Bec's Happybox

Summer Movie Roundup, Part II

Mid-August Lunch (Pranzo di ferragosto)

Rara and I saw this together and while it was certainly charming, we were far from the target audience.  Just as the Babies audience was full of expectant parents, Mid-August Lunch appealed very strongly to the white-haired set, particularly women.  Rara was the youngest person in the audience (eleven) and I was perhaps the second youngest (thirty-three).

I loved the mood and the food, but I think my youth blinded me to the real value of this movie, or so I assume from my mother's response to it (she thought it was amazing) and the reviews I've read.  I just think it's something that you get when you're old or maybe if you spend a lot of time with old women and understand them.  I don't.

The best part of going to see the film was finding out about the existence of ferragosto, mid-August holiday. In the film, everyone says "Happy Mid-August!" as a toast which sounds so strange in English.  The kind of thing to which Rara would respond "That was random!"  But whatever, I'm always happy to adopt new traditions that involve eating and drinking and feeling cosmopolitan and not working.

Handily, we saw the film just a few days before August 15 when, even more handily, we already had plans to visit Hot Springs Cove.  I mean, what better place for Ferragosto?

I had an idea that we would do a swanky Champagne brunch at the Wickaninnish before catching our water taxi to the hot springs at noon, but it didn't work out.  Our Mid-August dinner that evening was highly memorable, though.  We were staying at the Hesquiat Lodge across the bay from the park where the hot springs are located.  The lodge is six little motel rooms in a row on the edge of Hesquiat village with a long deck overlooking the bay.  It's owned by the Hesquiat nation and run by Bernard, who is also a public health worker.  We had dinner on August 15 on Bernard's porch.  Salmon, of course, given the time of year and the location.  I can't say Bernard's cooking rivals The Pointe, but man it was a cool experience.  Hesquiat is home to only fifty people and there are no vehicles there.  It is so beautiful and so quiet it's hard to believe you're only a 90-minute boat ride from Tofino, which isn't a bustling metropolis or anything but we did have to wait half an hour for a table for dinner the night before.  So dinner, a rowboat across the bay, a rainforest hike, and a long soak in the ancient hot hot hot springs (several pools which get cooler the further you get from the scalding hot waterfall and the closer you get to the ocean) another hike, another row, and a glass of wine while listening to the loons and ABSOLUTELY NO OTHER SOUND. Happy Mid-August indeed!

(Gratuitous photo of Deetman: "I can surf too, Mummy!")

Micmacs

Tobias, Rara and I are all fans of Jean-Pierre Junet, but Micmacs fell flat, at least for the adults in the group.  I agree with one reviewer who said that the audience doesn't bond emotionally with any of the characters, so while the movie has the charm and whimsy of Amélie, it lacks to emotional impact.  Also, it wasn't nearly as funny.  Rara gave it a nine out of ten, however, and I think kids will like this movie, provided they can stomach a bit of sexy time and a moment of goriness where a forehead gets sliced open on an operating table.  So probably 12 or 13 is a good age threshold.

Inception

The concept is cool so when you're in the part of the movie where you're learning about the concept, it's super engaging.  But then, once you know about it, it gets dull.  The action sequence at the end is interminable and not-at-all-suspenseful.  I don't know if it could have been edited differently and if that would have helped, but I just felt bored for most of the second half of the film.  I also really like surprises and twists and there pretty much weren't any.  Well, one teeny one, but nothing that was key to the plot.  Good acting though.

Iron Man (rented)

Superfun.  I wish the action scenes and editing in Inception were as good as they were in Iron Man.  Also, I find action/comic book movies palatable only when they're jokey.  This one was so cute in that respect and I loved Gwenyth Paltrow in it.

Summer Movie Roundup, Part I

There is a difference between imagining yourself as the kind of person who walks down to the local second-run/art-house cinema to watch films often and actually doing this thing.  For the last ten years I have been doing much more of the former than the latter.  But perhaps this is changing?  Being fairly certain that we are having no more children and having Deetman growing out of toddlerhood and Rara racing steadily toward greater and greater independence means that our lifestyle is undergoing a major change.  Friends for dinner and going to the movies are two of the early symptoms of this change.  The key now is to NOT GET PREGNANT.  Hee.

Babies

I had a minor freakout when I saw the trailer for this way back in the winter or the spring or something.  I think it was when we went to see How to Train your Dragon in 3D at the megaplex.  What genius, I thought at the time.  A movie of babies!  Of course!  Why has no one done this yet?  My ovaries were pulsing.  "I am going to BUY this movie", I whispered to Tobias.  This would bring the total number of DVDs in our DVD collection to 2. The other one Rara got as a Christmas present from grandparents.

Then I read Ayun Halliday's article about it in the East Village Inky, issue #44 (buy it here when the author gets back from her hols in a couple weeks).  She did a round-up of several very negative reviews of the film and talked about why she liked it.  Having not yet seen the film, my reaction to the article was ambivalent.  It was an interesting read, but I didn't yet know whether I agreed with Halliday, or whether the negative reviewers had their points.  It definitely did seem that the reviews were overly caustic though.

Then I saw it.  And it is so good.  So pure.  Pure documentary.  So moving.  So perfect.  It asks so many questions and presents no answers.  I just loved it.  And then I re-read the article in the East Village Inky and was totally enraged by the quotes from the negative reviews.  I had that experience of wondering whether the reviewers and I had even seen the same movie.

See it!  If you see it with a four-year-old, may I suggest the privacy of your home?  Deetman was quite disturbed by certain scenes of the movie and more disturbed by the audience reactions to them.  For example, a two-year-old boys slaps his infant brother repeatedly in the face with a dish towel.  The adults in the audience, while recognising the cruelty of the act, also, for the most part, consider the slapping to be harmless, provided it doesn't go on too long, and therefore, they laugh.  The four-year-old in the audience parses the scene as one of bullying bordering on torture and is disgusted and disturbed and frightened by the laughter.  The mother of the four-year-old must be sure not to laugh and reassure the four-year-old that no, it's not funny, you're right.  Complex!  Still, he liked the film overall and I would totally show this movie to kids, just maybe rent it instead of going to the theatre.

This review cracks me up, and I can't say it's inaccurate, but I really felt, after watching the film, that babies are the essence of humanity, and the movie was about humanity, or at least the human as animal.

There were a lot of pregnant women in the audience, and halfway through the movie, I really felt for them.  Babies was quite stressful at times, and if I were pregnant, I would not have been calmed by the movie, though it would have given me a lot of food for thought about the kind of parent I wanted to be.  Being unpregnant, the movie didn't make me want to have another any more than watching Blue Planet made me want to adopt a baby shark.

Another review said the film lacks insight and depth.  My immediate response was "WRONG".  But then, after consideration, I think that it's a film where the viewer adds the insight and depth themselves.  Because it's so raw, I feel like I got to explore the topic on my own terms, come to my own conclusions, develop my own hypotheses.  And I loved that.  It reminded me of something I experienced in an Edward Tufte class I took in June.  Mr. Tufte objects to traditional Powerpoint presentations because he says that they're like information dictatorship (I'm paraphrasing).

(I bought this poster.  Reactions to my suggestion that I put it up in the boardroom at the office have been lukewarm.  Our CEO, bless his heart, feeds heavily at the PowerPoint teat.)

In other words, the presenter strongly controls the information that she gives her audience, in an effort to strongly control the conclusions her audience reaches.  But Mr. Tufte advocates for a way of presenting information that allows audiences to use their cognitive powers to draw their own conclusions from data.  He suggests that presenters assume their audience is smarter than them, rather than the opposite.

Since attending his class, I have found it very difficult to stomach the Powerpoint presentations that I am subjected to in my professional life and have been talking to people who make presentations about how advantageous it is to loosen their grip a bit on their information and respect their audiences' powers of reasoning enough to simply give them the information (all at once!  In its entirety! yes!) and let them figure things out themselves.  I think this is what Babies does.  It doesn't, for want of a better word, spoonfeed the info.  It just lays it on you and you figure shit (ha!) out for yourself.  Babies is to the supergraphic as Roger & Me is to the Powerpoint presentation.

On the other hand, I also have to consider this:  I used to make movies for a living and the best part of that job (there were hardly any bad parts) was watching raw footage for the first time and having the movie be born inside your head.  And I think I did this when I was watching Babies.  I made a different movie from the video clips on the screen -- one that was much more prescriptive and preachy and made a lot of strong, salient points about How Things Should Be -- and watched that.   Sort of Make Your Own Movie movie-watching experience that maybe not everyone likes to have.  But then, that's kind of the point of art, no?

What do people's gender have to do with their opinion of this movie, I wonder?  Are women more prone to like it?  The answer seems too obvious to really warrant any discussion.  I'll admit that I hope my spouse doesn't see it, because if he hates it like the male reviewers quoted in the East Village Inky, I will be very unhappy.

Whoa.  Guess I just wrote a major diatribe about Babies instead of a Summie Movie Roundup.  So this will be part one.

 

Revisiting McCall Smith

I recently borrowed the latest three installments of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series from the library, for some beach reading while I was on holiday in Ucluelet.  I remember them being light but delightful reads, perfect for summer.  But either my tastes have changed or the series has gotten even lighter, to the point where the delightfulness can no longer make up for the lightness.  I am struggling to finish the last chapter of the The Miracle at Speedy Motors now that I am back home and have all sorts of options for what to read.  I find the chapter on stain removal in Home Comforts more engaging, frankly.  Sorry, Mma Ramotswe.

On the other hand, I re-read Portuguese Irregular Verbs while on hols and loved it again, annoying my family with read-aloud tidbits while they were trying to focus on their comic books or sand sculptures or wetsuit removal.  How I wish that the Professor von Igelfeld Entertainments were greater than three in number!  But then, maybe it's the Fawlty Towers/Office UK phenomenon: the brevity of the work is part of the greatness.

Anyhoo, Rara, who turned eleven this summer, has just cottoned onto the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books, via rented DVDs of the HBO series starring Jill Scott.  She finds Mma Ramotwse and Mma Makutsi fascinating, as I did ten years ago.  So we will have Mr. McCall Smith's books around the house for years to come, I imagine, even if I'm not reading them anymore.

(Gratuitous vacation shot because "There's more to life than books, you know, but not much more" --Morrissey)

 

A conversation from a lifetime ago ( for Father's Day )

One day during my last ( and last ever ) mat leave, my dad called me at home to see how my day was going.

I told him that the baby had been napping all morning.

So what are you doing with yourself then, daughter?

Oh, I washed the sheets, folded towels, wandered around the garden doing some disorganised and capricious weeding and looking for caterpillars and throwing them into the chicken coop -- they won't eat them though, but I keep trying -- took some pictures of my daylilies -- they really do only last a day you know -- and planted some more mache. Not much, really. I don't want to be focussed though, while he's napping. That would ruin it.

Ah, so you were just farting around then?

Yeah I guess so. I'm farting around today. But soon Rara will be home from school and then I won't be farting around anymore.

Did you watch that Vonnegut video I sent you?

No Dad, I haven't watched it. The VCR is in storage. We only have the DVD player set up. I'll get it out one day soon and watch the tape.

Well, you should watch it. You'd like it. He talks about farting around. He says it is the only thing worth doing. I'm so glad you have this time, you know. Time for farting around. It's precious.

Yes it is.

Well I won't keep you. Get back to your nothing.

Okay, Dad. Will do. Go do nothing yourself for a bit.

I just might. Love you.

Love you.

STP training now underway

For twelve years, my spouse has wished for me to join him in his long-distance cycling hobby.  For twelve years, my response has been a chuckle and a firm "No thank you!"  Then, last summer, a chick I don't like posted photos on Facebook of herself participating in the STP Classic, a two-day, 10,000-person ride from Seattle to Portland.  Suddenly, I felt inspired to ride.

So we're in training.  We've done two rides so far.  Tobias has a little computer on his bike that tells how far we go and how fast. ( Apparently, not fast enough. )

After I decided that we should do the ride, but before we actually registered, I went to a Solstice party full of cyclists.  The host was a former co-worker that does the STP every year.  I mentioned that Tobias and I were planning to do it in 2010.

"Wow!  Do you guys ride together a lot?"

"No, not really.  He's a randonneur--"

"Whoa ho ho!  A randonneur!  Those guys are fucking crazy."

"Really?  But you all do long rides.  Probably long enough to be randonneurs."

"Long yes, but not randonneuring long.  They do 1000km at a stretch!"

"Oh, well, Tobias isn't that kind of randonneur.  Not yet anyway."

"So you ride too?"

"Just to work."

"You don't do touring?"

"Nope, just Tobias."

"So you're a commuter, and he's a randonneur, and you're planning on doing the STP together?"

At this point, four sets of eyes were on me.  Everyone had glasses in their hands but no one was drinking. 

"Yes, I think so.  Why not?"

Raised eyebrows.  Incredulous smiles. 

"Well, that's a marriage breaker, is all I'm saying.  If you don't want a divorce, you do the ride separately.  Otherwise, whooo-boy, there's gonna be some fighting."

"Huh.  Yeah, I guess you're right.  I don't really enjoy riding with him.  He's always too fast and I lose sight of him and yeah, we usually end up mad at each other."

"Of course.  You wouldn't catch anyone here riding with their spouse.  We do the STP, sure, but not together.  We break into groups.  Otherwise you'd best see a lawyer in advance."

"Yeah, that's a good point.  It hasn't been good in the past.  Hmmm...."

"You can always meet up in the evening, and have a beer or something."

"Yeah maybe that would be better."

But Tobias is stubborn.  He doesn't believe in taking the easy path.  Even though he theoretically agrees with the advice of our marriage counsellor ( my dad ), which is "Emphasize the strengths of your relationship, de-emphasize the weaknesses", in practise he is sometimes blind to exactly what our weaknesses are.  A hint: trying to do something together when our individual abilities to do that thing are vastly different has not resulted in much success.  Ever. 

But nevermind!  Here we go!  Riding together! For four or six or eight hours every Saturday from now until July.  The first two rides have gone really, remarkably well.  We've gone too slow for his liking, but our distances have been fine. The thing is, he's making a huge effort to stick by me, even though my pace is like molasses to him, and I'm not sure how long he can sustain this.  Long enough for me get faster?  That could take a while.  

Signs

On Thursday night, Deetman handed me a yellow pastel and a stack of white paper and asked me to make him some signs for his bedroom door.  Here is what he wanted the signs to say:

1. Welcome, if you Can!
2. Welcome to Deetman's Room
3. Welcome, if you know Deetman?
4. How Much Money Do I Have?
5. You Can Come In If you Know Deetman
6. Horsey in my Room
7. My room is Messy, But You Still Love me, Right?
8. Don't come in if you don't Want To!
9. Come in if you have Money
10. Give Me Money

Silent Retreat Retrospective

In mid-November I checked into a convent and took a 48-hour vow of silence.  No personal crisis precipitated this, just an interest in the whole concept of silence retreats, and being silent, and curiosity about what I could learn from the experience.  Would I hear the voice of God?  That was my ultimate question. 

The retreat I did was a guided one, which meant that I had a once-a-day liturgy with a group of other retreatants and a once-a-day one-on-one spiritual direction session.  Due to a mixup with my contact info, I didn't get the retreat pack in advance, like everyone else, so when I arrived on Friday afternoon, I had no clue what was actually going to happen.  I asked the directors whether the void of information  was part of the experience, like a pre-test.  They laughed and said no, and apologized.  I said no problem, it's good for me.

 Aside from not speaking, we also practised modesty of gaze, which doesn't mean that you should be modest, but that you shouldn't make eye contact with anyone.  This is because saying hi and smiling at someone are basically the same thing, and they are contacts that are forced on people and the kind of thing people go on retreat to get away from. 

I loved this.  I am a real hi-sayer and smiler.  It drives Rara nuts sometimes.  She complains, "Why do you have to say hello to every stranger you see?"  Not doing this really felt like being on social holiday.  I felt like I had a special privilege, like a child who is excused for not responding to an adult's question because her mother knows she's shy and wants to protect her.  I was in no way responsible for making the other people around me happier.  And no one was offended by my surliness, because I had an "in silence" sticker on my sweater. It was like being invisible, in the best possible way. 

What do you do all day when you can't talk or listen to anyone, can't read or go online or watch television, have no work that must be done, no classes to attend and nobody to take care of? Well, you drink a hella lot of tea, for one thing, and spend a lot of time at each meal.  You go for walks, but not off the grounds of the retreat centre, because your "in silence" sticker may not be understood and respected on the outside.  You can walk the labyrinth, and do other spiritual practises like meditation and prayer.  You can go to the 24-hour art studio and make some shitty art with wild abandon.  You can nap, think, write in your journal, and float in the warm pool.  And that is about it. 

I slept more than usual, which is strange since I didn't have a sleep deficit when I went in.  Probably I was just sleeping because I could.  I practised calligraphy and found that I knew how to do it.  I remembered that my grandma taught me how when I was very small.

I was taking a weekly drawing classes on Thursday evenings at the university during this time, and I  could have done lots of drawing that weekend, but something stopped me.  I think I wanted to bring as little of the outside in with me as possible.  So I specifically did not do realistic pencil drawings( what I was studying ) while I was there.  Instead I did abstract pastels, which I've never done before and I have no skill at.  It was pretty fun.

I guess the idea behind stripping away the distractions of day-to-day life is that these distractions prevent us from really knowing and understanding ourselves.  They prevent us from being able to adequately assess our lives, our choices, and our mental health and they prevent us from making choices that we can trust.  In my own life, this manifests itself in a few ways. 

1)  Busyness, what is called "an insane schedule", or "an insane week" or whatever, can overwhelm me to the point where I feel like I hate my life.  But in reality, my life is awesome, and the busyness itself is my only real problem.

2)  Or, the busyness can be enjoyable and distracting in a pleasant way, making me overlook things that aren't good in my life.   In reality, there's something wrong that I'm not dealing with but I'm able to forget about it most of the time because of the busyness.

3)  If I manage to identify some problem that I need to deal with, and I make a decision that I think will help me deal with this problem, when it comes time to actually implement the decision ( which usually requires some sort of big change or self-discipline or doing something that is hard to do ) I weaken and second-guess the decision, thinking that the process I used to reach it was flawed in some way, or I was tired or depressed when I made the decision, and that it doesn't have value.

The silent retreat solved all of the above problems.  1 and 2 were obviously not issues when I was on retreat.  Busyness was not really an option.  I suppose I could have undermined myself and "cheated" and done things to fill my 48 hours, but I didn't, so I was able to reach clarity about my life and assess it.  And guess what?  I realized that I am profoundly happy.  In the group time I actually said this, that all of my so-called problems ( e.g. my marriage is troubled, my career is going nowhere, my kids are bratty ) are imaginary , and I only believe in their existence when I am exhausted or stressed.  So the true problems are exhaustion and stress and I can make changes to fix those.  Especially since they are entirely self-inflicted. 

The retreat solved the third problem too, because I made some choices ( about how to reduce exhaustion and stress and make sure my day-to-day life reflects what I truly value, etc. ) that weekend that I really trust.  So, in the actual execution of these choices that has happened since the retreat, when I've thought "Oh man, was this REALLY what I thought was the wisest course of action?  This is too hard!" I've always ended up sticking to the decision, because I know that that weekend I was wise.  Everything else was stripped away and I could just listen to my own inner voice ( and the voice of God? ) and that I had clarity and I knew what was the right thing to do.  If I had decided that weekend that I should only ever wear black socks ever again, then I think I probably would do it!  

The thing that surprised me a little and spoke to me a lot was how much I missed my kids those two days.  I've been away from them plenty and never missed them like I did those two days at the retreat centre.  So there was a lot of information in that, too.

Preschool Dispatches

Rara:  So is Emily your girlfriend, Deetman?

Deetman:  No!  She's my friend but she's not my girlfriend.  I can't even understand anything she says.

Rara:  Can she understand what you say to her?

Deetman:  No, because I never say anything to her.

Me:  You can't understand what she says to you and you never say anything to her?   Yup, sounds like she's your girlfriend.

.................

Deetman:  Mummy!  There's a boy at preschool named Max, just like in Where The Wild Things Are!

Me:  Oh, that's cool, buddy.

Deetman:  And there's a boy at church named Max too.

Me:  There is?  I didn't know that.  I don't think I've met him.

Deetman:  And Mummy!  The boy named Max at preschool and the boy named Max at church have the same face!

Me:  The same face?  What do you mean, the same face?  Is it the same boy?  Is there a boy from church that's also in your preschool!

Deetman:  Yes, the same boy!  I think it's the same boy!  That's why he has the same name and the same face. 

..................

Deetman:  You know what I'm going to do when I grow up Mummy? 

Me:  What, baby?  Go up in a cherry picker?

Deetman:  Yes!  But two other things too.  Three things.

Me:  What are the other things?

Deetman:  I'm going to go up in a cherry picker, be a daddy of children, and be a soccer player.

Me:  Sounds like a good life, baby.

Deetman:  Yeah, sounds like a good life.

....................

Highway chat

Rara:  Omigosh, Mommy, did you see what was drawn on the back of that truck?

Me:  Hmmm, I was hoping you would miss that.

Rara's friend: What was it?

Rara:  Ummmm, it was, ummmm, a boy thing?  A thing that boys have?

Rara's friend:  Oh gross!

Deetman:  What thing that boys have?  What was on the truck?

Rara:  You know that thing that you have?  And Daddy has?

Rara's friend:  And me and your mom and Rara don't have?

Deetman:  What, an iPhone?

Rara and Friend:  Hahahahaha!  No!

Deetman:  Hmmmm.  Sunglasses?

Rara:  No!  It's a thing that you use every day, like in the bathroom.

Me:  It's the thing you have to take your hand off of when Abu touches the top of her nose.

Deetman:  What?  I take my hand off it?  What? 

Me:  You know.  The thing that you have your hand on and then Abu touches the top of her nose and that means take your hand off it?

Deetman:  What, a penis?  ( laughing ) There was a penis drawn on a truck?!?  I want to see it!

Me:  The truck's gone now buddy.

Deetman:  But you can catch up to it Mommy!  Catch up!

Rara and Friend:  Yeah, catch up, catch up!

Me:  No.  I don't think I will. 

Fin

We tried to save her