Incendies

I finally found time to watch the Quebec film everyone was talking about a few months ago - have I mentioned I'm very busy? Set mostly in a fictional country that's a lot like Lebanon, "Incendies" is a violent tale of how violence begets more violence. (Well that's a twitter-length summary, it's a lot more than that too.)

The plot is not subtle and has at least one too many incredible coincidences, but there are delicate moments of cinematography, fine French-Canadian actors and a soundtrack by Radiohead that's used to hauntingly good effect. It's moving and thought-provoking.

I was haunted by this scene for a week: an orphanage under a pitiless sun, the kids lined up to have their heads shaved, Radiohead's "You and Whose Army?" playing softly.

David Foster Wallace on Life and Work

It's been a very busy week and my level of patience hasn't always been up to the challenge, at work or at home. This Friday lunchtime I re-read an essay by David Foster Wallace and I'm feeling a bit re-charged: 

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing."

From David Foster Wallace on Life and Work

La Sagouine at the Segal Centre

The famous one-woman play of Acadian folklore is a tour-de-force for Viola Léger who plays the eponymous old crone. Eighty-years old and with more than 1000 performances behind her, Léger actually is la sagouine - it doesn't feel like a performance. The humour is gentle and the atmosphere wistful; this is not a challenging work but casts light on a culture and people who aren't often seen.

We went on a Thursday night, when the audience was a mixture of the young and old with little in-between; Martine and I were about the only 40-somethings there. Maybe it's different on a Saturday night when kids don't need help with homework and the dishes can wait 'til next morning.

In praise of Julia Donaldson. Oh and Spike Milligan too.

Bed-time stories are over for another night and in a few short years they'll be over for good when Philou starts reading for himself. Like his brothers before him, Philou follows the adventures of "The Gruffalo", "The Smartest Giant in Town" and other fantastic creatures. I must have read some of these stories a hundred times, yet many of them are still a pleasure every night. But in my experience most books for young children are very poorly written; imaginative storylines and beautiful illustrations are rightly emphasized but often at the expense of the musicality and tonality of the writing, yet these are vital if the parent is to make the story come alive. There's so much flat and dull writing around that I really appreciate all of the books by Julia Donaldson which are quite wonderful to read aloud.

"His eyes are orange, his tongue is black;

He has purple prickles all over his back"

Oh and Spike Milligan too. "On the Ning Nang Nong" is quite the perfect poem to read to three-year-olds, who have it off-by-heart after two nights.

Twitter: antidote needed

Curiosity finally overcame scepticism and I created a Twitter account. I've spent far too much time there in the past few days, looking for needles in that enormous haystack with limited success only. But though the quantity of tweets is overwhelming, their lifespan is short. Information on yesterday's earthquake in Japan came in a tsunami of tweets, each one contributing a drop to the wave then disappearing forever into irrelevance.

So as an antidote to the cult of now on Twitter, I spent some time tonight using the Internet as a window to the past. I recently heard the story of Vivian Maier, a nanny in Chicago who died in 2009. During her lifetime she took thousands of photographs of street scenes but showed them to no-one. They were discovered at an antique auction and they're just stunning. See the John Maloof collection, the Jeffrey Goldstein collection and the introductory article in The Guardian.

Not just child's play

Three-year-old Philou and I went to a puppet show today at Place des Arts. He loved it, and I did too. For him it was pure enjoyment but for me it also had a wistful and eerie ambience - something profoundly human and delicate was portrayed in the startlingly natural behaviour of the puppets.

OK, perhaps that just means I saw a monkey puppet and, sadly, recognised myself! Or maybe this was both child's play and grown-up art. I'll go with the latter!

The production was by a Swedish company, Dockteaterverkstan, performing "Monkey Business". My favourite was Helga, the shy, frumpy, knife-throwing old lady, eh monkey, I mean puppet. She was the least like me.

After the show I had a chat with the puppeteer, practicing my rusty Swedish, unfortunately cut short when Philou took off into the crowd and I had to catch him before he disappeared into an elevator.

Crisp clean mountain air, saturated fat

Skiing in France can be a delight for all the senses, including taste. After a breathtaking morning in the high Alps one can regroup over a lunch of savoury cassoulet accompanied by a glass of Côtes du Rhône, and other such delights. But for some reason lunch at North American ski resorts is usually a fast food affair and often quite ghastly: crumbly dry burgers, soggy sandwiches and that infamous Quebec speciality of congealed poutine, all at ridiculous prices.

Last week was the winter school-break and we spent four days skiing in the Quebec City area. At Le Massif in Charlevoix we were pleasantly surprised to find a resort serving appetising and healthy fare: interesting salads, pastas, crisp vegetables and main courses all presented in a bright and welcoming chalet. More please!

The skiing was pretty good too.

Not a cover but a new layer

As I wrote in my last post, Martha Wainwright's recordings of the Piaf songs add new layers to originals that are very much still present. The spirit of Piaf is there, as she says in the video.

There's a rich tradition of this sort of layering in the visual arts of course as I was reminded when I saw some works by the photographer Tom Hunter. In his work "Woman reading a possession order" he twists and builds on Vermeer's famous "A girl reading at an open window". The interior of a 17th century middle-class Dutch home has become a London squat in the 1990's, the fruit a baby, the love letter an eviction order. Beautiful, poignant, thought-provoking. See all the images in his collection Persons Unknown.

This Musical Life, from The Clash to Piaf via Martha Wainwright

Three-year-old Philou's musical education continues on our commute to the day-care each morning and he can now sing along to the chorus of "Rock the Casbah". Musically it's one of The Clash's best hooks, and lyrically it's the perfect accompaniment to the recent events in Cairo. Perhaps Joe Strummer and Mick Jones were very prescient, or maybe not much has changed in the Arab world in thirty years. Mubarak had already been in office for one year when the song was released.

The Sharif don't like it.
Rock the Casbah, Rock the Casbah

My own musical education continues too. Thanks to "Concert on Demand" on CBC Radio I've just discovered Martha Wainwright's recording of Piaf songs "Sans fusils, ni souliers, à Paris" and it's quite exquisite. The songs are beautiful of course in that melancholic French way and she brings a fresh and vibrant sensibility to them. The old Piaf recordings are wonderful too but sound dated and historical now; Martha Wainwright's are full of vitality while just as moving. I'd love to see her perform these live.

See Martha Wainwright's Piaf Record promo video from Martha Wainwright on Vimeo.

Vote for John Lumsden

This is an election poster for my great-grandfather that was discovered recently in the attic of my parents' house. John Lumsden was a plasterer by trade, as were quite a few of his descendants, but until seeing this I knew nothing else about him.

He gets my vote, 80 years later.

What's the problem with being Irish?

In trying to understand what's happening in Ireland I've read a lot about economics and banking - more than I want to, frankly. David McWilliams has been a great source of information and an advocate for a course of action quite different from that undertaken by the Irish government. But while I'm a lot more knowledgeable about the current situation and the sequence of events that led to it, I'm not that much wiser about the root causes of the problem. Even at the height of the boom it always seemed to me that Irish society was quite dysfunctional; the lack of a vision for the country, other than "make money and spend it" was startling and quite a contrast with my experience of Sweden in the 80's and Canada in the 90's. In fact, not having a vision was pretty much government policy, judging from the behaviour and pronouncements of its leader Bertie Ahern.

As I write this we're in the middle of an election campaign, but still there's little being offered that could be described as a vision for the country. Most of the discussion is on modifications to the processes of the state; some of these changes have merit - but did we really get to this position because of a mechanical problem in the state vehicle or is the driver at fault?

I think we need to open up the discussion and consider root causes. The commentators below might be right or wrong, but I think they're adding something valuable to a debate that hasn't really started.


John Waters in the Irish Times:

Perhaps the economic system is really collapsing because human beings sought to find through it an answer for their longings that cannot be found in this way? The implication of almost all of the recriminatory discussion that has ensued since the beginning of the disintegration in mid-2008 has been the suggestion that we might have continued to pursue our desires as we had been doing – presumably to a successful conclusion – had a few bankers and politicians not torn the arse out of it.

Now, the discussion is dominated by those who tell us that, by effecting this or that ethical or mechanistic change, we can restore the system to balance, with human beings once again snug and well-adjusted at the heart of it. Thus, all discussion is predicated on the idea that, had we done things slightly differently, we could have preserved our illusions.

Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair ascribes many of our problems to a chronic lack of confidence. The following excerpt from Vanity Fair hurts because it's true:

The first thing you notice when you watch the Irish Parliament at work is that the politicians say everything twice, once in English and once in Gaelic. As there is no one in Ireland who does not speak English and a vast majority who do not speak Gaelic, this comes across as a forced gesture that wastes a great deal of time. I ask several Irish politicians if they speak Gaelic, and all offer the same uneasy look and hedgy reply: “Enough to get by.” The politicians in Ireland speak Gaelic the way the Real Housewives of Orange County speak French. To ask “Why bother to speak it at all?” is of course to miss the point. Everywhere you turn you see both emulation of the English and a desire, sometimes desperate, for distinction. The Irish insistence on their Irishness—their conceit that they’re more devoted to their homeland than the typical citizen of the world is—has an element of bluster about it, from top to bottom. At the top are the many very rich Irish people who emit noisy patriotic sounds but arrange officially to live elsewhere so they don’t have to pay tax in Ireland; at the bottom, the waves of emigration that define Irish history. The Irish people and their country are like lovers whose passion is heightened by their suspicion that they will probably wind up leaving each other. Their loud patriotism is a cargo ship for their doubt.

The irascible Kevin Myers has a thought-provoking opinion of course expressed in his inimitable style.

One of the central problems of 'Irishness' is the disorder created by the bipolarity of overweening conceit and pathological self-loathing. The result is not some happy medium, but violent mood swings of the emotional compass that make plotting a prudent national course virtually impossible.

None of the points above is the answer to "why" - but I feel each one is an important clue in an investigation in to root causes. While the economic debates continue, this more important discussion really needs to get going.

An Irishman abroad, Christmas 2010

Winter in Quebec is bitterly cold and I’ve often regaled my family in Ireland with tales of life during snow-time. But this Christmas, Dublin is colder and snowier than Montreal. There’s a bitterness in the Irish air too. The prideful country we imagined in the past decade has vanished, and we emigrants again find ourselves unable to answer the naive questions of friends in our adopted countries “What’s happening in Ireland?”

I try to remain detached. I love my life in Quebec, and I will never be one of the emigrants who pine for the old country, gathering in lame Irish pubs to join in maudlin ballads that would be laughed at in Dublin. I first left Ireland in 1986, a grey and pessimistic country going nowhere, and I revelled in the optimism of North America and the pragmatism of Sweden. I dodged the reasonable yet unanswerable questions from my new colleagues (“why are the Catholic and Protestants fighting?”) and smiled inwardly at how my homeland marketed itself abroad. The large advertisement in the check-in area of Stockholm airport for example. It showed smiling Irish students proclaiming “We’re the young Europeans” and while literally accurate it was completely misleading; the fact that it remained there for 10 years as it aged and faded said so much more.  I returned to Ireland in 1999 and bought a house; or rather I climbed on the property ladder and made my personal contribution to the bubble that has burst so disastrously. I left again for Quebec in 2007, this time probably for good. Late each evening when the kids are in bed and I’m scrubbing the pots and pans I listen to RTE radio, broadcast over the internet. That’s the early hours of the morning in Dublin, so my fellow listeners are probably few in number – insomniacs, taxi-drivers, the night-shift. My Mam and Dad are sleeping fitfully as always I fear, and I listen to yet another discussion on the prospects for the economy; will there be cutbacks in support for elderly people like them who want to keep their independence and live in their own homes for as long as they are able?

We’re spending this Christmas in Quebec and greeting the family across the Atlantic through phone and internet. We have plum pudding, my Mam’s recipe, and our own habitual Christmas dinner: roast beef with Yorkshire pud and Baked Alaska for desert. The addition of maple syrup to the latter allows me to call it Toasted Quebec, which amuses our guests. I will also make my now traditional joke about Toasted Quebec being a both delicious desert and a timely reminder of the danger of global warming. There’s no tradition of holiday telly here, so I’ll try to encourage everyone to leave their video games for a few minutes and go for a skate in the nearby park; it's our equivalent of the Christmas afternoon stroll to the devotions at the Carmelite Church that my parents used to always take. Of course Dad can’t walk that far now.

Later that evening when the house is quiet I look out the kitchen window and see the snow falling softly. Nothing we can’t cope with, we citizens of “New France” are at home in winter. This year snow is falling too on the corporation house in Dublin that was my childhood home, where Mam and Dad live still. But it’s a different sort of snow, bringing apprehension, uncertainty and incomprehension.

I suppose it’s a good time to be out of Ireland, but it doesn’t feel like it.

Mam's plum pudding

When I was a child, the sign that Christmas was really coming was the Sunday afternoon at the end of November when the house filled with the smell of exotic spices and strong booze. My Mam, mixing the plum pudding. We all took turns to stir it and make a secret wish, then after cooking the covered bowl would be prominent in the front room for the 4 weeks of Advent, part of the countdown and a symbol of our hopes for the holiday. Unlike the Christmas cake, which was a necessary if often overlooked part of the festivities, the pudding was savoured and enjoyed. We had lots of different ways of eating it; my favourite was a slice warmed in a pan with some butter until the edges became crispy, served with creamy custard. I’m starving just to think of it. Mam and Dad always ate it with a thick layer of brandy butter on top, Dad making the same joke every year about how this broke his Pioneer’s pledge of abstinence.

Now I have the late November ritual with my kids, following Mam’s recipe.

6 oz. butter

4 eggs

4 oz. self-raising flour

4 oz. brown sugar

4 oz. breadcrumbs

Zest and juice of a lemon

Zest and juice of an orange

8 oz. raisins

8 oz. sultanas

8 oz. currants

4 oz. glace cherries

4 oz. candied fruit peel

2 oz. chopped dried apricots

6 oz. chopped dried dates

A bottle of Guinness

A swig of rum

A swig of brandy

1 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. nutmeg

1 heaped tsp. mixed spices (I find that Garam Masala is good)

Mix all the dry ingredients together. Melt the butter and stir in with the eggs, juice and booze. Have everyone stir and make a wish – this is very important. Cover the mixture and let it stand overnight – this isn’t very important as I never have time to do it. This is enough mixture to make one big pudding and one little one. Place the mixture in a greased heatproof bowl, cover tightly with grease-proof paper or foil, and stand in a covered pot of simmering water for around 6 hours. Add 4 weeks of Advent and the mounting excitement of children.

This Musical Life

It's Philou's musical choices that dominate in the household between 7pm and 8pm, and once he's decided he likes something we have to listen to it for many evenings in a row. So it's really important to steer his 2-year-old mind in the right direction. This month he's had us listening to a lot of Ash, and we've heard them perform at least a half-dozen different versions of "Shining Light", thanks to YouTube. Philou likes them all, but Tristan and Louis prefer watching the one performance in which Charlotte Hatherley smiles. However I think this unsmiling acoustic performance sounds best, even if the video is incomplete:

A golden Sunday in Autumn and it's 2-0 to the Impact...

We had warm Autumn sunshine on our faces, Louis and his best friend Félix, Tristan and his best friend Maxim, and me. The trees around Stade Saputo were yellow, red and gold, and the Olympic Stadium to our left stood slender, brilliantly white and unearthly. Add in lots of popcorn and candy-floss and two beautiful goals by the Montreal Impact.

A perfect day...