Presentations

I forget what led me to the 1977 Academy Awards presentation for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. I suppose the answer lies in my browser's "History" tab, but I'm too busy to look. It's a beautiful morning. I can't wait to get out in it.

At first I thought this incredible set was inspired by Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), as Award set designs often taken their cues from/pay tribute to movies released that year. But Close Encounters wasn't released until November, and the Academy Awards was held in March. 

Apart from its colours and lines, the set carries with it an illusion (the dotted path that Tatum O'Neal walks to the podium, to read the list of nominees), which is what movies are all about, be it "movie magic", sleight of hand or downright deceit. The colours are especially interesting. A large dome of Caucasian pink, over a smaller dome made up of yellow and brown (it was Awards co-host Richard Pryor who introduced O'Neal).

Groupings

 

There are a number of fundamentals gardeners learn or dispense with over a lifetime of gardening. One of them concerns composition (groupings) -- plants that look good together.

The picture up top includes a dark blue pot that every year is given two or three plugs of blue lobelia and an Indian Dunes geranium. 

Embracing the pot is a happier than usual lupin that, rather unexpectedly, has backed into a Rosa Sexy Rexy floribunda, a rose I planted four years ago and was late to the game this spring.

Mary Janeway

Mary Janeway (1949-2022) passed away earlier this year. Last Sunday her life mate Charles Rea held a remembrance at their home near Trout Lake.

In the top floor room that is Charlie's studio a picture wall featuring pics of Mary throughout her life. The picture up top includes a number of Mainstreeters -- the "art gang" whose core was formed from students of Charles Tupper High School, and the subject of an exhibition (Mainstreeters: Taking Advantage, 1972-1982) Allison Collins and I curated for grunt gallery and Presentation House Gallery back in 2015.

Mary is at the far-left of the picture, as you are looking at it. Between her and the three people standing at the far-right are the Mainstreeters, sans Kenneth Fletcher.

I had never seen this picture before. Had I seen it, I'm sure Allison and I would have included it in our exhibition. As for the leopard spots, they were a motif deployed by Western Fronter Eric "Doctor Brute" Metcalfe, and the Mainstreeters were known for inhabiting those whose circles they ran in (and around). 

Another artist-run collective the Mainstreeters paid tribute to/burlesqued was Pumps. Among the videos we showed in our exhibition was a fashion show the Mainstreeters mounted after breaking into Pumps and dressing in the clothes of its members.

I was fortunate to know Mary over the past twenty-five years. Her art included jewelry (many of my friends wear her rings), gardens and a range of insights that have served me well in my own art over the years. A generous and curious person whose convictions, though firm at times, were less concluding walls than topic sentence bridges. I will miss her.

Three Crows

I thought I was losing my mind: three crows together on a fence, their beaks opening and closing, adjusting their bodies in ways that suggested a singing group, but no sound. Like the world's quietest pantomime. Something out of a horror movie. This was Friday evening, the day before the weather changed. I took a picture right away, then took a step closer, camera in hand, but one of them flew off. The picture up top was the picture I took, then enlarged. There is no other way to say it: I thought I was losing my mind.

Goodbye, Lenin (2003)

Another film where a lead character stops talking. Yesterday it was Persona's Elizabet Volgner, today it is Goodbye, Lenin's Frau Kerner, who is gobsmacked after her husband's 1978 defection to the west. Not because he left the family for a floozy, as she came to tell her children, but because she was too scared to apply for an exit visa so that she and the children could join him.

This lie, which she reveals to her children before her death at the end of the film, is intended to braid with the lie her son Alex maintained after she came out of a coma nine months after the Wall came down, when East Berlin, where this film is set, was no longer the worker's paradise that Frau Kerner, a school teacher, served "too idealistically," according to her former boss, but a place of hyperbolic transition. Alex's lie is that the DDR is not dissolving but in fact thriving, swelling with West Germans fleeing the pornographic popcorn that is capitalism, and he does everything he can to protect his weak-hearted mother from a reality that could, quite literally, shock her to death. 

Goodbye, Lenin is a film I had heard about for years and had imagined differently. For example, I imagined the mother and son to be older, the mother closer to a wisecracking Ruth Gordon than the limited yet distractingly attractive Katrin Sass. And then there's the question, Are Germans funny? Which of course they are. But when Germans try to be English funny or American funny, something very unfunny happens, and the problem as I see it has less to do with easy laughs than it does with our ability to appreciate the spectrum of the thoughtful (often ironic) proposition that only Germans seem capable of, where all responses are in play, an effect that can sometimes leave me -- speechless.

Persona (1966)

I would love to have a summer to read all that was ever written on Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966). Why it took me so long to see it is based on my belief that I had seen it. The only time it came up in conversation was when someone mentioned it in the context of all-time favourite films, where Persona is never first or second, but usually third or fourth.

The Persona I thought I'd seen was likely pieces of more obscure Bergman films that I hadn't seen all of. Amy was the last person I know who mentioned Persona to me. A couple weeks ago I saw a copy of it amongst the dreck at the East Hastings Street Value Village, and I bought it thinking of her. According to one of the floor staff, there are two guys who wait outside the doors every morning and race to the DVD section to "get all the good stuff." That Persona wasn't considered part of that stuff is partly what's wrong with the world.

If you're reading this far it might be because you've seen the film. I'm hoping you have, because I'm not going to describe it, only speak to the screen grabs I've selected for this post.

The first grab is of Nurse Alma's introduction to her patient, the actor Elisabet Vogler, who was admitted to hospital because, during a stage performance as Elektra (Elektra!), she suddenly, and more or less forever after, stops talking. Nurse Alma is a friendly young woman who, when asked to accompany a convalescent Elisabet to a desolate seaside house by one of the hospital psychiatrists, admits she might not be mentally strong enough to take on Elisabet's care. Eventually she agrees to do so, and more admissions follow. What Persona is, then, becomes in no small part a culmination of admissions -- and their consequences.

Did you notice Nurse Alma's shoes in the grab up top? Take a closer look:

Not a shoe I think of when I think of nursing. But then, what do I know about nursing? In Sweden, no less. And in 1966, when I was four.

There's so much men will never know about women's bodies, and it is for this reason that those who support The Patriarchy, inadvertently or otherwise, must not make decisions on their behalf.

Here is Elisabet's foot, the first time she misses stepping on a piece of Nurse Alma's broken glass:

The Bitch (1979)

My advice to those interested in the writing life is now down to four words: read widely, write daily. An example of wide reading could include Elfriede Jelinek at one end of the shelf, Jackie Collins at the other. 

A couple weeks ago I picked up a never before cracked Jackie Collins paperback published in the relatively debauched year of 1979. The book is called The Bitch.

Collins is at her best with chapters that begin with the names of her characters. In The Bitch, it is not the bitch we first meet (Fontaine Khaled), but the "gentleman" (Nico Constantine) who uses her as a unwitting mule to smuggle a fabulously large and "borrowed" diamond ring into London to sell before his return to Las Vegas, where he can pay off his gambling debt.

I am only on Page 141 of this 253 page cartoon, so I don't know how it turns out. Not that it matters, for as I said, it's portraiture, not plot, that is Jackie Collins's strong suit. Which is not to say (so far) that the Bitch is well drawn, with complexities that lead us to sympathize with her, forgive her bitchiness as a symptom of some childhood injury, and thus love her for what she isn't. My problem is that the Bitch isn't bitchy enough.

Like Nico the Gentleman, Fontaine the Bitch goes through lovers -- young lovers -- like seltzer water. The difference is that Nico (a widower) sets a time limit of four weeks on his love affairs, after which he gives his exes a diamond trinket and a speech that makes it sound like it is the dumped lover who is breaking up with him. For Fontaine (the divorcee), a lover rarely lasts a week, and is assessed entirely on the size of his bank account (we're still in the era of the millionaire) and penis ("eight or nine inches").

Why Nico is considered a gentleman and Fontaine a bitch is the difference between the lies of a confidence man and the honesty of a woman who, though fickle, is at least up front about what she wants. Fontaine's bitch is a mere shadow when compared to the ferocious recklessness of today's bitch. As for Nico, his gentlemanly ways would only leave him vulnerable, serve as an admission of guilt, and he would, like Tennessee Williams's Sebastian Venable, be torn to pieces by an unforgiving mob.