Friday, June 22, 2007

Monet to Dali avec Paprika

The Cleveland Museum of Art's renovation brings its great collections of Impressionists to Vancouver for a few months. The show is called Monet to Dali and as I've seen more Monet I've loved than any other artist, or group of artists, I buy my ticket with great anticipation.
A tv show on Monday night which I taped and watched Tuesday, Simon Schama's Power of Art filled the tube with Picassos and Van Goghs, not two of my top thousand favourite artists but it was good prep for this show, with several of the paintings shown and discussed so sagely by Mr. Schama now gracing our walls.
I start taking notes on my micro cassette. Tissot's Specimen of a Portrait. The feminization of light. The tenderness of Renoir's Apple Seller. You leap with the dog. From some distance, Madame Monet's red cape catches my eye. Not surprisingly, it was one painting he wouldn't sell, and kept with him all his life. My first impression of seeing it closer: it hit's a home run. In the sense that a baseball looks like a grapefruit to a hitter about to hit it out. It captures the eye, and sends it aloft. Madelaine and her daughter Yvonne. The woman's face is between 3 dimensional and Picassoesque. The Gardener's House looks like a pallette, a green roof of its era. "reveals Bonard's delight in light in colour" from the wall explanation, but if you don't delight in light in colour, why are you a painter?
Another great Monet. The deconstruction of a cliff as reflections in the water reminds me of the scene in the Firesign album Don't Crush That Dwarf where the kids' high school is "taken apart, stacked up and labelled." And then back to Monet's red hooded wife in the window. You don't want to turn away, for fear she'll stop watching you. Seurat's bather's structural relationship to his shadow, the water in front of him. They seen parts of him, but now adrift, with lives of their own like the grass he sits upon. The naked woman in the green wave by Gaughin, she is trying to reject it as her back is stained, so perhaps it's dyed water. Paint? Van Gogh's large plane tree looks like it's about to be consumed by bubbles, a washing machine film gag gone overboard. Matisse's Etruscan vase more cartoon than painting. And not a good cartoon. Modigliani's paintings are all basically one painting. Thankfully, a good painting. A woman with an elaborately feathered hat turns out to be by Picasso and does not suffer from that fact. Seeing his Life in real life is less impressive than on Schama's TV show, though the nipple's nice. The cubist melon picture and the glass and fork work for me, his attempt to see like an imaginary insect drawn to the seductive light reflected on his bald head. Magritte's Secret Life is intellectually exhausting to look at. There's something so comfortable about Ernst's coffee grinder, though I don't drink coffee. Dali's Dream warrants close attention. Ernst's Dejeuner Sur Herbe looks herby. The fish looks like it's about to eat me rather than be eaten. The surrealists doing their job.
A most impressive exhibition. Three surreal cheers for Cleveland.
I discover there's a bar below my favourite building in the city, Vancouver Central Library. I have a cidre, and after all that walking around, lament the bar doesn't seem to have any chairs with backs. Then a short, pleasant walk to Vancouver's white elephantine Tinseltown to see Paprika, a new Japanese flick I'd just read about in last week's Straight.
As it's animated, I'm momentarily amazed that it's in Japanese, and then happily adjust to reading subtitles which had never been available in the decades of anime I've seen. From my first night in the Hamamatsu Grand Hotel in August, 1971, to several months with my boss's family and the numerous families I visited thereafter, anime was everywhere in my Japan. Cute is everywhere. Dolls play a much large part in Japanese life than would be considered sane in North America. The panda effect, as cultural staple. I came to view this quite differently bringing up my daughter in Japan in the 80s. The TV cartoons and flicks I watched with her had a new meaning for me, participating in her involvement with them. As a child, I was fascinated by the Peanuts comic strip, to the point of writing a book and a TV script on Peanuts in the mid 60s. Doonesberry, or Zippie, or one of the cartoonists in Salon is often the highlight of my day. I like cartoons in general, and have been since I've had eyes.
That said, the Miyazaki flicks I've seen, first Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke and Tottoro all vastly dissapointed. The New Yorker article about him was much better. I enjoyed the Japaneseness of Away, and some of the superb visual imagery, the sky in particular, but gradually the story grew too Disnefied for me. Princess Mononoke begins with some exquisite imagery, mottled light through leaves on passing charcters, but goes downhill from there. For even longer than I've been into cartoons, I've been into fairy tales, folk tales and that milieu. That's what one was exposed to as a kid, at least in the pre-TV era I'm from. As an ESL teacher I often used them as teaching material. My daughter delighted in all the imaginary creatures of Japanese folklore, who continue to sell products and stoke the local economy. I just thought Miyazaki didn't have anything interesting to say with this lush cast of characters and endlessly exploitable cultural resonance. Some nice graphics, but so what? A few days ago I rented my neighbour totoro which i found totally unwatchable. Where was the invention, the mirth, the satisfaction that came from watching Doraemon and so many other cartoons that used to dominate Japanese TV in the days of Bit's youth? Miyazaki came close to ruining the genre for me. I hadn't seen Japanese TV in years and didn't know what else was out there until I read the review of Paprika last week. The fact that the story was akin to The Lathe of Heaven, one of my favourite novels and the subject of two flicks of its own made me want to see Paprika, and the fact that it was supposed to be so visually stunning made me want to see it in a theatre. Although the TV show has no visual pretentions, the Southpark film more than lived up to its theatre ticket price in the scenes of hell. That's why you go to the movies. You want to see vast vistas of eye candy. Your own private Saskatchewan.
And as soon as it started, that's what Paprika was. It was never not riveting. The characters would have been considered cliches when I first became aware of manga in 71, but the cliches worked. The great river of unconsciousness or whatever what rolls through this flick, although led by appliances escaped from Magritte via Zabriskie Point, was filled with Japanese dolls, just like the Japanese environment is. It's a riff. Paprika, who may or may not be real, is also continually riffing on herself as a spice. The noir detective's obsession seems to come out of the very non-anime The Shining. The doll guy's dolls welcoming home seems right out of equally visually visionary Blade Runner. There are so many things to see, and yet the characters are endlessly in motion. I laughed and I felt emotionally drawn in to these drawings, for all their clever imagery they resonate. The world of the flick is the dream world, and though the heroine Paprika may spice her way out of danger, the moral choice is whether to allow a device, the (hopefully fictional) DC Mini to allow people to enter our dreams or to continue to keep them private. Just as in The Lathe of Heaven, the man in charge of the device goes for control of everybody's dreams, with the expected results. Paprika reminds me of Sophia, the female aspect of the deity in Philip K Dick's novel The Divine Invasion. Just as graphically and emotionally involving as the flick is, with characters gone mad by their controlled dreams wandering throughout the flick babbling nonsense, the dialogue strives to overcome the obvious jargon of the SF technology and its accompanying future world, the ideas remain challenging. Where as I felt intellectually exhausted looking at the Magritte image, Paprika made my brain delight in its challenges, I think because there's so much more going on in a film than in a painting. Usually. The more you know of Japanese folklore and Tokyo architecture, the more you may enjoy Paprika's ebullient immersion in them, but perhaps the greatest feast is offered to someone who knows nothing of these things. What a wonderful vista is opened up here. I left the theatre enthralled. All the way home, Vancouver has never looked more beautiful. That's what art is for.

Monday, June 11, 2007

2 yellow books

On Christmas Eve, 1967, in a club called The Magic Mushroom in a suburb of Los Angeles, Peter Bergman told his radio audience and the folks in the club about a dream he'd just had about the coming of The Electrician. Not surprisingly, the Firesign Theatre's first album, already recorded but not released until early 1968, was called Waiting For The Electrician, or Someone Like Him. In his dream, Bergman imagined a giant, Jim Morrison-like Electrician striding toward a giant plug that controlled all the electricity in the world, and then pulling the plug...
"and all the lights went out all over the world, and all the radios went out and all the tvs went off and all the movies stopped playing, and all the lights went out on the freeways and all the lights went out in this club went out, but we didn't care, see, because we don't need this microphone, we don't need these lights because we can do it on our own." "...One reason they're gonna pull that plug is so that we're gonna have to start living very closely together in very small communities so that everybody has a very important function and there won't be anymore of that, I think we call it, disrespect."
Reading The Long Emergency is like finding oneself in Bergman's dream from 40 years ago. The end is near! I used to hear that a lot. It was actually true when I was growing up. If Kennedy and Kruschev had pushed their respective buttons, the village world Bergman dreamed of would probably be the world we live in now. I had thought those days of imminent catastrophe were gone. I guess I wasn't thinking of Peak Oil.
Another "Firesign" album, this one written by Bergman's Firesign pal David Ossman and called How Time Flies came out in 1973 and also predicted a retirement of the US government and its replacement by the North American village movement. James Howard Kunstler is dreaming/predicting the same thing in his book The Long Emergency. Without oil, our civilization will collapse, he warns us, and we better all get really good at growing our own food and building everything we need. Well, I spent the 50s/60s worrying about imminent catastrophe so I've paid my dues worrying and have better things to do this decade. Not that it isnt a good idea to make some preparations....
In Armed Madhouse, Greg Palast poo poo's Peak Oil. Is Greg or James right? One certainly wants to cheer for Greg. Working for the BBC, he has uncovered scandal after scandal that should have brought down the Bush regime if there were any justice left in the US. Maybe justice is just as much a hallucination as Kunstler says our belief in surviving the absence of oil is. Rove brags about the fact that American media have ignored Palast. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Reading Armed Madhouse, one finds oneself constantly rooting for him as an underdog. Come on, Charlie Brown, kick that football, finally. American politics has so degenerated since Watergate, the current regime can get away with things that previous administrations were shattered over. If the bad old days of drop drills and imminent Russian missiles are indeed distant, the good old days when politicians found trampling on the Constitution were booted from office are just as distant. If we are in the end times of our oil slicked civiliation, the last to go down, the criminal politicians and captains of industry that ooze through Palast's screed will keep the last drops for their Hummers and Rolls Royces as the rest of the world falls apart. The Bad Sleep Well is more than the name of a great 1960 Kurosawa flick I saw recently.
Both Palast and Kunstler use Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans as examples to prove their theses. Palast is certainly right that cares no more for drowning poor people in New Orleans than he does for the US Constitution, and Kunstler may well be right that global warming, etc will make the rest of the first world look like the drowned Big Easy sooner rather than later, but reading both books is to wallow in despair. Not my favourite wallowing place.
It has been said that optimists write tragedies and pessimists write comedies. Although Palast has a few funny lines, neither of these books have been written to make us laugh. The people most responsible for, at least America's descent into political madness and oil addiction want everyone to keep laughing, or keep being afraid of ghosts about to attack. I suspect both authors wrote their books to educate at least some people to tell the difference between imaginary and real threats. An American public oblivious to the difference is a calamity for the rest of the world.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

The Pear Tree

I had been to The Pear Tree, Burnaby's only first class restaurant, for my birthday with friends a number of years ago. In those days, it was more kitchen than restaurant, and despite being April, unbearably hot, though I recall the food was good. As my journalist friend X lived near The Pear Tree and had a birthday coming up, I took her there to see if the ambience had improved and the food was still good. I started with the Lobster Cappucinno, chunks of lobster with dashi custard and Atlantic Lobster foam that tasted a lot like a bowl of Portobello and Balsamic Onion soup I'd had that afternoon, from a wonderful local cheese and meal place called
Les Amis de Fromage . The soups and other meals from this tiny store are to take-out food what Diva at the Met is to restaurant food, as mentioned in a recent blog.

My entree was slow-poached organic Red Roe chicken breast napped in blanquet foam, served with potato gnocci and fresh mushrooms. Rather bland until a glass of chardonnay appeared, greatly magnifying the quality of the meal. Not as good as the chicken at Diva, but what is? I was thinking of the orange carmellized scallops and bacon risotto but I'll have that the next time I come here.
As a salad, I get carmelized pea shoots and pear slices. There was a time in adolescence when Bit refused to eat salad, calling it Rabbit Food. I felt myself turning into a rabbit while nibbling on the pea shoots, but the julliened pear slices were a delight. X reported the same with the pear in her salad.

X had the organic micrograins dressed in extra-virgin olive oil, shallot infused balsamic with fresh pears and tomatos. It lived up to her expectations. The tower effect reminded me of what I had the last time I was here. We were also given some brioche as a bread course. I thought it was pound cake, and avoided it, but X found it delicious.

Images of pears were everywhere. Large photos of pear orchards and more sylized imagery such as this. Best of all, pieces of pear in the meals. Fumyo's home town Kamagaya, where Bit spent the first half of her life and I'll be travelling to next month, bills itself as the Pear capitol of Japan, and has all kinds of pear products made from its abundant fruit. Kamagaya could learn a few lessons from this restaurant.

Friday, June 01, 2007

May 30th- The 9th Anniversary

The wisteria are in fragrant bloom on the side of our house so I brought some to Bit's grave. She always loved flowers and floral scents.
Steph, a friend of both Bit and Kim, set up a space in memorial to them at Facebook, which is at
In a book of baseball stories by W.P. Kinsella called The Further Adventures of Slugger McBat,
the story "Searching for Freddie" describes a famous base stealer as having "slipped through the cracks of time." That's what happened to Bit too.
In his story "And the dog in the road" in the March 5, 2007 New Yorker, Orhan Pamuk writes, "I must have seen tens of thousands of dogs in this world, and when I was looking at them they struck me as beautiful. The world surprises us in the same way. It is here, there, right next to us. Then it fades, and everything turns to nothing."
Bit won't turn into nothing as long as she's remembered.