Life-changing decisions, artistic choices, and pop-cultural whims

I write because it is my most rewarding form of play. Play can be entirely serious, as I renewly know from watching the total absorption of small children in self-assigned tasks. (Put pebble on peanut. Put peanut on pebble.) When I was a child I wrote and wrote and wrote as a child, in big round letters, in pencil, with a satisfaction that reportedly charmed the people who weren’t alarmed by the sometime seriousness of the content — bullying of chipmunks by monkeys, mutilation of me by alligators. I also read a lot, but pushing the envelope of my own imagination was more full-filling.

Now that I’m a man I still write seriously, but now it’s more to lighten up, to flatten the bumps of fraughtness with the steamroller of organized thought, to claim a centre of knowing against the fearsome chaos of unknowing.

[My friend Peter Marmorek says I’m not not getting rid of the fraughtness, but rather defining it, clearing the underbrush away around it, and quotes Piet Hein: Problems worthy/ of attack/ prove their worth/ by fighting back.]

I’m guessing that I often write as some unconsciously motivated form of therapy, and sometimes consciously to improve myself. Certainly the journals I kept for years were an attempt either to encourage or galvanize myself. And I am reinforced (in retrospects) by evidence therein of both change and continuity. Just last night I flipped open this entry from the January of my year of media studies at Syracuse, which began 40 years ago:

“Worked long but not very efficiently on editing film, and on article re John Lennon. CBS 60 Minutes said that more people are currently alive in the U.S. than have ever died, and graveyards already take up an area half again as large as Connecticut. Gordon’s Electronics said my cartridge should last another six months.”

I still watch 60 Minutes (it was a compulsory mutuality for our class discussions), and it’s still on CBS, but a lot of people currently alive in the U.S. probably don’t know that a cartridge is the interface between a turntable and a record. I was going to say something about efficiency, but I can’t remember what it was. However, I must have known I would like someday to look back on what I had experienced, felt, believed ... and reflect from some future perspective that might otherwise have been warped in various ways.

I write to find out more about myself in the present, especially about what I feel, but also about how I think, and to discover true(-seeming) things about how the world works, and to test the reality of both.

But maybe my priority is simply to project a more assured self.

Most of the most beautiful people I know are not models, and the exceptions either do not know themselves to be beautiful or think that they are beautiful only externally.

The funniest people I know are not comedians or comedy writers, except Dave Barry; indeed many of the humor pros I have interviewed in depth revealed a depressive core. And this shouldn’t have come as a surprise: Why would you work as hard as you must to prove yourself to strangers if you get a sufficiency of appreciation from the daily laughter of friends and colleagues?

Likewise, the most articulate people I know are not willing to spend an hour on a paragraph to make it sing and dance.

Teachers Oriah (The Invitation, etc.) and Peter are the specific exceptions I know best. Obama is the exception everyone knows. Ignatieff is the rule — as with me, the editor of his pen is rather more reliable than the editor of his mouth. The general exceptions, in my experience, are classic Brits, must be something in the class rooms. Other writers have grown into the job of talking about their writing. But few effective professional talkers have gone the other way, gone on to create memorable prose. Do let me know if I’ve missed a great head-of-stately memoir.

I also write because it is my most assuredly meaningful form of communication. I used to write to woo, to catalyze the kind of relationship I imagined, to avenge my ego for being spurned. I still need the purpose of an audience, and a sense of the person/people to whom I am writing. I wrote papers for profs, columns for editors. I wrote interviews for my subjects — to reveal to them what I found in them. I blog for family and other friends. Of course I hope others will lurk and discover (and admire) the specialness of me. But if I like what I have been given, it is always enough that it will have a chance to be received.

The feeling of being given is for me the addictive component of writing. Which makes writing my runner-up form of surrender, and way more reliable than #1 because my inner editor can always exert some control. Still, we all do better if she stands aside for long enough to let my inner writer receive the muse’s allotment of inspiration.

And then — okay, perhaps I was mistaken above — one really wants one’s inspiration validated. Communication, in words as in touch, is enhanced by feedback. With responsiveness, maybe I can make the earth move. Maybe I will last.

My writing is more lasting than my contributions to conversation. Even I don’t even remember what I say in conversations, even when the conversations are professional (in which case what I plan to cover is written down, in case something more compelling doesn’t come up.) My interviews, like my ideal conversations, are pas de deux of discovery and the great Why of purpose. When things are going well, I am utterly present. My subsequent writing chops off the conversational vines, harvests the ripest grapes, and distils the results into a brandy that will alter consciousness. That’s the hope anyway.

I did like the reinforcement of being paid for my writing. But publishing is imploding as self-publishing goes nuclular; and composition is cheep in a time of Twitter.

So I continue to write mostly because I have what Malcolm Gladwell calls my 10,000-hours presumption of mastery. It’s what I do, what I’ve always done while trying to figure out what I’m going to be when I grow up. If I can’t stand the heat, I guess I’d better get out of the kitchen. But I have a fiery nature, and plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chauffage.

On the evidence, it’s still about play.

And I’m still serious.

Normal inspiration returns. So should you please ...


8 days of family reunion at Magog Meadows on Lake Memphremagog in the Eastern Townships of Quebec: midafternoon Saturday August 8th to midafternoon Sunday the 16th.

25 scheduled events, a few fewer than at the previous Meadowlark that my wife Kris and I shepherded in 1999.

94 [Meadowlark 2009 T-shirts designed by Kris and sized (from baby ‘onesies’ to XXL, male and female) for a record number of participants, financed by Uncle Billy.

6’1”: median height of the 61 post-adolescents in attendance.

4 seniors from the second generation of the Magog Meadows family, two original couples who were celebrated at the opening night dinner. The other two couples were also in first-time marriages until death did them part.

15 cousins from my (third) generation, most with partners (all present), but more than half with exes (all elsewhere this time.)

3 new babies, Noah and Mathilda and Freya, added to the fifth generation this past year, celebrated at the farewell picnic with their six parents. They join Sam and Jai and Cohen, whose parents are two married female couples, and siblings Emily and Jamie, who were amazingly fearless goal-keepers for the opposite sides in the dramedic opening all-ages soccer game, which ended in a tie victory, with no one trampled. (All events were all-ages. Only the doubles-tennis tournament did not have a fifth-generation participant, but 5-year old Sam won the award for Best Fan. “Good try!” he often exclaimed to ambitious double-faulters.)

* * * * *

What defines my extended family and keeps them so broadly interactive? It is, after all, hard to think of a subgroup in which we are not represented, or a part of the world where none of us has made ourselves at home.

I think it is our collective faith in this crucible, this place we share, the power of its example. Formerly a rugged expanse of grazing farmland, it is now a mostly forested, university-administered and researched nature conservancy with some meadows (still!), some gnarly heritage fruit trees, swamps and ponds and steep shoreline, lots of deer, some wild turkeys and foxes, even the occasional bear. It’s the place I always refer to as the Farm and others as the Lake, but it is our Avalon, for it has a mythology greater to the family than that of any of its orbiting and returning members, even the late, now legendary, father of both Farm and family.

To outsiders he was the surgeon and pioneering mapper of the brain, the author and statesman who founded both the Montreal Neurological Institute and the Vanier Institute of the Family. To us he was Deeda, for the grandfather that my generation of 15 cousins had in common never ever brought work home with him. As far as most of us are concerned (except Montrealers, who face regular reminders of his fame), the greatest thing he ever did was to buy this place. He did so with war reparations awarded years after a German torpedo sank most of the undefended ship he was on. A small framed photo of the surviving third of The Sussex in dry-dock hangs on the wall at Sussex House, but I don’t remember his ever telling the story of the drama, let alone of the life-saving heroism he reportedly displayed. We are far more likely to recall the inclusive warmth with which he presided over Family Prayers at 9:30 every Sunday morning between Canada Day and Labour Day ... and the fresh home-made doughnuts and hot chocolate (or coffee) and games (or conversations) that followed. (When it came to their summer home, the vision was his; the standards were our grandmother Lala’s.)

Magog Meadows has always been a place of expanded possibility, where we could see birds learn to fly and butterflies emerge from cocoons and spiders make enormous webs, a place from which we could all swim across the bay (we had to in order to boat without life-preservers), and climb mountains, and herd cows back to the neighboring farm for milking, where exotic experiences were shared, where wild ideas from performing our own musicals to holding séances could find collaborators, where a team of kids could help turn a nervous parental No into a multi-parental Yes, from which, therefore (for example), my cousin Wilder and I at age 14 and 13 could hitchhike to Montreal, and bicycle to the southern edge of Vermont, and subsequently sail to Newport, and paddle (and portage) the skinny, twisty little Mississquoi River all the way to Lake Champlain.

Young kids since haven’t exercised such freedoms, but the precedent is part of the mythology.

At the same time the myth is about Safety. A cemetery on the edge of the Farm predates us, and has been restored to a state of tranquil beauty and returned to public access over the past three or four decades. The ashes of the Founders, of their older children and of their spouses are beneath the cedars on the hilltop walkway to the Tholos (which Deeda modeled in a modest way on the one he loved at Delphi), but no one has died here. A freak summer storm once blanketed the area in six inches of hail, and tornadoes once tore up hundreds of trees here, but only a few of the latter landed on houses and power lines, none on cars or people.

More importantly, it has also become increasingly safe emotionally. The Founders instituted a benevolent dictatorship and inculcated a conservative sense of the Right Way of Doing Things (men provide, decide, and operate machinery — women nurture, abide, and homemake). But the multi-racial in-laws of the third generation admixed fresh cultural and spiritual ways of being and role-playing and parenting. Prodigal children were welcomed back without hesitation. Standards have turned into more relaxed traditions — dressing for dinner, for example, now happens mostly when there are guests (which is frequently), but the decision is strictly opt-in. The Farm has become a remarkably Should-Free zone with a multiplicity of role models. We have all learned a lot about Loving What Is.

And while this normally makes for a pretty amiable, accommodating village, most of the villagers are passionate, opinionated, and strong-willed. The few feuds and lingering resentments of any given year can usually be elided because there is space here and because visits can be spread out over four or five months. So the all-at-once of Meadowlark is a test and can be a trial, at least logistically.

Meadowlark was flown for the first time at the 50th anniversary of the farm in 1979, when the family was at its most widely scattered (in Toronto, I represented its geographical centre). Back then, though, there were still some traditional chains of command — or at least influence. Now Meadowlark comes together by consensus and is made operable with flexibility. Dates were agreed on, more or less, last summer and finalized in the fall. Hannah (fourth generation) was drafted to coördinate, and the first decision she promptly proclaimed was that she was not the Decider. The resident owners of the five most versatile spaces were volunteered for specific kinds of functions — Rock Haven for music on Talent Night, the Lodge for some sort of feast, our Barn (for almost a century prior to family occupation and renovation, a home for sheep) for the Barn Dance, and Wendy’s Sussex House as always for the Family Prayers. The Chesters, who came together from ten homes in Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine and Arizona, rented the Austin Town Hall for Movie Night.

Movie Night was in two parts, three if you count separately the time devoted to integrating dogs, babies and the bagging and munching of fresh flavored popcorn into the hubbubaloo. One part was devoted to highlights of the (truly!) Amazing Meadowlark Race, which had been organized for 18 family-member teams in emulation of the TV series, handicapped, hosted, recorded, edited into chapters, narrated and even scored five years ago by our Israeli branch at our Mini-lark (a first that seems extremely likely to be reconfigured in other years that end with a 4). The other part was a suite of digitized home movies of early family recreations with animals and boats from the senior couples in residence.

A third part, the remarkably appealing trailer for a documentary in post-production by Chester grandsons Matt and Loren Feinstein, was postponed until the closing Family Prayers, which would bookend the opening favourite-memories Prayers with hopes and visions for the future. (Ciclovida — A Revolutionary Approach to a Growing Problem “follows a group of landless small farmers as they traverse the South American continent by bicycle on a mission to rescue natural seeds.” The trailer is the one that loads automatically here — not the one that can be downloaded from the same site.)

Kris and I got to host giant Meadowlark versions of the only annual events scheduled — the Barn Dance (this time, “Come As Your Alter Ego”) and the Great Clothing Swap. And I was impresario of Talent Night — music, magic, and comedy, mostly. Amazingly, my elaborate plan for an opening number — a collectively improvised but rigorously formatted synthesis of Stomp! using found objects and borrowings from Queen, Laurie Anderson, Ogden Nash and Ann Jellico — had to be scuttled: Five children had in secret been rehearsing a shorter but no less complex spin-off from Stomp! set in a classroom detention.

Other talents interrupted the flow of my music for the Barn Dance — a rousing half-hour salsa lesson from a pair of dancers, another couple’s remarkable black-lit yoga-based pas de deux, and a rendition of Baby, It’s Cold Outside in affecting duet and clever cross-dressing mime.

Elsewhen were workshops in mask-making and harmony-singing, a traditional Saturday-night cook-out bonfire with fireworks, and afternoons of trail-blazing, nature-walking, mountain climbing and “Memphregatta — madcap races for the navigationally challenged.”

But perhaps the most remarkable event was two evenings on the fringe of Meadowlark devoted to screening and discussing The First Part of Henry IV, the Shakespeare play that introduces Falstaff. My wise senior cousin Kate’s husband Roger Williams recently retired from teaching Shakespeare at a private Montreal cégèp, but he jumped at the request that he host a seminar for family. My first surprise, when it fell to me to acquire to acquire the best DVD, was that Henry IV had been filmed only once — for a 70s BBC broadcast of the Complete Works. The second was that the second-night discussion of that one play so involved everyone present, and brought such diverse life-experience to bear, that the talk flourished for close to four hours.

The week also included a mid-Lark Quiet Day. Most people took advantage of the long-delayed arrival of summer and focused on the beach. But eight girls and three guys managed to coordinate a visit to Montreal that severally included shopping (new books, vintage clothes, alter-ego makeup), Rogers Cup tennis (close-up exposure to six of the world’s eight best male players either competing or practising), superb bistro tapas with draught Maudite at Nyk’s, and the sixth Harry Potter movie, the first in which my mind never wandered and my heart was actually moved — no doubt partly because adolescence is more absorbingly complicated than childhood.

The so-called real world was more personally intrusive at other times — when our ongoing renovation wind-up needed our fine-tuning, acquisition of supplies, and cash for work. Our black-sheep puppy’s densely matted and pungent fur coat needed shearing from a groomer in Cowansville, her charmingly shambolic three-legged broken-field running required veterinary intervention, and her habit of visiting dogs across the highway and defending against puppies close to home mandated a session of professional training for her owners. Torrential rains caused leaks, floods, sinkholes, blackouts, water shortages and fast changes of plans. Outliers from Arizona, San Francisco, Saltspring Island and Thunder Bay needed to be reintegrated and brought up to speed on new rules for boating, recycling, and our conservation-area management. Accommodation wanted to be made for Vegans, nursing mothers, small children, the physically and mentally infirm, recording and visual artists, and part-time telecommuters (I had the property’s one dial-up internet account), not to mention ten dogs and 30-plus cars. Imaginative salads had to be shopped for, cooked and assembled for half a dozen events. Thousands of dishes had to be washed and retrieved. And ways had to be found for everyone to be cleaned, dressed, motivated and delivered to the next event.

Remarkably once again, collective will inspired an astonishingly inclusive experience from which no one left early in a huff or departed at the end seeming dissatisfied. Final Prayers did include concerns about the future, but no wish for less of what we had now. The myth of the space we share has been extended once more.

It is August, 1951. Edna Rae Gillooly has already had a hard life, but at eighteen-and-a-half, she is about to begin another.

As she loads her two suitcases of new wardrobe onto the bus that will take her out of Michigan for the first time, she has no idea that she is going to spend the rest of her life exposing raw parts of herself to rapt audiences, and healing broken parts of herself with some of the world’s great teachers and therapists.

It will indeed be another eighteen and a half years before she changes her name for the last time and becomes Ellen Burstyn and starts changing the world as an actress (and as a Sufi). She will win recognition in particular for The Last Picture Show, The Exorcist, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, Same Time, Next Year, Resurrection and Requiem for a Dream, and will also seem marvelous to me as well in The King of Marvin Gardens, Providence, and Silence of the North. There will also be much memorable theatre and television work; the latter will earn her five Emmy nominations, including one for a role in Mrs. Harris that lasted less than half a minute.

But back in 1951 she is a Detroit model, and she is going to Dallas because one of her fellow clothes- and car-horses has said, “They like your type there ... the all-American girl.” She is on her own for the first time, crossing Ohio, transferring in Kentucky and continuing south through the night ... as her future self slows down the narrative for a page:

“I woke up once to stretch out the crick in my neck and heard the sounds the other passengers were making as they slept. An old man across the aisle had his head back and his toothless mouth hung open emitting a hoarse rattle with each exhale. A few seats in front of him, a great gangly boy in overalls whimpered like a puppy in his sleep. All around me was the deep rhythmical breathing of this collection of souls. I drifted off, adding my breathing to the night song.

“Hours passed and the light changed. The black went to gray. Again I stretched the sleep from my neck and arms. Pink entered the gray and strips of lavender seeped through. A bright apricot joined in. Other sounds of waking, stretching, yawning. People rising to the surface, cutting through the veil of night. Coughs here and there. No words yet. The THWACK of a Zippo lighter, then the smell of smoke. All around us now a pink color on all sides and even layers of aquamarine. Then, in that glorious dawning, before any word had yet been spoken, the bus slowed and came to a stop. The doors clunked open, and as we felt the bus start up slowly, the bus driver said in a deep and reverent tone, ‘Ladies and gentlemen ... the Mississippi River!’

“We sat up in our seats, fully awake now, craning our necks to see the great gift that had just been presented to us. Our wheels rumbled over the bridge as we crossed this great river. It was smaller and muddier than I’d imagined, but it didn’t matter. It was the mighty Mississippi and we were crossing over into a new part of the country, into a new life. The light changed. Everyone on the bus was glowing. I turned and looked behind me and from out the back window I saw the gorgeous hot orange ball of sunshine rising to bless us all. When I turned back, I saw the sun had burnished the shoulders and head of this kind bus driver whose job was just to drive us to Dallas, but whose generous soul had presented to us the miracle of crossing over into a new world, a new beginning.

“And even so, I saw that that world would be lit from behind. Always what we are leaving behind will be the source of light and shadow of what we are going toward....”

* * * * *

A sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay ends:

“Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.”

Edna/Ellen feels that pity, and we who are somewhat younger can grow impatient with her, overlooking how far she had to go to arrive at what our cultural awareness now takes for granted. Her 70s movie protagonists were groundbreaking in their liberation — she fought the presumptions of her producers, directors and scriptwriters (always men) to embody intense roles with their truth, personal convictions devoid of political stance. But her life was slow to imitate her art. She was a pre-hippie chick who had sat out the seismic Sixties as a man-pleaser. And that would continue to characterize important aspects of her personal life for years.

“It’s a gift,” she writes. “Some people have perfect pitch or photographic memories. Me? You could put me in a roomful of handsome, healthy guys, blindfold me, turn me around three times, and I would walk directly to the one guy in the room who was trouble and lay my head in the guillotine of his lap, smiling all the while like I’d finally come home.”

Today we can readily recognize an effect-pattern of an abusive childhood. But she does not label. And although she foreshadows some stages of her amazing advancement, she does not backdate her discoveries — she is scrupulous about checking her extensive journals, and not infrequently finds that she had answers long before she knew to apply the questions to herself. This is no less true of me, and I am grateful for the reminders. Her memoir is ultimately about values, and full of insights into the challenges and rewards of profound change.

What makes the Lessons such a pleasure, though, is mostly that they emerge so vividly from the momentum of story. As a Lee Strasberg actress, Burstyn has exercised her sense-memory more than most, and is professionally attuned to the structure of narrative. Any familiarity we bring to the famous names in her artistic life is just enrichment for our mental movies.

Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.
-- George Carlin



40.6 — years of life expectancy for New Yorkers in 1900, according to a New York magazine cover story.

47.3 — life expectancy for Americans in general in 1900, 16.5% higher.

79.4 — years of life expectancy for Americans in 2009, an average increase, by my calculations, of 3.5 months per year for more than a century.

80.4 — for New Yorkers in 2009, an average annual increase of 4.4 months.

35 thousand — Dogs at U.S. animal shelters given death on an average week, according to the New York Times Magazine.

35 thousand — Dogs given liberty every week — the relative liberty of new owners.

74 million — U.S. population of dogs with owners.

74 million — U.S. population of children younger than 18.

74 million — U.S. population of citizens with passports.

74 million — Speakers of Telugu, the official state language of Andhra Pradesh.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
-- Leonard Cohen

Thanks to Peter Marmorek for the timely epigraph, which he included in an emailed link to this story about the ticket-agency scalping of Leonard Cohen before this morning’s on-sale. (He also had valuable Cohen links in section 7 of this weekend’s edition of the Tikkunista blog he edits.) He knew I wanted tickets.

Why Cohen? Because he’s there, like Mount Everest, maybe more like Mount Sinai.

Why now? Because he’s here, nearly, which happens seldom. And because she I love loves him also. He used to be a trip, consistently a good one; now at 74 he is a pilgrimage.

I first learned to care about his music in my teens when I was representing Youth to the Montreal Star at Expo ’67, where he was singing The Stranger Song and The Gambler and about how you could trust Suzanne at the end “’cause she’s touched her perfect body with her mind”. That last line mystified me until I fell for a young maiden who hadn’t, and then it mattered terribly, but it mystified a lot of other people too, and now it is only a very few female singers who keep the line alive.

I first learned to care about the man himself almost two decades later when I interviewed him for the Toronto Sun. At 50, the romantic poet of shadow had become the unwitting godfather of gloomrock. And although what inspired the trend was less his lyrics, which were elliptical, than his dark, doomy sound, he knew where the gloom-mongers were coming from — and he had chosen not to dwell there. “You look around and you see this world, this butcher shop, and it’s impossible to penetrate the meaning of suffering,” he told me, “And finally all you can say is ‘Amen, Hallelujah!’ if you’re going to hang in.”

It was the year of Various Positions (1985). He did not yet know himself to be a Buddhist, but the melancholy that furrowed his face appeared to be philosophical more than depressive. I had said I sensed resignation without hopelessness in the music of his middle age, and he seemed pleased, almost. “That’s the point of view of the whole record. There’s no point in crying about it, and rejoicing would be inappropriate in the face of what we see. So we have to find another position in which we can discover our self-respect.

“There is no decent place to stand in a massacre,” he said, quoting a song on the album. “But that’s just the given. The predicament doesn’t allow you to split. It doesn’t allow you to murder either. Or to escape to the mother, or to the Father, or to the woman, or to the Muse, or to the friends.”

Responsibility, he felt, was inescapable. “There is a moral universe, and there are celestial mechanics, and whatever you do, you never beat the rap.”

For a start, there is the immediate punishment of conscience. “Guilt has been receiving a lot of bad press lately. It’s considered a disease or an aberration, and psychoanalysis devotes itself to annihilating it. But it is the only indication we have of separation from Spirit.”

(Indeed, as I see it, pure guilt is simply knowing that what we are doing is wrong. It is one of the ways we find out who we are, what we believe in. We err, we feel bad, the inner voice speaks briefly, quietly, and we learn and, hopefully, change for the good. What becomes a block worth annihilating is guilt that does not teach, neurotic guilt that creates tape-loops of the inner voice, and speed-dials a connection with other negative judgments, and builds structures to house the guilt and make it resonate. The remedy, following Cohen’s neo-Buddhist example, is to make a practice of dispassionate observation. Or, following his artistic example, to focus one’s energy on what feels right and good.)

Far worse for Cohen than the punishment of conscience, though, is what he called “the void of indifference.” It is our duty to break ourselves of that kind of despair, he felt. “Some of the rabbis of the 18th century said if you can’t get out of it through prayer and meditation, you should get out of it through theatre and jokes.”

Once upon a time Cohen had reminded the management “that the drinks are watered / and the hat-check girl / has syphilis / and the band is composed / of former SS monsters

“However since it is / New Year’s Eve / and I have lip cancer / I will place my / paper hat on my / concussion and dance.”

Cohen was still will-powering himself to dance, for concerts were an affirmation he could share. But he admitted to some astonishment at the independent vitality of some of his songs. “For instance there’s a man in France named Graeme Allwright who has done many of my songs in French.”

An unlikely name, that.

“His is a strange destiny.” The man was a unilingual anglo from New Zealand when he won a theatre scholarship to the Old Vic in London, but he fell in love with a French classmate and turned down a place in the Royal Shakespeare Company to follow her home and marry her. Work as a stage manager gave him time to become fluent and develop musical gifts that (despite a diffidence about stardom not unlike Cohen’s own) would make Allwright — and Suzanne, and ultimately Cohen — household names in 60s Europe. “He is a very good singer and songwriter in his own right,” Cohen said. “But every so often he records [translations of] my songs, and on a modest level — not compared to Duran Duran — they do quite well.”

Even more amazing to Cohen was his then-recent discovery that there are Leonard Cohen festivals in Krakow where singers perform his songs in Polish. [The next one is being organized for the weekend of Aug. 6-8, 2010.]

“We have this idea that entertainment has to be frivolous and distracting,” he said. “Well, I think there’s a great hunger for the enjoyment in seriousness.”

* * * * *

When I started going to concerts, a ticket could be had for about the cost of an album; now you can often buy a major star’s collected works on CD and DVD for the price of a single seat. Leonard Cohen has reached that level even without taking into account the ‘premium’ paid for in-house scalping.

But name-brand expensive hasn’t eased the competition — even in a stadium you have to have luck or pull or enormous patience and persistence merely to see the stars of a major tour on big screens. And with on-line ticketing, well, one wants to be prepared ... as I had found out when I tried to get into any of multiple nights at a Montreal arena on the last Arcade Fire tour. Despite speed-dialing and internetworking simultaneously, I was informed one minute before time that there were no tickets yet available, and eight minutes later that there were no tickets still available. Imagine the amount of money moved in those minutes, the technology backing it up. (I admit it — I ended up supporting a freelance scalper in Toronto to see them at Massey Hall.)

So for the Cohen tour I found three suitable venues for which tickets were going on sale at 10 this morning, had numbers programmed into the phone, credit card information in the computer memory, order forms bookmarked and tabbed, and printouts of seat plans at the ready for each. The closest venue, and the latest to be added (the announcement came yesterday from jambase.com, my concert search-engine de choix) was the Pavillon de la Jeunesse in Saint-Hyacinthe, QC., which is handled by Billetech, which was featuring the Cohen show, for Admission, with which I registered to save time in the morning. The next-closest were the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, perhaps the best concert hall in the country, and something called the K-Rock Centre in Kingston, both handled by Tickets.com, with which I also registered. To put aside some niggling doubts about the difference in ticket-handling I phoned the Pavillon, and some guy who didn’t know any Cohen told me (in French) that the only thing they do there is hockey. Long story short, turns out there are a great many Pavillons de la Jeunesse in the province, one of them (also handled by Billetech) in or near Quebec City.

So come 10 a.m. we were down to two venues but back up to three concerts, since the NAC had added a second night. For a few minutes I had two tickets in my basket, but they were almost $300 each when service charges were added, so I stalled for a moment and punched in the K-Rock ticket search, then switched back, but they were gone. However, K-Rock had come up with two 16th-row centre-floor seats and taken my money (much less of it) within seconds and sent an email confirmation with links to print out each of the two tickets with barcodes. Only one of the links worked, but I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to the Thousand Islands.

In the meantime I think I’m ready to move on to futures trading.

* * * * *

This evening I watched a Paul Simon tribute on PBS. The Library of Congress was presenting Simon with the first annual Gershwin Prize for contributions to American popular music. Art Garfunkel was there to bridge the troubled water once again, along with Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, Lyle Lovett, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and so on. With the instrumental support of a peck of impeccable anonyms, this club of celebrity privilege acquitted itself admirably, reflecting the many facets of the unlikely little father of World Music.

The Librarian of Congress quoted Thomas Jefferson on music, that it was “the favorite passion of my soul.” But passion and soul were what these amiable all-stars mostly lacked. Only Alison Krauss made one of Simon’s standards her own, emphasizing the serene spiritual overtones of Graceland rather than its country roots. The rest held up affectionate mirrors to the past.

Far more passionate was the Paul Simon tribute a couple of years back at the Montreal Jazz Festival. There a younger, hungrier assortment of stars had each chosen a song that mattered to him or her ... and in performance had sold us on the why. The result was less evenly excellent, but they were expansive, even transformative. Cool Holly Cole, for example, had slathered Mrs. Robinson (“Heaven holds a place for those who pray”) with irony and exposed it as an amazingly creepy song.

And what had emerged from the sounds of silence after the lights went down at the beginning ... Leonard Cohen! “Hello, Darkness, my old friend,” he spake cavernously, blanketing the hundreds of thousands in the crowd, “I’ve come to talk with you again.” The earth moved.

1 — Female singer in the top-10 25 years ago this week, when Michael Jackson’s Thriller, UB40’s Red Red Wine and Van Halen’s Jump! were #1, 2 and 3. At #8 was Eurythmics’ Here Comes The Rain Again, sung by Annie Lennox.

7 — Female singers in the top-10 this week — Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Pink, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Kelly Clarkson and The Pussycat Dolls are #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8 respectively. For decades, a lot of powerful music industry professionals (men) had been certain this would never happen.

49.1% — U.S. jobs last November that were held by women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — only 2% fewer when farm work and self-employment were included.

82% — U.S. jobs lost since the recession began that were lost by men. Yes, women are set to become the majority of bread-winners for the first time in American history.

25% — Increase in earnings still needed to give women the majority of the bread.

35% — Amount that financial performance by Fortune 500 companies with the highest percentage of women in top management exceeds those with the lowest.

“My nephew has HD ADD. He can barely pay attention, but when he does it’s unbelievably clear.”
-- Steven Wright


At a time when keeping up with the present often seems impossible, the Big Novel should be a thing of the past. But Neal Stephenson, author of Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Trilogy, has hand-crafted another ornate doorstop. Inquiring minds will want to make time for Anathem’s hi-def big-picture window on the world. (Indeed, an amazing number already have — just Google “anathem” and check the number of results for this new-minted word.)

The title has resonances of the bright pull of ‘anthem’ and the dark drag of ‘anathema”, and the dynamic tension between these forces becomes the heart of the story, which is rooted in an alt.monastic retreat where people can do their thinking undistracted by the world’s considerations of God.

[While the following is spoiler-free, I do understand why the jacket copy chose to be more forthcoming, even at the risk of dampening some of the pleasures of anticipating along with the narrator ... and the even greater pleasures of sometimes being wrong.]

Initially Anathem requires more of a leap of faith than its predecessors. The narration begins in extreme close-up with descriptions in very-English-like language of the fussy arcana of the narrator’s convent–like life on an Earth-like planet (‘Arbre’). This is preceded by a timeline of the 7,000-year history of the peoples of that planet. And there is a need to keep referencing a 20-page glossary to understand both the narrator and the history, and elsewhere in the glossary to understand the definitions. Meanwhile there is a large and ever-growing number of characters, for which there is no reference.

I confess that I faltered after 150 pages, with almost 800 pages to go — and gave it to my best friend in Toronto ... who pressed on ... into such a state of enthusiasm that he bought me my own copy. And miraculously, when I picked up where I’d left off, I remembered the people I’d met, the flow of the history, the unfamiliar concepts and terminologies. The meanings of the invented words proved just as important but no less intuitive than the bright coinages of Anthony Burgess’s unreferenced language in A Clockwork Orange. And any remaining irritations were transformed into admirations. For when the plot really kicked in, I was able to ride the highs of paradigm shifts, and thrill to some dizzying action and some startling passion — without losing my way — because their context had been developed so meticulously, and sometimes amusingly, on such a vast scale.

“Calca: (1) In Proto- and Old Orth, chalk or any other such substance used to make marks on hard surfaces. (2) In Middle and later Orth, a calculation, esp. one that consumes a large amount of chalk because of its tedious and detailed nature. (3) In Praxic and later Orth, an explanation, definition, or lesson that is instrumental in developing some larger theme, but that, because of its overly technical, long-winded, or recondite nature, has been moved aside from the main body of the dialog and encapsulated in a footnote or appendix so as not to divert attention from the main line of the argument.” [an example of itself]

The arcs of the novel take us repeatedly from contemplation of received knowledge through transformative event to more expansive contemplation and sharpened thought. In this way it is not unlike astronomer Fred Hoyle’s classic of scientific argument, The Black Cloud, where the disputations are in response to an escalating crisis that require a series of direct actions. But Stephenson raises the bar by setting the arguments among representatives of belief systems of his own invention.

The Sconic Discipline was named for the little cakes served by the hostess of a salon where “all the best metatheoricians knew to gather ... They addressed the ramifications of the apparent fact that we do not perceive the physical universe directly, but only through the intermediation of our sensory organs ... I asked, ‘What do Fifth Sconics do? I’m sorry, I ought to know,’ ... Avout who followed the Sconic Discipline had begun to splinter ands fight immediately after the Reconstitution and to squabble over which sect had dibs on the names Sconics, Reformed Sconics, New Sconics, and so on. Eventually they had gone over to a numbering system. they were up into the low twenties now, so Fives were pretty well established ... ‘I don’t think that the differences between the Fives, the Fours and the Sixes are germane here,’ she finally decided, ‘I just want to know how they smelled.’ “

I haven’t found myself ruminating much about Anathem since Stephenson brought me in for a safe and satisfying landing, probably because the trip didn’t push many of my disputation buttons. But while I was aloft, I was feeling very expansive, and our world was seeming very precious.

3 — Genie nominations announced this week for acting in Emotional Arithmetic — for Susan Sarandon, Christopher Plummer and Max Von Sydow — and one more for Normand Corbeil’s score. (Genies are the Canadian Academy Awards.)

3 — Genie nominations for best adapted screenplay. Total. They went to Amal, Borderline and Fugitive Pieces. You might have heard of the third — the book is much celebrated. Who wrote the adaptation that attracted the Emotional Arithmetic cast to the story and gave words to their notable work? Jefferson Lewis. When one’s category isn’t even full, one might think one had been snubbed.

3 — Nominees for adapted screenplay who are also the directors of their films.

3 — Total Oscar nominations this year for Best Song. Snubbees include Bruce Springsteen, who won the Golden Globe for "The Wrestler", and Clint Eastwood, who was GG-nominated for "Gran Torino" and for his score for The Changeling. The Academy Award nominations were restricted to Peter Gabriel's song for WALL*E and two A.R. Rahman songs from Slumdog Millionaire.

7 — British Academy Award wins this week for Slumdog Millionaire — best film, best director, best adapted screenplay, best cinematography, best editing, best sound, and best score. What’s missing? Oh yes, them, the actors with the hard-to-remember names. Indeed, some have alleged racism, but the rest of the Slumdog sweep and previous BAFTA awards would strongly argue otherwise. Another numerical factor is ...

9 — Actors playing the three principal Slumdog characters at three different times.

4 — Slumdog wins to date from guilds of the American Academy — the Writers, the Directors, the Producers, and, oh yes, the Actors, for Best Ensemble. To be sure, the solo acting prizes went to notable bankable stars — Sean Penn, Meryl Streep, Heath Ledger and Kate Winslet — just as the Brit prizes did. Academies have a vested interest in celebrating careers. Unlike critics, who tend to prefer upstarts and underdogs ... until they have to achieve consensus.

9 — Critics associations that named Sean Penn best actor for Milk and Heath Ledger best supporting actor for The Dark Knight.

5 — Critics associations that named Anne Hathaway best actress for Rachel Getting Married, also the number that named Sally Hawkins best actress for Happy-Go-Lucky.

50 — Books on the subject of happiness published in 2000, according to Psychology Today.

4,000 — Books on happiness published last year.

1 — Rank of “Positive Psychology” among the most popular classes at Harvard.

15 — Percentage of American college students who report being “clinically depressed.” (Thanks to Michael Kesterton in the Globe & Mail)

What counts

Breathing

Sensual density

Being

One

With

At the Golden Globes on Sunday, Waltz With Bashir, which was written and directed by Israel’s Ari Folman, was named the best foreign film of the year by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. It has also been named the year’s best documentary by the International Documentary Film Association, the year’s best animated film by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the year’s best movie by the National Society of Film Critics. In addition, the European Film Awards also named Max Richter the year’s best composer for its score.

The GGs also named Kate Winslet the year’s best dramatic actress for her work in The Reader and the year’s best supporting actress for Revolutionary Road. She had previously been nominated five times for Oscars, three times as lead, twice as support ... and the same five times for Golden Globes ... but had never won. We’ll see if history continues to repeat itself when the Oscar nominations are announced Jan. 22 ... and when the statues are handed out Feb. 22.

I am grateful, in no particular order, for ...

The hour in which to do this.

The month (almost) of non-stop resident company that preceded this hour, all of whom proved to be rewarding in various excellent ways, especially (unsurprisingly) my sister.

Four months of cohabiting with Leila, the adorable, voraciously inquisitive puppy product of an off-white soft-coated wheaton terrier and a mix of apricot poodle and golden lab ... and whatever turned her into a spring-driven black sheep.

Ongoing sensibility of happiness with Kris, facilitator of the above (and most of the below), the wonderfully gregarious woman at whose wedding I was best man 36 years ago next month ... “I have found an alternate self,” I had written in my diary with uncommon brevity the previous year, and “Great kiss.” ... and ongoing happiness also with the childhood friend who was best man at my wedding to this woman almost twenty years later.

Kris’s and my first trip together to greater Europe (includes Egypt, Israel, England) last late-winter/early-spring, staying with family in Tel Aviv, with newer friends in Athens and London, with both in Italy. Falling in love with Barcelona.

The frustrations, and therefore the blessings, of unconsummated ideas, the result of much expansive stimulation.

The many people who are among the best of the stimulations, most recently Keb, last seen 14 years ago, last known rather longer ago when I was Beau, now known again in the highest fidelity of which telephones are capable.

The huge overlap between the circles of friends and extended family who were part of a surprise birthday party for my 60th, a wine-tasting, dinner and barn-dance (with fine newly-installed sound system, and the new mobile executive throne at which I now type). I was also honored and successfully distracted beforehand by adventure — being whisked away by godson goodfriend Erik for our first experience of mountain biking on a real mountain, which also had a waterpark, of which we also took full recuperative advantage.

And the vibrancy of popular culture, the processing of which was my daily work for more than three decades, and the best of which is still a regular source of joy.

* * * * *

In this area — old habits die hard — I felt most rewarded by the following:

Norman Doidge: The Brain that Changes Itself (2007). There wasn’t a chapter that didn’t shift in some way my understanding of how we relate to the world, and even the appendices were rife with provocations.

Patrick Brown: Butterfly Mind — Revolution, Recovery, and One Reporter’s Road to Understanding China (2008), a personal and surprisingly comprehensive suite of visions of how the world relates to us.

Two inspired fictions: Elizabeth Hay’s Giller-winning Late Nights On Air (2007) made me feel wisely and sensually attuned to the world. And making me feel my youthful we-can-change-the-world oats was Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, newly named one of the eight “Notable Children’s Books of 2008,” by the New York Times, which described it aptly as “a novel that is at once an entertaining thriller, a thoughtful polemic and a practical handbook of digital-age self-defense.“ Suitable “children” would include anyone who loved Harry Potter, The Golden Compass and 1984.

I have just realized that all four books happen to be Canadian. And so was the book I gave most often last Christmas, Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (2005), which this year was the best-selling book in Canada. I should probably share some of the credit for this with Oprah. (The rest of the top five were vampire novels from the Twilight series.)

True Blood, the first season of the addictively toothsome new HBO vampire soap. No relation. The Alan Ball show is derived from the quite different Sookie Stackhouse books written by Charlaine Harris and narrated by the eponymous waitress-telepath.

Season Four of Lost. No series, not even Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under (and certainly not the transformation of The Godfathers into The Sopranos), has so pushed back the boundaries of episodic drama. And it has done so with ever increasing range and unpredictability — on broadcast TV! — without sacrificing the satisfactions of emotional impact.

Juno, Ratatouille, Iron Man and U2-3D, the movies I most enjoyed in ’08. Since this is the first time since 1964 that I haven’t seen been out to see many (usually most) of the year’s likely Oscar nominees, my awareness is uncorrupted by personal preference. My prediction, therefore, is confident that the winners will be Slumdog Millionaire best picture; David Fincher best director for The Curious Life of Benjamin Button, Mickey Rourke best actor for The Wrestler, Heath Ledger best supporting actor for The Dark Knight, either Anne Hathaway or Sally Hawkins best actress for Rachel Getting Married and Happy-Go-Lucky respectively, and either Penelope Cruz or Viola Davis best supporting actress for Vicky Christina Barcelona and Doubt.

Scorched at the Centaur. Wajdi Mouawad looked into the abyss and found fierce laughter and touchingly frail hope. The Tarragon production turned the abyss into a multi-purpose sand dune to surreal and symbolic effect. And the cast made it feel essential that we be witness.

The race to the White House. I probably devoted more time to reading and listening and watching as it unfolded than to anything else, and nothing made me gladder than the outcome. We may be in trouble, but with some integrity, idealism and inclusiveness in charge (or leading the Opposition in Canada), 2009 is already looking way brighter, how could it not.

* * * * *

And then there was music. In a fine year for musical infatuations (songs by Babylon Circus, Broken Social Scene, Ane Brun, David Byrne with Brian Eno, The Decemberists, DeVotchKa, Rock Plaza Central, and Yma Sumac (!), there was only one new commitment: the Porkbelly Futures, two CDs of literate blues with superb grooves from literary Hogtowners fronted by Paul Quarrington and backed by a Round Table of session friends.

If you don’t know any of the above, you are likely in the majority — the music world has become so diffuse that I am probably unfamiliar with your recent favorites. Which makes the emergence of some consensus this year so astonishing. TV On The Radio’s Dear Science has been named the best album of the year by Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, John Pareles of The New York Times, T’Cha Dunlevy of the Montreal Gazette and Lorraine Carpenter of The Mirror — all five of the publications I source most regularly for passionate opinions about what’s happening in entertainment. It is currently available for $7.99 on iTunes, so have it I do, but listened to it I haven’t.

"Why do you need to think? Can't we just sit and go budumbudumbudum with our lips for a bit?"
- Douglas Adams: Mostly Harmless (the 5th part of the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy.)

The current TV season is amazingly polarized — two divergent trends have taken up ever-increasing chunks of prime-time.

At one extreme, critically lamented or ignored, are ‘Reality’ series. The biggest, with global sources and variations, are the elimination series. made famous by American Idol and Survivor. The Idol kind are talent competitions (dancing, singing, stand-up comedy, modeling, etc.) that celebrate personality and glorify ego; the Survivor kind are challenge competitions (The Apprentice, The Amazing Race, The Bachelor, Big Brother, Boot Camp, The Mole, Project Runway, Stylista!, and many more) that manipulate narrative for dramatic impact in ways that may have emerged from American human-interest coverage of Olympic contenders.

A second form, capable of infinite variety, is the slice-of-life series, often a voyeuristic exposé, (COPS, The Osbournes, The Simple Life, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Wife Swap, Nanny 911) or variations on the hurry-hurry-improve! series of lifestyle shows (What Not to Wear, The Biggest Loser, Extreme Makeover, Trading Spaces, Debbie Travis’ Facelift, The Dog Whisperer).

In all of this dubious ‘reality’ we can at least usually feel the real in the feelings being expressed by the contestant-participants. What’s really unusual this year is the strenuous suspension of disbelief required in the prime-time drama series I call UnReality TV.

The big dog in this arena is J.J. Abrams, co-creator, writer, executive producer and director of the ongoingly addictive Lost, which has sprouted too many loose-ended weirdnesses ever to get back to Normal — and would betray the audience if it tried. But what invites us to care is its focus on believable people in more or less credible relationships. The weirdnesses are exotica. The dramatic essence, behind the scrim of what-ifs, is something emotionally truthful.

However, most of the new shows it has inspired find strange ways to weld its challenges — the paranormalcies it shares with The X-Files and the brazen implausibilities it shares with Alias (Abrams again) — to the law-and-order focus of prime-time’s dominant dramas. I’m talking here primarily about grim, gritty stories of crime-solving and action-adventurish stories of saving the world from evil.

The most ordinary of these feature quirky guys with personal issues, but when it comes time to do their jobs, they do them incredibly well, with the emphasis on ‘incredibly’. Some are geniuses of science (The Eleventh Hour, Numb3rs, Fringe) or psychology (the Zen cop of Life, the carny-honed intuitive of The Mentalist). As with House, the abrasive hospital soap, we are seldom expected to follow what the hell the central character is spewing or doing or why. The essential thing is that they turn out never to be wrong, except in the case of Dr. House, who is usually right eventually.

Add to this list the gifted professional hackers who have proliferated and became the most entertaining elements in The Border, which is about Canadian security, and NCIS, which is about a team of U.S. Navy criminal investigators and has two cybergeeks. Never mind that serious encryption is now foolproof, these guys and gal can usually get the secret information they need without even waiting for a commercial break. As with the CSIs, the attitude to hi-tech science here is both worshipful and reassuring.

Another sign of the smart new times, almost every series above (and below) features women who are more powerful than the protagonist men — and more competent (except in the area of the man’s quirky specialty). Often these geeky guys also have partners or handlers of the gorgeous-babe persuasion (a flashback to the Get Smart old times), and while some of the latter do have personal issues too, they are usually secondary.

Collectively these teams are up against more serial killers (by far!) than have ever existed, plus agents of an extraordinary number of villains bent on world-domination, and other high-rolling low-lifes.

Fringe’s quirky science genius is genuinely nuts, and he would still be finishing off his second decade of residence in a mental institution if the FBI hadn’t decided he was the only man who could help them figure out what to do about a contaminated jet full of liquefied passengers and crew after the plane had gently landed itself. The asylum immediately agreed to release him, of course — national security trumps sanity — and he has since been kept extremely busy in his mad-science lab every week dealing with other events of the scary-strange terroristic variety. But people are watching, so Abrams (yes, him again) is free to pursue his strange muse. I have enjoyed all his other series, which include the hit Felicity and the miss Six Degrees, and his film directing debut, Mission: Impossible III, so I am hopeful about his sophomore outing, which is next year’s Star Trek movie, but Fringe is caution-punishing, common-sense-pulverizing pulp SF.

Which is also prevalent on TV this season, and may be timeless. Terminator: The Sara Connors Chronicles picked up (ever so slowly) where the future left off in 1991’s Terminator 2, and promptly became the highest-rated new scripted series of 2007-08. Former Knight Rider David Hasselhoff has crossed over to Reality as a judge of America’s Got Talent, but the 80s series about the talking car is back with a supercombative new model KITT, voiced by Val Kilmer, that can transform into various Fords for disguise and promo purposes. (On December 31st, “Mike must stop the spread of a computer virus that threatens a total global meltdown. The job gets much harder when KITT is infected.”) Battlestar Galactica, in sporadic existence since the 70s, resumes the 4th season of its gripping character-driven reincarnation on January 16th. Dr. Who carries smartly (and foolishly!) on in its fifth decade with its tenth time-travelling Doctor (David Tennant); its latest spin-off — the darker, brooding (and anagrammatic) Torchwood — is well worth checking out on DVD.

Kyle XY is a newer invention, a youth-oriented romantic family drama whose title character is a laboratory creation — a sensitive brilliant gorgeous Superboy who just wants to be a helpful (but otherwise normal) adopted teenager. Unfortunately, there are sinister forces who know his potential to be much more powerful, and a troubled Supergirl as an iffy friend, but most of his focus challenges are about fitting in and going out. We’ll find out more when a third season of ten episodes begins on January 12th.

Ratcheting up the disbelief stretch considerably are series with characters we are supposed to care about despite concentration on arbitrarily absurd premises.

My Own Worst Enemy tells the earnest stories of a pure-hearted suburban family man (Christian Slater) appalled to discover that secret agencies are regularly activating his superbly trained sleeper killer. When this lone wolf likewise finds that his employers are regularly re-activating his incompetent inner drone, he starts taking advantage, impersonating his alter ego to fuck his wife and his therapist fabulously and to help make a Man of his son. But when the transitions start to happen at times that are most inconvenient personally (and convenient dramatically), they have to be more helpful in the cellphone videos they leave for each other ... especially if they want to find out who killed their common parents. ... so there’s hope. Not much, though, for Wikipedia reports it will end December 15th after nine episodes.

Nice nebbishy Chuck contains within his unfailingly accurate memory the only copy of an unfailingly accurate computer catalogue of code-red criminals, and as a result finds himself once a week with a secret life that is vital to the CIA and FBI. Sometimes his expertise in tech support and gaming at the local Buy More outlet proves majorly useful in life-threatening situations. It also helps the show that Zachary Levi is an extraordinarily appealing doofus, and that this is kind of a comedy, so we know he’s going to be all right, which is nice.

Being a comedy about even nicer people, though, hasn’t helped Pushing Daisies, perhaps because the premise is so cruel. Our hero is a pie-maker whose gift is a touch that can bring people back to life — once! The second time he touches them they are killed for good. So he has a very pure relationship with the true-lovely he saved, and spends a fair bit of time reawakening murder victims for just long enough that their killers can be identified and brought to justice. If the dead are resurrected for more than a minute, an equivalent person in the vicinity is killed. It’s a balance thing — the tone of the show is relentlessly but charmingly ironic. It has won multiple Emmys, but is currently on death row.

And so is Eli Stone whose title character is a misfit, an ethical lawyer in the profits-over-principles firm of his father-in-law-to-have-been. Eli also happens to be a psycho, in the sense that he lives in his visions, often to his terrible embarrassment when he returns to the real world. Many of the visions turn out to have been predictive — especially when his tough-loving oriental acupuncturist guides his interpretations — and a dwindling number of the rest feature cast members and guest stars in displays of singing and dancing that are show stopping, one way or another. The series plays cute the way Joan of Arcadia or Wonderfalls did, but not as consequentially.

The grit- and irony-free Ghost Whisperer stars Jennifer Love Hewitt as Melinda the Medium, a working wife and mother who occasionally helps the local police much as the pie-maker does, but mostly helps the living understand the dead (and vice versa) in ways that have moved many to such loyalty that it may be immortal.
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Then there’s Life On Mars, about a cop who is inexplicably (so far) sent back 25 years by a near?-fatal accident to the rougher justice of Harvey Keitel’s copshop. He tends to be right by our standards, but he has modern knowledge without modern technology, so he improvises. Visions of the future that was until recently his past upset him pretty uselessly (he hasn’t yet bought stock in IBM or placed bets on the World Series) but memories of the imminent present have led him to protect his young single mother from dangers that might prevent him from having grown up.

The apotheosis of UnReality is Heroes, which for three years has required the viewer not to disbelieve in the confluence of a dozen or so ordinary individuals with one superhuman ability each — to fly, read minds, travel through time, walk through walls, paint the future, generate electricity, regenerate themselves, and so on — all of which will be required to save the world from supervillains. It’s unwieldy. Audiences are hanging in hopefully, but it will take multiple miracles to restore the naïve charm of the discoveries with which it began.

The attrition of so many Unreality series (especially compared with Reality series) is not exactly surprising, for the expense of these hours is also unreal — the HD production values of most are the match of many a movie — and when most people screen most shows on time-shift television, computers, seat-back monitors or hand-held devices, the promise of payback is ever iffier.

So let us cherish the standouts while we have them.

The best of breed last year was the crime-solving series called Life. (My opinion aligns with critical consensus.) The larger narrative is the story of a cop who after 12 years has returned to the force, exonerated by DNA from a life sentence for murder, with a fortune ($50 million?) in compensation. Under his apparent serenity is compelling conflict: The Zen dispassion that allowed him to survive in prison — and now allows him to find fresh insight into crime suspects and situations each week — is being challenged by an obsession with taking revenge on the conspirators who put him away. Season Two has been treading water (blame network insecurity, marginal ratings), but the invention and momentum of Season One, which does have some satisfying resolution, is well worth your streaming time or DVD dollars.

(Curiously, the #1 new show of the year is The Mentalist, a diverting Life Lite that also features a weirdly genial, impossibly intuitive, loose-cannon law-enforcement advisor with a repressed jones for revenge — he is haunted by flashbacks to when he was a TV psychic and his wife and daughter were murdered by a serial killer who is still at large. It comes from a creator of HBO’s edgy epic Rome and stars Simon Baker, who was so cult-compelling as a desperate idealist in three seasons of The Guardian.)

The best of breed this year is HBO’s True Blood about a village community in the Deep South. The title beverage allows vampires to be an oppressed but rebellious minority; while they retain their unholy hankering, no longer do they need to feed. Nonetheless, the town is riven by a baffling series of murders that a whole lot of people would like to blame on them. Yeah, I know, vampires, la-di-da. But it turns out that they created some of their own mythology for self-protection. Which is just the beginning of how cleverly this show disarms disbelief.

I started off aligned with the dubiousness of the critics who had seen the advances, but episode by episode, it slowly and steadily moved beyond high-concept — a visceral Southern Gothic for an age addicted to sex, violence and intolerance — to something unexpectedly densely shivery, insightful, romantic, funny, disturbing, and sometimes just lovely, quite unlike anything else on television. And although no concessions were made for latecomers, its audience grew with it to reach levels unsurpassed by any other HBO series except Sex and the City and, of course, the Sopranos.

So a second season of True Blood is sure to follow the May 12th release of the first on DVD. In the meantime, the twelve episodes are being reprised on HBO Canada in batches of three from Wednesday the 17th of December to Saturday the 20th between 8 and 11 each night. And for a foretaste, check out not the trailer, which gives away WAY too much, but rather the bracingly surreal title sequence seen here.

This trip is probably nothing less than one should expect from Alan Ball — bet you didn’t think you’d get utterly absorbed by the family of undertakers in Six Feet Under either, did you.

“Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”
— George Bernard Shaw (Maxims for Revolutionists)

How pleasant to partake of the Shaw Festival in the Fall. The town (Niagara-on-the-Lake) seems to have settled comfortably into its natural beauties and its artful enhancements. The plays and musicals (I caught three of each this weekend) have likewise become what they have become, which may have nothing — or everything — to do with what critics experienced at the summer openings. The casts on the homestretch seem to be having fun again, with less stress and less to prove than at spring previews.

Or maybe the lack of urgency was in me. I used to be there for opening nights, feverishly backgrounded for rushes to judgment — often just 90 minutes between curtain and transmission ... on a pre-internet computer with land line and handset — being torn between competing goals of being right (or at least fair) and being memorable (or at least entertaining) in “light, bright and tight” words that would fit the exact amount of space the Toronto Sun had held for me.

No, that kind of stress had become familiar. My real problem had been that it was theatre, and that my instant reaction to this most anomalous of a show’s performances would assess thousands and thousands of hours of creative work and help define the choices and experiences of other playgoers as much as four months later. I had no problem rushing to judgment about books or movies because they are fixed, or about concerts because they are mutable and would have ongoing evaluations. But I knew from my own amateur experience in theatre how much the organism of a show continues to evolve, how great can be the difference in its impact between one night and the next. And in the professional leagues, Critics attend Openings.

Since I missed most of the reviews of Shaw this year, my motivation came largely from early-bird friends. (If there is an on-line forum for Shawgoers, I failed to find it.) And since I chose the shows for the pleasure of my three family escorts, their good times helped reinforce mine, and I was well satisfied. What seems particularly interesting in leisurely retrospect is some of the artistic choices evident.

“Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?”
— Shaw (Man and Superman)

Getting Married was the first George Bernard Shaw play I have enjoyed seeing more than reading — as has always been the case for me with Shakespeare, especially if the seeing came second. While Shaw’s plays are wonderfully wordy, the words tend to be at the service of ideas rather than of actors. In this play we can marvel at how protective (sexist) was the British conjugal world one hundred years ago — for characteristic example, the fact that a man could be held financially responsible for the costs incurred by his wife’s outspokenness. But while such gleanings work just as well on the page, there are so many parts and many points of view in its one long and intricately constructed scene that it becomes important that they be inhabited fully and differentiated entertainingly; I credit the depth of a mature repertory company for the absence of weak performances in even minor roles, and fine direction (by Joseph Ziegler) for effervescent coordination and bubbling momentum. (Also for turning the potential weakness of the dea-ex-machina pivot into a dramatic virtue by freezing the scene at the announcement of her entrance, repeating it after the intermission.)

Belle Moral, by mercurial multi-talent Ann-Marie MacDonald, likewise puts big ideas — the conflict between eugenics and natural selection — into a playful context: a Scottish gothic. ShawFest premiered it three years ago; the new production, directed by Alisa Palmer (who is also a fine playwright and MacDonald’s partner) was provocative and, in the end, surprisingly, touchingly humane. I hope one day, though, to see another production that gives more resonance to some of the philosophical arguments.

Most transporting was a one-act play called The President, as embodied by Lorne Kennedy. who absolutely sizzled in a part that must have more words than Hamlet. It’s a classic farce written as “One, Two, Three“ four generations ago by Budapest’s popular and influential Ferenc Molnár, and filmed under that title by Billy Wilder in 1961 with James Cagney as the President. But as newly adapted by Welsh-Canadian playwright Morwyn Brebner, it proved to be a hilarious amphetamine Pygmalion, as timely as it is timeless..

The future of the title tycoon (and of his many minions) depends on his ability to take the hapless communist cabbie who has impregnated the tycoon’s ditzy ward ... and to transform him into a convincing scion of industry before her parents arrive. He has one hour. But he also has an extraordinary flock of loons (the aforementioned minions) prepared to launch themselves into the whole rushing-about thing at his bidding ...

At the penultimate performance, ShawFest artistic director Jackie Maxwell came out to explain that the actress playing one of the secretaries had come down with severe laryngitis not half an hour since, and it had been decided that she would carry out her complicated duties while being shadowed and voiced by the actress playing another of the feverishly busy secretaries — which the latter would also continue to do either sequentially or at the same time, as required. Ms. Maxwell opined that this solution seemed quite within the spirit of the production.

And it was! Indeed, it added a whole new layer of comic confusion to the chaos without ever quite spinning out of control. I was almost sorry that the laryngitis had not spread by the time of the final performance two days later.

* * * * *

“Music is the brandy of the damned.”
— Shaw (Man and Superman)

The three musicals, all new to me, were early works by composers who went on to greater things I have seen.

Wonderful Town may have only one truly dangerous earworm — “Why, oh why, oh why-o / Why did I ever leave Ohio?” But the Leonard Bernstein who would soon erupt into theatrical greatness with West Side Story was implicit in the gratuitous street dances here, and explicit in the jazzy rhythms and progressive tonalities of the orchestrations.

Likewise, in Follies and A Little Night Music, Stephen Sondheim’s orchestral wit, clever internal rhymes, and passionate ambivalences — especially about love — prefigure the masteries of Merrily We Roll Along, Sweeney Todd, and Sunday in the Park with George.

Greatness is already present in songs from Follies — especially “I’m Still Here” and others that were scooped up for the Side By Side By Sondheim revue. And some of the performances achieved moving regret and transporting vulnerability. But the power of juxtaposing characters in their regretful maturity with other actors playing the same characters in their hopeful youth was confusing in this concert context.

A Little Night Music, a Midsummer Night’s dream of wrongly matched couples put right, may already be great. Some of the duets were delightful, and could be thrilling when the duos’ melodies were superimposed. The chamber score — all of it in triple time — was endlessly diverting. And although I have heard "Send In the Clowns," still Sondheim’s only hit, performed by scores of the finest interpreters of our time, once again it was in hands sensitive enough that it felt new. (Amazing to discover that in context there is one final verse that gives the bittersweetness a less ambiguously sweet ending.)

The intimate production was remarkably fluid, especially given that the stage — hemmed in by the audience on three sides and by the musicians on the fourth — was the size of a modest living room. But miking the voices would have helped enormously without destroying the intimacy; I missed at least two thirds of the lyrics when singers who couldn’t be facing me directly were overwhelmed by the instruments.

Did any of these six experiences matter much to anyone? Unlikely. But likeable they were, overall, likeable indeed.

Next year Shaw will be presenting the improbably challenging Sunday in the Park with George, Sondheim’s pointillist musical about the coming-together of Georges Seurat’s famous painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (1884) ... and about what happened a generation later. The festival is also presenting a great whack of Noel Coward — the ten one-act plays he umbrellaed as Tonight At 8:30. Both are bound to be talked about long after the critics go home.

“Live in the future! It’s just starting now!”
— Firesign Theater (quotes from How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All)

After almost a year of advice and consensus, from passionate friends and professional analysts, Kris and I have taken ownership of the first new car either of us has owned since the 70s. In love with it we have not yet fallen — we haven’t even given it a name! — but boy are we in like with its guaranteed practicalities!

In several ways the process of collaborating on the purchase of a car is even more revealing than that of co-buying a home, which we have done three times, and decided not to do even more often (while we continued to rent). A home is a far greater commitment, of course, and far more defining. A car is a tool, a more or less convenient way of getting people and things and (imminently) a dog from one place to another, but it also projects you into the world, where it represents your power and priorities. And a standard trope in the interpretation of dreams is that cars represent the physical self, the ‘energy body’, so the choice of a car is also very much about self-image and personal style where the subconscious has some sway.

Our Platonic sense of car-ness was no doubt formed in childhood, and the particularities of our identification were no doubt shaped by youthful experience. 50s Moms may have opined about cars when we were growing up, but Dads decided. Kris’s Danish-Canadian father was a success in the chemical engineering biz, and their family sedans projected conservative suburban family values, quality rather than ostentation. Her mother was a homemaker with design and artistic gifts that might have won professional recognition had she lived longer or later. Her car was a Buick Impala with a red tartan fabric interior (a wild outgrowth of her Scottish lineage?), then a silver 1961 Thunderbird upholstered in white leather, in which Kris had learned to drive before her mother and brother died in it.

My American-born folks eventually surrendered to the pragmatism of station wagons, but Dad, a restless entrepreneur with a nomadic childhood, loved the feel and freedoms of driving and hands-on tinkering. For Mom, whose father had been a Chevrolet dealer, a car was a source of fun, as well as a form of security. Both parents told stories about vehicles of all sorts. Mom had driven a three-ton truck evacuating refugees in the war; Dad had flown gliders over enemy lines, and was certified on motorcycles. They drove away from their Vermont wedding in a surrey with a fringe on top, then switched to a classic 1929 Packard Roadster for a honeymoon trip to California, and they remained romantic about their cars, remembered them fondly, even gave them names (our Karman Ghia was ‘Grasshopper’, our wooden-sided Chrysler ragtop convertible was ‘the Egg Crate’.)

I had some of both sides. I once fell in love with a Datsun 240-Z in a Canadian movie about a moody driver, and took advantage of the opportunity to rent one in Detroit to get to an interview (with Little Feat) in northern Michigan. You practically had to lie on the sidewalk and roll to get in. Then the acceleration was a thrill, but the size of the competing traffic was intimidating; I really wasn’t able to get away from it all.

And that’s partly because of still-recent sense-memories of the fragility of cars. I’d hated the amazing amount of damage I’d been able to do to the family station wagon when I lost traction avoiding a highway collision (successfully) in a sudden midnight deluge. While not a single mechanical element was affected by my slo-mo slide into both dividers, and I was able to drive home, the sides of the car were crimped and cratered. But I soon came to bless this as a safety feature when I was the passenger in a Mini in rural Quebec and the driver slammed at 60 into the passenger side of a station wagon that was making a blind left turn (just after a truck had passed her). My legs were crossed, and I drove the dashboard forward more than a foot with my right knee, but when we were crowbarred out, we were all three able to walk.

My folks got me my first car at 21, from friends of theirs, just before I went off to Syracuse University in 1969 for a one-year Masters in media. It was a funky old Volvo, the Chicago gangster-ish model that was the last to be built in Nova Scotia, and made me feel both secure and quite cool. Very occasionally, and for no reason anyone could determine, it failed to start, but since the problem could almost always be solved by popping the clutch, I spent the year parking it on slopes, of which Syracuse had plenty. (The rest of the time I relied on new sets of spark plugs, of which I learned to keep plenty.) However, when I went to work at the CBC in Toronto, too much of the city proved to be flat, and my solution was a membership in the CAA — to this day the most comforting insurance I know — and one of the places they towed me finally diagnosed the real problem as a hairline fracture of the distributor cap, inside which condensation would sometimes collect, to the detriment of spark plugs. (Thereafter more expensive problems accumulated; one of them must have been the tipping point.)

What occurs to me now: Was a pattern thereby set of trusting gift horses and coping with the horseshit? (The pattern could also be applied to my acceptance of the few troubled young maidens of that era who were kind enough to sleep with me — I’d think ‘intuitive’ enough on really good days; ‘manipulative’ enough on bad — but I’m going to carry on with cars and not even mention phallic symbolism.)

Kris’s first car was a Fiat coupe. When I met her, and became the Best Man at her wedding to my friend Marty, she was driving a Mercedes 280-SL she’d brought home from a year of schooling and working in Europe. (Her set pattern was “terrific deals.”) After mounting maintenance mandated a trade-in, she found that a bargain Toyota Celica utterly suited her independent/lower-budget style. Meanwhile I had been driving a marguerita-colored Datsun when I was engaged to Janice, and a Civic that made us Honda loyalists when we got married ... though we had a short fling with her dad’s white Cadillac, which interrupted our road trips to see Bruce Springsteen with more or less useful announcements: “The gas is low” and “The door is ajar” respectively. (This was the highest of tech at the time.)

Kris was making do with a Hyundai Pony when we reconnected. But opportunity knocked when chivalry beckoned, and we bought out Sun Entertainment Coordinator Melinda’s lease on a BMW, drove “Grace” happily for many years, and eventually sold her to our loyal mechanic before we made him really rich.

Exhaustive comparison shopping had led us to select the Honda CR-V as a replacement when Kris’s dad phoned to say that he and his second wife had just bought a Range Rover and wondered if “you kids” would like to take over their old white Cadillac. It was disappointingly mute, and not our self-image, but free is good, so we did the polite thing and said yes, and “Mac” (because it was a Fleetwood), or “the Boat” (because the feel was of floating), became part of our life. And we did so again with the Rover (“the Puppy”) when he contracted Alzheimers and had to become his wife’s passenger. But as the disease went from cruelty to fatality, and Land Rover was no longer making the parts we needed, we decided last year to invest some of Kris’s inheritance in something green — maybe a Prius, if we could make it work, or something in the new clean diesel we had recently seen in Europe.

Well, the latter is a few years away in Canada, and we’re not early adopters by nature anyway, but older-fashioned diesel has been almost completely phased out of the standard car market. (We’re not late adopters either.) We decided to hope that diesel is again common by the time we make our NEXT purchase.

Meanwhile, a wonderful rant on Boston Legal had made the case that the manufacture and distribution of the Prius came at an environmental cost that outweighed the carbon benefits of driving it. The most high-minded pragmatist I know argued that the Prius would have to be driven more than a hundred-thousand klicks before it would make the financial sense of, say, the Matrix he bought (albeit before the latest gas-price surge). Wired recently opined that getting a reasonably fuel-efficient car second-hand would make more sense because such a car had already completed the carbon-debt of its creation.

My problem was the design — too much rear vision has been sacrificed to aerodynamics. But our final rejection was inspired by my uncle Billy. He loves his quiet, roomy Prius on the highway, but found it so low-slung that it scraped the lanes of our family summer retreat. And when winter roads are slick, he discovered, the Prius system of reducing power to the front wheels when the rear wheels are spinning can be dangerously becalming, and he cannot always count on it climbing the hill to his home in Vermont.

So I took our indecision to my first auto show.


“It’s a beautiful car, friends, with doors to match!” (FT)

I’m not sure what I expected for my time and effort and money — some razzle-dazzle? some edutainment? some seduction? — but it was certainly something more than the inert sequence of three-dimensional ads I found.

The set-up, on four floors of the Montreal Convention Centre, borrowed its one-way maze concept from Ikea and its affective component from speed-dating (though none of the many businesslike animatrons on hand was remotely interested in me.) There was no animating world-of-tomorrow theme, no invitations to imagine or to play, nothing to take home but glossy brochures and ‘special’ flyers. Instead we were herded past scores of accessory and advocacy booths to a series of similar showrooms featuring similar assortments of similar-looking cars. With a few boxy exceptions at both size extremes, they were all shiny monocolored oviforms with slanty-eyed side windows in the rear.

More than a few times I did what the roamers were doing and waited in line to sit in the driver’s seat of some immovable object. Sure enough, the mirrors revealed things behind me, and the windshields were so clear that I could see things ahead. Some cars had more cupholders than others. Some had screens, but all of them could have. All had sound and lighting systems, but very few could be turned on. Some seemed short of headroom or legroom, but that may well have been the fixed positions of electric seats.

Kris’s decision to stay home and paw through back issues of Consumer Reports, and click through edmunds,com and its online rivals, was the right one.

But we were little closer to a decision when we sold the Puppy to the last CAA guy who rescued her ... and went off on our long-planned first trip together to Europe.

Kris wanted style, safety, and sufficient useful space for her design work and our intended dog. I also wanted responsiveness, practical design, clear sightlines, clean sound. We were on adjacent pages, no arguments. We had become accustomed to automatics, and decided that with so many opportunities in Quebec winters to stop just below the crests of steep hills, automatic — with all-wheel drive — was the way to continue to go. But this didn’t eliminate many contenders. Could we join Communauto, the Montreal car-rental club, and stall a bit longer? — perhaps indefinitely? Not really, not with so many of my family responsibilities and Kris’s interior-architecture clients being out of town.

When we came home, it was spring, and time to go shopping.


“As you can see, this car’s been fully equipped with a com-pul-LETE line of extras, designed with your mind in mind!’ (FT)

We started out where we had ended up a decade before in another city (Toronto) — with the Honda CR-V. We had really liked the way the front-seat backs and headrests interlocked with the rear-seat cushions for flat-out catnapping, and the way a layer of the trunk folded out into a rear-extension table for picnics or tailgating parties (not that we’d ever been, but maybe someday). The new CR-V we test-drove no longer turned quite so cleverly into a mobile B&B, but the back seats were easier to fold down than I remembered, and it all seemed much roomier, but no less peppy — good road feel, noticeable road noise. We felt comfortable and safe. We didn’t feel excited.

The Honda people were patient and painstaking. The ecological Fit seemed too light and tight; the more-than-substantial-enough hybrid Pilot was much more expensive but didn’t get mileage to match the CR-V. We said we’d probably be back, but wanted to sleep on it (explore further). Honda said: Did we like the demo we had driven? the one with the heated leather seats, moon roof, large navigation screen with GPS and rear camera, and voice-controlled 6-CD changer with iPod connector? We could have it, fully warrantied for three years from the day they gave us the keys, for $3500 off, with Honda’s attractive 0.9% financing and bi-weekly payments. Unfortunately, it was a shade of deep blue Kris doesn’t fancy at all. No, we couldn’t change the color.

We did explore further. Kris developed a slight preference for the Toyota RAV-4, but we couldn’t get a price break, the seats were (unheated) fabric, and the financing several times more expensive. The Audi A-3 was charmingly compact and sporty, but the sightlines would be seriously constrained by serious packing — ultimately it seemed like too much for too little. If we wanted to be driving any day soon, we were back to the primo practicality of the CR-V. We took the demo.

But when we sent the serial number to our insurance company, they emailed back to confirm that we knew it was a 2007 car. We didn’t know. We’d just assumed that the model Honda was using in 2008 would be a 2008. Friends and experts confirmed our impression that an imminently two-year-old car had lost 10% of its value at the very least.

Honda said they wanted us happy. They added full replacement coverage, extended the full warranty to five years. They offered free snow tires and storage of them. They offered to put Sherlock numbers on all the key elements (to lessen the risk of theft and lower the cost of our insurance.) They offered full injection rustproofing, leather treatment, color and front chip protection, durable mats, and a dog liner for the trunk. They even said we could park for free in their lot (a couple of blocks from the Place des Arts and the upcoming Jazz Festival.)

We were happy.

And we have grown even happier. We don’t spend a lot of time looking at the exterior color, and some of the bells and whistles have demonstrated real value — telling the car what radio station or CD track we want rather than fumbling with dashboard commands, using the rear-camera to back confidently into tight parking spaces without collateral damage (children, dogs), and letting the trip planner talk us through mazes of unfamiliar one-way streets, or find a gas station or an alternate route.

And with luck she (“the Car”) will go on to make someone else happy when some exciting green design can accommodate Quebec winters.

These words are slightly adapted from my thoughts for friends and relatives at last Sunday morning’s Prayers, a venerable summer tradition my grandfather began for his four children and fifteen grandchildren. The tradition’s one evolutionary leap in three generations is that his weekly Bible reading and discussion has become a short talk, more diversely spiritual and psychological, given by a different volunteer or willing conscript each time. (We still follow up with The Family Prayer he wrote and sing The Family Hymn, and then have The Family Gossip over coffee or hot chocolate and donuts; my younger sister Wendy has held high the torch of host ever since our parents’ hands failed.)


At the beginning of the season, Wendy and I thought to collaborate on a first Prayers about the Dance of Family. Ultimately, however, we decided that she would rather do it herself.

Today, though, at her invitation, I would like to add some mature second thoughts on the Dance.

Most of you know that Kris and I are off next weekend to Great Lake Huron to adopt a puppy; most of us make it our business to be our family members’ keepers. Unto the second and third generation. And this sensitivity has become our standard with friends too.

Many members of the family are experienced dog-owners. Kris and I are newbies. We had a cat for some years, but that won’t be much help. As Kris likes to say, “Dogs have trainers. Cats have servants.”

Fortunately, we both grew up with dogs. Indeed, Wendy and I had the best dog in the world. Toby. Three or four canine lifetimes ago. Some of you will remember.

Some of you will remember that Toby had problems with boundaries. He didn’t have any. Could we stop him from chasing cars? or rescuing every swimmer? or racing from dock to dock barking on long afternoons of waterskiing? No. But our current dog-owners have standards of behavior that their dogs have adopted. I’d like to think we contributed to that.

In return they have offered us the benefits of their experience — not only advice, but also books, and DVDs, and crates, and even puppy-sitting service. Many others have opinions, interesting ones, which even our articulate pre-teens are not too intimidated by Kris’s and my venerability to share.

This is quite different from olden days, when parents knew, and children learned. And a pattern has been established in our Dance -- the larger the generation, the wider the embrace, and the greater the range of acceptable choices.

-----

A few days ago cousin Caroline involved just about everyone here in an all-day birthday party for children, the epic property-spanning quest of Roger’s Rangers. (A quest for what? I never did find out.) Wendy and I, though, also really wanted to be at the world premiere of a family friend’s first movie that afternoon at the Montreal Film Festival. With a few extra hours of planning the night before, Caroline was able to move to the morning not only my kidnapping but also my rescue from Wild Abenaki Indians (Wendy and Kris and cousin Katherine), and to re-weave some of the morning puzzles and adventures into the afternoon storyline ... without evident cost to the good time apparently had by all. Which is amazing, given that nobody ever knew everything that was happening everywhere.

We here have all learned to flow from such examples. The challenges of organizing this motley crew can be frustrating, but the anal are learning to relax their sphincters, while the jellyfish are developing spines.

-----

A lot of people in our society feel trapped by the closed circles of their immediate families, and we were not immune. Back in the 60s when we were much younger and fewer, our immediate-family relationships could be pretty fraught. But every summer these circles were being integrated into ever-larger circles of extended family. By the 80s the outbursts of hostility were few, and temporary, and localized, the outbreaks of empathy widespread. We all had multiple role models, many sources of information and inspiration to take with us into the real world and return to with our discoveries. We were having collective experience that nurtured individuality. There was more acceptance of our diversity, more mentoring and less monitoring, more trust in ourselves and in each other.

In many ways the dance of family begins and comes to completion in the dance. Many of us learned our parents’ steps from our parents. (A few of us also learned our grandparents’ steps from gym class.) But we learned our own dances from each other. No one, for example, does the jitterbug quite the way [cousins] Lyana and Kate taught Helen and their sisters and me and mine to jitterbug, though it must be admitted that this was not always entirely to our advantage, say, at senior proms.

I also learned a lot about grace from [cousin] Wilder’s easy economy of style, partly because pretty girls on the bay seemed to admire it so. [His brother] Howard was probably okay in that department too, but he was way younger, and we were very youth-ist in those days.

The dances that were held at Magog Meadows in the good old days did not make much room for young people either. But as we grandchildren grew into our majority, we became the majority. At barn dances we danced to old-fangled tunes for a few hours, with our folks, and near them, or just watched them, and then became more rockous, while they watched us. And gradually the musical caste system broke down entirely, followed by the guys-ask/girls-accept system and even the guys-lead girls-follow system. If the music had an infectious beat, everyone would dance with everyone, to anything.

And to an extent that would have seemed improbable to the founders, though not undesirable, this ecumenical movement extended itself to every aspect of our lives here. We work together, and seniority is no longer the same as authority, and our roles are no longer dictated by how many x-chromosomes we have. We all have friendships — real friendships — that not only cross gender — and generations — but transcend them.

—————————————

The Festival movie I referred to above is the very personal National Film Board documentary, Grief Walker, which is described and can be tasted here.
Wendy and I found it powerful and beautiful and important, though after much surprisingly nourishing time in hospice being present to the dying of both our parents (in different decades) we are the choir, not the congregation who needs to hear this movie’s message.

The family friend who directed and narrated (and acted as cinematographer and sound engineer) is a fascinating fellow named Tim Wilson, profiled here. As with me in the old days, I’m sure he used to use his body mostly to take his head to where it could see and hear and create things. But then he (like me) came unexpectedly close to dying. “You don’t seem like someone who has been given the gift of life,” a close friend accused him afterwards (on camera!), and I understood, because I too missed most of the drama that affected those around me. But Tim does seem gifted with life now.

The accuser has become the focus and the catalytic force of the film, and is still Tim’s good friend even after more than 200 hours of difficult shooting (and many more of painful editing down to the essential one percent). Stephen Jenkinson is an extraordinarily articulate talker and cut-to-the-chase teacher who is alarmed by the “toxic fearfulness” our society brings to dying, suppressing honest loving connections at a time when they are most urgent and can be most rewarding. Stephen has made it his business to be an Angel of Death, encouraging people to invest the process with vital meaning by being intensely present to living and open to grieving. (We in the audience witness several strong transitions.)

Small world, I discovered anew in conversation afterwards: Tim and Stephen met at the Bly & Woodman On Men & Women conference where Kris and I were Writers-In-Residence. Robert Bly and Marion Woodman would likely resonate even more to this movie than to the video that came out of the conference.

Tim Wilson had been to Prayers back when I first knew him, back when Prayers was more patriarchal, less participatory. His movie is Prayers now. It is about participating fully in the Dance of given family and chosen friends.

The seasons shifted yesterday. And I responded.

It had been a cool, stormacious summer, here in the rolling hills and round mountains east of Montreal. But suddenly it was Fall. Magisterially, omens in place, August was auguring Winter. A few browning ferns, a few russet branches, fewer bugs, less birdsong, sun migrating south with increasing speed, shadows shifting, deepening in the afternoon.

Today summer heat has returned, but it feels Indian. The proximate world is folding in on itself. Even in the city, where terrasses are full, urgency seems to mark escapism from a swelling momentum of purpose. Fall is the new focus of media, Winter the new focus of fashion. Even people in shorts and tees move with more vigor.

It has been almost forty years since I was getting ready for back-to-school at this time, but I feel the unsettlement still. Suddenly there is no longer enough time; already I must start shedding the desiccated leaves of possible accomplishment. Plans are longer range; schedules are more fixed; recreations are more intense.

Harvest time is now, cold is soon, activity is moving indoors even when the air-con is on. With more than a third of a year to go, it still seems reasonable to ask: How was 2008 for you?

Stephen Collins became a successful actor in the usual way — practice. Also by winning notable roles and doing a noteworthy job with them — the commander in the first Star Trek movie, Ashley Wilkes in Scarlett, JFK in A Woman Named Jackie, the Donald Trump character in Ivana’s For Love Alone, most recently King Arthur in Broadway’s Spamalot and, most enduringly, 200-plus episodes of Seventh Heaven as the Reverend Eric Camden.

He became a hit novelist as the result of a game.

He played it once only, he told me, in Idaho, in 1991, at a big dinner party hosted by his best friend Christopher Guest, and Guest’s wife, actress Jamie Lee Curtis.
Curtis was inspired to pass out pens and paper, and to pull a novel off the shelf — a Sidney Sheldon novel, as it happens, that no one present had read — and to invite everyone to imagine its first sentence. Here is what came to Collins:

“Making better eye contact with her image in the mirror than she did with most people in life, Nicolette Stallings capped her lipstick, dropped it into her purse, exhaled, and whispered aloud to no one in particular, ‘Perfect.’”

When Curtis read it aloud with Sheldon’s first sentence and those of all the other guests, most people guessed that the published one was the Collins.

Weeks later the sentence was still with him — distractingly — and he sat down to see what would follow it ... and the eventual result was Eye Contact, a manuscript entertaining enough to win mass-marketing and a big advance on a second novel.

“Eye Contact,” he said, “puts the reader inside the head of a person who makes a choice to follow through on what looks like a perfect gift-wrapped sexual fantasy — and then, because of that choice, has to make hundreds of others ...” Not unlike the actor who created this situation.

Years later I was inspired to introduce the game to extended family, who had long enjoyed ‘Dictionary’, which follows the same rules. (Each player of Dictionary in turn finds an obscure word the others don’t know, and writes the real definition — one of the real definitions is there are several — on a sheet of paper, and his own imaginary definition on another, and collects what the other players have written on identical sheets of paper, and reads them all aloud a couple of times, and then tallies the votes. The scorekeeper awards a point for each correct guess and for the writer of each incorrect guess.) Some people take longer than others to acquire the knack of writing a plausible dictionary definition, but eventually it is fun for everybody who loves words.

What I called Literary ‘Dictionary’ has turned out to be even more of a social pleasure, even among those who were initially intimidated, partly because the most successful players are often keen readers more than skilled writers, partly because there are so many genres (including non-fiction and books for children) that are fun to attempt, and partly because so many good books get off to really bad starts, while many quite terrible books have compelling openings, If the novice is having fun, others are sure to be convinced. I have often relaxed newcomers by quoting from memory the first sentence of Stompin’ Tom, the unexpectedly compelling 1995 memoir by Canadian singer-songwriter Stompin' Tom Connors: “Hi, my name is Stompin’ Tom Connors, and this is my story.” But every game reveals surprising new examples.

Recently, for example, I introduced dinner guests to Richard North Patterson: Exile (2007), a novel about the Palestine ‘situation’ by the trial lawyer turned best-seller I praised here in All Our Trials, Lord. But this awkward sentence was the novel’s first —

“Gazing at the white-capped aqua waters of the Mayan Riviera, Ibrahim Jefar struggled to imagine the act that would end his life: the righteous murder, far from home, of the man who led the enemy of his people, the hawk-faced architect of his sister’s shame and grief.”

I also had as usual a back-up to save time in case anyone knew the Patterson. It was Thomas M. Disch: The Word of God: or, Holy Writ Rewritten (2008), which I wrote about in the same blog entry. and it begins, simply —

“Let there be light.”

Proposed by my wife Kris, the most compelling real sentence of the night was from Scavenger (2007) by David Morrell, still best known for First Blood, (1972), which became the first Rambo movie. 35 years later, Scavenger is, according to the back cover, a “desperate high-tech scavenger hunt for a lost 100-year-old time capsule.” But it begins —

“He no longer called her by his dead wife’s name, even though the resemblance was strong enough to make his heart ache.”

The hardest for me to identify (and to compose in my imagination) was the opening sentence of a biography I and my cousin Kate Williams (who proposed it) had read with great enthusiasm many years ago. Dr. Wilder Penfield: The Difficult Art of Giving: The Epic of Alan Gregg (1967) is a biography of the chief executive officer of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded (among many other things) the Montreal Neurological Institute, which the author (our grandfather) had conceived, and where he was able to map out some of the electrical pathways of the brain. None of which was foreshadowed by what turned out to be the real opening sentence:

“A hundred and fifty miles south of San Francisco, Number One Highway turns inland along the valley of the Big Sur.”

In my experience, seven or eight is the ideal number of participants for a game of Literary Dictionary with diversity enough and time for everyone to introduce a book. The host should have plenty of identical pads and similar ball-point pens. The turn leader could, for variety, choose a last sentence, but should always describe, if only from the jacket copy, the author, the nature of the story, its context in time and place, and maybe some stimulating reviews. If anyone has read the book (without remembering it too vividly to participate), it would be wise for the leader to mention key characters by name so that the playing field remains as level as possible. Urge that everyone write legibly (I have to use capital letters) on one side only, sign their submission, and fold it in half before submitting it to the turn leader. Urge also that the turn leader look closely at the submissions in advance (and check in with the players as necessary) so that all submissions can be read with the same confidence.

Then maybe one day your party will be remembered not only for good times but also as the launch pad for another literary career.

Second thoughts on the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics don’t contradict the first thoughts, which are that it was the most impressive spectacle I have ever seen.

Not the most powerful. That would be the never-to-be-surpassed (I hope!) Nuremberg rallies staged and filmed for the brilliant artistry and terrifying Nazi propaganda of Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl (who also made the most famous Olympic documentary ever). The Beijing ceremonies were only peripherally about power.

Nor was it the most moving for me, because I lack too many of the emotional connections. CBC-TV’s talking heads did a pretty good job of filling in the restless resonances of the performance, but it was after the fact, like explaining a joke. My most moving spectacle would be watching the Pink Floyd all-stars tearing up The Wall in Berlin after the Berlin Wall was torn down. (Runner up, for pure thrilling invention, would be the Cannes Film Festival screening of Apocalypse Now, the only time (so far as I know) that this shattering tone poem was ever shown without the gratuitous narration that undercut our disorientation and weakened the conclusion. The premiere version ended when the natives prostrated before the crazed Marlon Brando character emerging from his tropical asylum, and the camera zoomed into the black of his widening pupils.)

What made the Beijing show so impressive, beyond its fluidity, precision and technology, was its celebration of the cult of the collective. There were stars, but they winked in and out, upstaged at every turn by the enthusiastic members of giant teams — 2008 t’ai chi masters, another 2008 drummers with luminous tablets, and many more thousands of dancers, some of them leaving calligraphic traces on a giant screen, others formicating at high speed to create Chinese symbols or perfect spirals or concentric circles or three-dimensional geometries. A veteran piano stylist's solo was swarmed by prodigious youth. A Chinese pop star was paired with his polar opposite (Sarah Brightman of Phantom of the Opera fame) and set atop a giant floating globe that was continually being circumnavigated by men running perpendicular to its surfaces. And the Chinese gold-medal winner chosen to end the Olympic torch relay took his final circuit horizontally on an LED track at the very top of the open stadium ... pursued by moving-pictures of people of the world. Spectacular!

My first second-thought was that the effectiveness of this mammoth effort was clearly the product of a singular vision.

The collectivity it embraced, though, is a significant evolution from China’s better-known cult of conformity. The military was present here only in attractive token show of protecting children. Symbolically China was celebrating the diversity of its peoples, the flow of its history, and the range of its contributions to the world from philosophy to technology. But the world — not just China — was the show’s dominant symbol, and outreach in beauty was its dominant expression.

Now we are back to the cult of individuality with which the Western World is so much more comfortable — round-the-clock coverage (and re-coverage) that stresses the importance of individual physical prowess, of winners, and of the nationalities of the winners.

All competitors apparently still have amateur status. But what does it mean to be an amateur if your talent and training are fully paid for, if your goals are professional contracts, if your rewards for success are personal luxury?

It means that in this context, the market economy, which some of us call ‘capitalism’, is the world’s most powerful force. It also means that sports have become rather more meritocratic. It also means that nothing much has changed since the Games began in the (limited) democracy of Ancient Greece. Even two-thousand-year-old criticism sounds pretty familiar when the subject is the cult of the individual athlete and what is civilization coming to anyway. Here are three exemplary sentences from Ancient Rome’s Vitruvius (with thanks to Ido Yavetz, our in-family History of Science Prof):

“THE ancestors of the Greeks have appointed such great honours for the famous athletes who are victorious at the Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean games, that they are not only greeted with applause as they stand with palm and crown at the meeting itself, but even on returning to their several states in the triumph of victory, they ride into their cities and to their fathers’ houses in four-horse chariots, and enjoy fixed revenues for life at the public expense.

“When I think of this, I am amazed that the same honours and even greater are not bestowed upon those authors whose boundless services are performed for all times and for all nations. This would have been a practice all the more worth establishing, because in the case of athletes it is merely their own bodily frame that is strengthened by their training, whereas in the case of authors it is the mind, and not only their own but also man’s in general, by the doctrines laid down in their books for the acquiring of knowledge and the sharpening of the intellect.”

Some writers of genre fiction are godlike in their insouciance, others in their controlling ambition. The one who became God in his latest paperback original, The Word Of God (2008) took on both aspects. Almost a third of the way in, He announces:

“’Ballade of the New God’ represents my first public proclamation of my divinity, and as such it is a poem of universal significance ...

“I have decided I’m divine.
Caligula and Nero knew
A godliness akin to mine,
But they are strictly hitherto.
They’re dead, and what can dead gods do?
I’m her and now. I’m dynamite.
I’d worship me if I were you.
A new religion starts tonight! ...”

The author is the very lately incarnate Thomas M. Disch, usually lauded for his science fiction. and he turns out to be a jealous God, also peevish, sometimes vainglorious, but also flamboyantly forgiving, working in ways mysterious and, indeed, miraculous.

“For all that, I do help those who help themselves — usually without their ever knowing they’ve had a favor from a secret Someone. I shake someone’s hand and the plaque that had been piling up in her vena cava dissolves. I blow a kiss and a sinus headache disappears. Sometimes the mere passage of my shadow across his cardboard sign puts steel into the soul of a drug-addicted teenage beggar and he decides to get his GED.”

The Word of God includes many manifestations of Disch — fragments of memoir, figments of his imagination, shards of his satire, thematically suitable short stories and poems, pokes at rival powers (especially Catholicism and Bushism), earnest evocations of divinity in the fine arts, and wild, willful expressions of his obsessions, especially with Philip K. Dick, with whom he had to share shelfspace all his life, and who shows up here in context after context, some of them as a time-traveling twelve-year-old on a mission from Hell. In this chapter, though, Disch is simply musing omnisciently about the surprising political and cultural implications of having children ...

“As to murder of offspring I will admit that the Scriptures often seem to sanction that in particular cases (Abraham and Isaac, Jephtha and his daughter), but even in those cases God and his designated hit men come off looking bad and not a little crazy.

“Is crazy another chapter in itself or should we talk about it here? If we think of crazy as an alternative to nihilism, then here’s as good a chapter as any. For many zealots — not just Abraham and Jephtha but ordinary off-the-wall weirdos like Phil Dick — crazy is square one. Crazy was that first tab of acid in 1965 and a lifetime of rehabs thereafter. Crazy is never having to say you’re sorry, because you’re not, and you don’t remember what you’re supposed to be sorry about, and you can’t recognize the person you won’t apologize to. Dad, is that you?”

Non-devotees could wholly reasonably ascribe unholy self-indulgence and no Higher Purpose to The Word of God, but even if the author is just a quirky friend, he knows better than to waste our time, and I think our amusement is another of his obsessions, which makes him more appealing than most gods. One final example:

“Perhaps the martyrs of 9/11 might have leveled the World Trade Center without the enticement of the seventy virgins — just from a sense of sheer envy, resentment, and spite. Perhaps their operative motive was piety. We can only guess.

“I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a member of the Anti-Sex League or that my own orgasms have been of such poor quality that I undervalue the pleasure principle. There’s nothing like a good fuck, unless it’s another good fuck. But can anyone sustain their wild ecstasies through eternity? That’s the question theologians must ask themselves. There comes a point, orgasmically speaking, when we all poop out and want no more than a cigarette and then to watch the smoke wreathing up into the light. Such a mood of sated contemplative peace offers an alternative scale-model of the divine bliss we may enjoy hereafter ... I promise my worshippers a heaven with a selection of good wines by the glass and a juke box with infinite variety.”

* * * * *

Another suicide bombing on American soil is the incitement of Richard North Patterson: Exile, now in paperback. Patterson writes courtroom-thrillers, but about 15 years ago, when he became the first #1 lawyer-novelist since John Grisham, it was with a move away from melodrama. Degree of Guilt was “more of an Eastern,” he tells me. “It deals with moral ambiguity.” The novels since have moved ever further in this direction, and Exile, which puts the Middle East on trial in America (which doesn’t want the job after a suicide bombing), may push the limits, but he has been ever more repelled by “the tendency of people to try and arrange the messiness of human behavior into neat little boxes so they can be labeled.”

The humanism of Exile argues that every action has a complex confluence of causes, and that understanding of these can be achieved only by looking deeper into memory, and therefore farther into the ultimately unknowable. Nonetheless, instinct continues to persuade him that there is still no better approach to justice than the oversimplification of guilty-or-not-guilty. Although has had cases he would rather have tried before a philosopher king than before a jury, he fears elitism. And the opposite extreme of trial by mass audience seems just as dangerous. Television, he says, turns court cases into morality plays, and also into plebiscites. He is concerned that “jurors will feel their neighbors watching over their shoulders.”

On the other hand, he hopes that we will all feel like such jurors in preparing for and following the trial in Exile, for it seeks to make his fellow Americans (in particular) more understanding of ‘the Palestinian position’ by trying a new case on its multi-layered merits. His presentation is, as ever, meticulous, and there is dispassion in the way he evokes feeling. The feelings are real; the observations that evoke them are carefully calibrated.

When his Jewish lawyer-narrator is chatting with his Holocaust-survivor father-in-law-to-be, or with the adolescent daughter of his Palestinian ex-lover and her terror-suspect husband, the parts of the conversations that are quoted are about personal truth in the larger sense, not about personal idiosyncrasy.

Other principals are also smart enough to be more or less conflicted, but they are always somehow representational. What is in jeopardy are people, and I think we can care about them the way we have always been able to care about archetypal young fallers-in-love or he-men-in-peril, but what is on trial is policy: How can it be made more wise? And he is willing to hold the hands of his characters over the fire until he gets what he wants.

* * * * *

(From George Johnson's recent NYX review of Leonard Mlodinow's new book on probability and statistics ...)

When O.J. Simpson was depicted by the prosecution as an inveterate wife-abuser, defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz "countered with statistics: in the United States, four million women are battered every year by their male partners, yet only one in 2500 is ultimately murdered by her partner.

"The jury may have found that persuasive, but it's a spurious argument. Nicole Brown Simpson was already dead. The relevant question was what percentage of all battered women who are murdered are killed by their abusers. The answer, Mlodinow notes, didn't come up in the trial. It was 90 percent."

Opening today at a video store near you, right in the middle of Superhero Summer, is an all-star relationships movie like none other. The probability that its name, Emotional Arithmetic, will be unfamiliar even to fans of Susan Sarandon, Gabriel Byrne, Max Von Sydow, Christopher Plummer and Roy Dupuis, who comprise its ensemble, must have something to do with the fact that it is Canadian, specifically English-Canadian. In any other artistic medium (and even in French-language film) we compete with the world, but when our own movies can get no traction in our own movie theatres, who in the world is going to notice?

The Quebec premiere was hosted back in November by scriptwriter Jefferson Lewis at the Coeur du Village, the multi-purpose arts space he and Andrée Pelletier catalyzed in Sutton, their Eastern hometownship. (Some 2500 people had previously attended the world premiere screenings at the close of the Toronto International Film Festival in September.)

“I’m going to say something incredibly obvious,” he said: “A movie begins with words.” He had begun work on the words for this movie eight Novembers earlier, at the behest of the wife of his friend Matt Cohen when Matt was in the final rounds of a fight to the death with lung cancer. Matt had already ventured an adaptation, but as fellow Canadian novelist Howard Engel once said, "Making a movie script of your own novel is like trying to put the contents of your refrigerator into the box your alarm clock came in."

Almost as awkward, something had been left out of the novel: Cohen had stipulated that the central character of Jakob, who would one day be embodied by von Sydow, was an important poet, but had neglected to actually write him any poetry at all (not even in the 350 pages Matt had left out of the novel before it had been published nine years earlier), let alone something impressive enough to transport the Susan Sarandon character-to-be (and, indeed, Sarandon herself). So Jeff had not only to imagine his way into the mind of a 70-year-old Auschwitz survivor but also to channel his untapped muse.

I loved the result. But more importantly, so did the amazing cast, who turned the words into the experience I wrote about below that is constellated today on DVD.

Just a few years ago it might have disappeared altogether, as happened to many another ambitious movie before the recent explosion of media. Heck, it happened to Robert Altman! Despite his wunderkind reputation and commercial success, and despite the Cannes Best Actress win for its star, Susannah York, Images played North America for just one week and then disappeared. As a fledgling film columnist, I had discovered its lush expressionism in a screening room and then, after deciding it was a cinematic poem about mid-life Woman, dragged groups of mostly female friends four times with me to the theatre for their perspectives.

Cathryn (Susannah York) is turning against herself, I observed back then at earnest length. She is a writer of books for children, but she dislikes the only child we meet (her own?). She seems to fear animals, but lives surrounded by their decorative skins, heads and artistic representations with a husband whose only known recreations are as hunter and photographer of animals; only her outdoorsy double with the dog seems to enjoy them alive. And then there’s men. Over and over again, Cathryn has two mutually exclusive choices, and she takes both of them, a dramatic device that zeroes in on the fierceness of her ambivalences ... Altman sits firmly on the fence (it happened and it did not happen) ... By himself, each of the three men in her life is incomplete ... Husband Hugh is the friend, considerate, gentle, with loveable weaknesses. René is the charming and sensuous lover. Marcel is machismo, rough desirability and ruthless power. In a glorious climactic love scene, they are combined, and this makes one wonder in what sense they live except in relation to her ... Eventually I noticed that Hugh is played by René (Auberjonois), René by Marcel (Bozuffi), and Marcel by Hugh (Millais) ... and that big dark Marcel’s blonde daughter Susannah is played by Cathryn (Harrison) ...

That was 36 years ago. Images never came out on videotape. It wasn’t shown on TV. In L.A. I did find an acetate (!) of its wonderful Oscar-nominated (!) score by John Williams with Japanese soundscape artist Stomu Yamash’ta. Otherwise the only remnant of its passing that I could discover was words — the words in gloriously illustrated hardcover of In Search of Unicorns, the children’s book Susannah York wrote for (and excerpted aloud in) the movie.

It’s probably too late now for the cult-following I’d predicted for the movie’s trippy sensuality, but a mono DVD called “Robert Altman’s Images”, salvaged from a somewhat darkened print, did finally emerge as part of the new flow of second chances.