Category Archives: Art, Theatre, & Film

Destinations

So, how about that letter from Captain James Cook that’s been found in the back of someone’s picture frame?

1777 is the year in which they believe it to be written, at the end of his three-year journey to chart Australia and its environs. Of course, there being no such thing as air mail or any kind of international postal service in existence at the time, the only way for a letter to get back from a seagoing vessel was for it to be handed to a fishing boat or a passing merchant ship headed in the other direction, and to pray that it eventually reache England’s shores. Which, when you think about it, is pretty much throwing your trust into the hands and words of a stranger.

It actually worked. The letter got to England.

Now, the thing that blows me away is the fact that we couldn’t do this today. Okay, if a stranger handed me a letter and said, “Please, could you post this?”, I’d probably say, “Sure,” and drop it in the nearest box and forget about it (I know, I know, anthrax scares and fingerprints to the contrary). But if a stranger in a foreign country came up to me and said, “Please, can you carry this back to England for me?”, chances are good I’d say, “Er, no, sorry.” Chances are good, in fact, that most people would say the same thing.

The other thing which amuses me about this is that the BBC quotes someones as comparing Cook’s return to James T Kirk’s return from his five-year mission with the Enterprise. Even Tom Allen, the host of CBC Radio Two’s Music & Company, compared the miracle of the letter reaching England to an Earth-bound letter from Kirk passed to some independent starship while on a far-flung planetary mission. Star Trek is all about idealism in the future. So our views of this letter from Cook are caught between nostalgia for the past on one side, and idealism about the future on the other.

Ain’t historical (and pop cultural) parallax grand?

I’m sure future generations will use similes like, “It’s about as amazing as someone three feet high carrying a Ring of Power through the entire lands of Middle-Earth and surviving the trilogy.” Ooh, look at that; I’m twitching.

Today

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: I love hearing music I’ve played in concert on the radio. Particularly the fourth movement to Beethoven’s second symphony. I get all excited. Small things amuse, I know.

I also became strangely excited when I realised that it was so darned cold in the office this morning that I had to go put socks on. After a summer of bare feet, it Meant Something.

The computer finally defragged, on the fourth go-round. I can’t see that it’s any quicker, but it sure moved stuff around. This morning I installed a pop-up ad blocker, which works beautifully – so well, in fact, that I couldn’t get the YACCS comments boxes to come up on a blog this morning. Oh, right – they’re pop-up windows. Duh. Must hold Ctrl down while clicking on link. Small price to pay, though.

I was looking out the window this morning, waiting for my tea to steep, and I saw a man walk casually into the depanneur across from us. He had a ball cap on and a messenger-style bag over his shoulder, and wore a denim button-down shirt. It was around seven-fifteen, and all of a sudden I got hit by a wave of back-to-schoolness. For a moment, I, too, wished I had somewhere to be, to dress up and pack my bag and leave the house for, walking down the street early in the morning, when the light is still clear and cool, and on your way to the bus stop, you can swing by the dep for an orange juice and maybe a granola bar.

Only for a moment, though. Then I came back into the office with my tea, sat down, and looked at my list of work things I had drafted for today, with CBC Radio Two on behind me, with cats chasing one another around the apartment, and torn jeans and a summer sweater on.

Taking Form

It’s official! The cold has developed a fever, making this the Cold Package with Extra Bonus Material.

When I have a cold, I know what makes me worse: soda, dairy, and so forth. Sugar and milk just feed my sore throat with bad stuff and it gets worse. So of course I’m craving cola and such. Instead, I’m drinking herbal tea and bouillon. It’s odd how you can fall into a routine without realising it; when I open my laptop to write, I gather my loose change and I walk to the depanneur to pick up a can of Vanilla Coke, then come back and sit down and whip off however many pages my mind decides to create and/or my fingers can keep up with (whichever comes first). I want to write today, but Vanilla Coke is right out. I suppose I could buy a ginseng drink or something, but it’s just not the same.

On the much more exciting news front, my husband came home from working on someone’s balcony yesterday, and after chatting with his a-bit-out-of-it wife, he wandered into the office and didn’t come out. Now, he’s been discovering the Internet (has his own e-mail address and everything! Well, it’s big news in our world, anyway), so I figured he was on-line. When I emerged from under the afghan and left my nest in the living room to refill my teacup, I stopped in the office doorway, amazed. He wasn’t at my desk, where the computer is; he was at his own desk, where the new oil paints I bought for him on Saturday were. In fact, he had a palette out, and two brushes going, and a landscape taking form rather rapidly.

Oil paint fascinates me. I’m a watercolour person myself, so to see how oil blends so well is truly astounding. Even more astounding, however, was watching him blend two or three different paints on the palette, take the new colour, and blend it into a tree trunk, for example, on the painting. He doesn’t seem to use long strokes very often; he dabs a lot. His foliage in particular uses this technique, and catches my attention.

The whole apartment smells different too, and it took me a while to get a fix on where I recognised it from. I shared an apartment with Annika while she was doing her BFA; her room and the bedroom hallway always smelled like this. It’s the smell of creativity, and of colour, and of boldness and a moment in time.

The only problem with this fever is I’m at one remove; I feel as if I’m working under a pane of glass that separates me from the rest of the world, or a puddle that slightly distorts the sensory info that reaches me. No doubt when I re-read all this in a couple of days I’ll wonder how anyone made any sense out of it.

The Luthier

After a semi-disastrous day that imploded around six o’clock, I managed to get my cello to the luthier last night, half an hour before they closed.

As soon as I walked in, I relaxed. Wilder & Davis is in an old townhouse on Rachel street, just a block west of St Denis. As I lifted the cello up the stone steps to the doorway, a woman in an apron enjoying the night air on her break smiled and said, “Bonsoir.” As the door closed I could hear, somewhere upstairs, a cello being played very slowly. To my left was the empty reception area, which has a lovely bay window and a fireplace; to my right was the workshop, wide open. “Bonsoir,” said a youngish luthier; “votre violoncelle?” I explained that I needed the bridge replaced and the fingerboard examined. He beckoned me into the workshop (into the workshop!) and motioned for me to take it out of the travelling case and lay it on the workbench while he cleared a space for it. We stood on either side of it as he squinted at the bridge (“Ah oui,” he said immediately. I wanted to apologise; I know I should have brought this in a couple of years ago, but I held my tongue) and then pulled out a level and moved it all over the fingerboard. “Vos cordes – ils brisent ou?” he asked. (Actually, he tried in very broken but quite earnest English: I had explained about the bridge and fingerboard in my mother tongue, since in my imploded mental state the French terms for “bridge” and “fingerboard” had completely escaped me. I insisted on speaking French after that initial mind-blank, though.) “Mes cordes ne brisent pas,” I explained, “c’est le vernis; ca s’enleve pendant que je joue, mes doigts se rendent tous noirs apres seulement quelques minutes.” “Je vais le nettoyer quand je remplace le pont,” he said after he’d grabbed a bottle of cleaning solution, then looked at the viola he’d been working on next to him. I have a funny feeling that when he goes to clean it he’ll get a swipe of black colour on his rag, but he’ll figure something out to stabilise the stain, I’m sure.

It was so peaceful. I felt like collapsing in the papasan chair by the plants in the front bay window and just closing my eyes. The whole place smells like orange oil, and wood; there’s no sense of the busy St Denis strip a few hundred metres away. He filled out a work order, looked at me anxiously and said, “Mercredi prochain, ca va?” “C’est parfait,” I said. Actually, I knew darn well that as soon as I didn’t have it I’d want to play it, so getting it back today would have been nice, but my husband has a whole three days off in a row because it’s Labour Day weekend, and I wouldn’t end up playing it anyway. So Wednesday is just fine. (I did, in fact, indulge in a pre-emptive strike against seperation anxiety in the form of a Mendelssohn trio yesterday. I love Opus 49 in D minor.)

The bonus: I get to go back next week. Hurrah!

Scheduling Minor Cello Surgery

I did something I haven’t done in a few weeks.

I walked past my cello, paused, and said, “I really should play something.” Before I could talk myself out of it, I sat down, pulled the cello towards me, picked up my bow, and just started playing whatever was on my music stand. It happened to be the second movement of a Breval sonata. When I’d done that, I flipped the page with the tip of my bow and started playing the next thing: the Prelude to the first Bach solo cello suite. The I played both Minuets from the same suite – with repeats.

Not bad. Not bad at all. Nice sound. I now have throbbing fingers, however.

Then I picked up the phone and called a luthier. I haven’t played my cello these past three weeks because the bridge is so badly warped that I’m afraid that it will slip and smash the belly of the instrument, turning a minor repair job into a major disaster. Not only can the luthier replace my bridge ($120 – eep), they can stabilise the black stain that’s wearing off the fingerboard and onto my fingers every session. (Ick.) This is a good thing, of course.

Naturally, however, now that I will be bringing the cello in for minor surgery, I’m getting all antsy. I just know I’ll want to play it while I don’t have it. I’m taking it in on Thursday afternoon, and I’m already wondering how much playing I can safely indulge in tomorrow without threatening the safety of the instrument.

He’ll Become George Clooney Or Something

So I finally saw Bridget Jones’s Diary last week, hard on the heels of reading the second book in the series, and discovered that the film was a blend of both books. I think what might have happened was that Helen Fielding, who co-authored the script (love it when they actually get the author to work on the film) was writing the second book while coming up with a couple of key scenes for the film, and ended up using similar versions in both movie and new book, never dreaming that a second film might be made.

Clicking on Bill’s link to Bridget Jones today, I discovered that they’re making a film based on the second book.

Er?

This should be interesting. How they’re going to top Colin Firth and Hugh Grant pounding each other and crashing through windows on a snowy street, I truly do not know.

The other wonderful bit of meta-fiction, Bridget’s obssession with Pride & Prejudice‘s Mr Darcy and Colin Firth, was by necessity disposed of in the first film, since, well Colin Firth was in it, providing fans of the book with a deliriously smug in-joke. (And heaven forbid we mention Jane Austen in a pop film. Pride and What? Good Lord, no, we might lose the audience!) The second book has Bridget actually interviewing Firth in Italy. However, and I quote (although I have cleaned up the spelling and the punctuation), Colin Firth has suggested that the scene in which Bridget interviews, er… Colin Firth may not appear in the sequel. Firth said in a recent interview, “He won’t be there, he’ll become George Clooney or something.” This may not have quite the same effect as the original way Fielding intended but since Firth is not in the scene maybe they’ll simply hope the audience doesn’t notice the remarkable resemblance.”

The statement made me laugh. Probably not for the right reasons, but I laughed.