Like many people in creative or entrepreneurial businesses, I often work on spec. I write grant proposals that may or may not get funded and plays that, when produced, may or may not make enough money to pay the bills I've run up mounting them. I have written and rewritten feature scripts that may never get made. I have had producers sit across from me at $100 lunches and ask me if they could pay me a dollar for a script I'd worked on for over a year. A portion of my current income is tithed to retiring tour debt to people who loaned me money or worked for me on spec who I owe big time not just for their talent and money but for their faith and support. I do plenty of writing, including this blog, for free. All the artists I know do contra deals, that is work trades. I just traded modelling to a photographer friend in exchange for pictures.
This week, a person who is not an artist, approached me and asked me to co-write a feature film script from an idea he has, based on a family member's self-published memoir. He was convinced it would take me little time and effort to turn the book his family member's writing into a coherent and exciting film script someone will want to spend millions of dollars making. We'll share the writing credit because of course, it is his brilliant idea. I will of course write this thing, with him, while teaching him to write screenplays. Of course I'll be willing, no excited, to do this for free.
I get one of these offers at least once a year. Sometimes the person has a notebook of hand-written ideas, sometimes a vanity book, sometimes just "a great idea" they want me to write while they tell it to me. Not one of these people has ever, once, offered to pay me.
Nor I am never offered a work trade by these people. The well-paid professionals who ask me to do this wouldn't dream of giving me thousands of dollars worth of their services for free but have no compunctions about asking me to give them thousands of dollars worth of my services and many hours of my time, for free.
I am currently working on an interdisciplinary theatre/dance piece that requires I read about ten thousand pages of research. It needs to be some kind of a script by December, a script for which I will be paid in due course. The grant application I am currently writing in support of this project has easily taken 40-60 hours of work.
I also have a 2/3 day job I really enjoy. I have family and friends who need time and attention. I like to get to a yoga class on occasion. I need to see plays and films to stay current on work by my peers and to have something to write about here. My garden needs some serious weeding and I owe my mom and my aunt a call. I am my own cook and my own cleaning lady. I am woefully behind with my knitting. The kitchen needs painting and so does my bedroom. I constantly pitch scripts of my own and go for auditions. Prepping for those meetings takes time and effort.
I have plenty of ideas of my own for my next few plays, I have a couple of feature ideas, there's a television series pitch I'm knocking around with a few friends and then there's the play I want to rewrite and the feature I've already written that I've decided really needs to be a book.
In short, I'm plenty busy and I haven't run out of ideas.
I always tell these wanna-be movie honchos the same thing: "I can't write your script. It's your story and you have to tell it." I then offer to give them private writing tutorials
for pay, or story notes once they've written the thing themselves, also
for pay. I tell them I am not reading the book or their notes. I tell them I expect them to start by telling me, on one
computer-printed page, not in a scribbler full of hand-written notes,
what the story is about in one sentence, who the protagonist is and what happens at the start, what happens in
the middle and what happens at the end. When they realize I'm not dying
to write their movie for free and that they have hard work and hard
thinking ahead of them, as well as an outlay of cash if they want me to
help them, they go away.
Sorry this is my blog entry for this week. As soon as that grant app is done, and I am over a wicked head cold, I plan to go see Pamela Sinha's CRASH at the FACTORY BACKSPACE. If you're free and in Toronto this weekend, I suggest checking out DANCING QUEEN and Paul Hutcheson's SPRING FLING cabaret both on tonight at Buddies in Bad Times. Paul and his cohort are wickedly funny and very naughty. DORA-award winning actor Ryan Kelly stars in DANCING QUEEN, the Sky Gilbert-Keith Cole collaboration that is a musical about a gay love triangle. Their press has been mixed, but neither Cole not Gilbert strive to be everyone's cup of tea. If you're in Winnipeg, EDEN by Hope McIntyre opened this week and the CAROL SHIELDS Festival is on at PTE. Have fun for those of us who are trying to raise money and avoid spreading contagion in our wake.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Monday, April 23, 2012
The Real World of Michel Trembley and the delights of the House of Elliot
I saw THE REAL WORLD in preview at the Tarragon Theatre Sunday night. Twenty-five years after its premiere in English, Michel Tremblay's play remains a powerful and deeply affecting exploration of the intersections between life and art and an excruciating window into the life of his family.
When you turn your life into art can you ever be fair to the people you are writing about? Who decides what was real, and who is telling the truth about events long past? Whose memory do you trust: your own, or the memories of the people you loved ,or despised? Can we ever let go of the residual pain of childhood abuse or neglect? How do you write silence? What does silence allow: good and bad, in life and in art?
As is often the case with Tremblay, the play is also an excoriating exploration of straight white male privilege, the abuses that so frequently attend it, and the affect of those abuses, physical, sexual, and emotional on the lives of the people who are dependent on those men. Few have ever better depicted domestic hell than Tremblay. I walked out of that theatre last night shaking with rage, remembering men I grew up it who were that dad.
I've always felt Tremblay and Tennessee Williams wrote most realistically and truthfully about the lives of women. The young friend I was with said; "He's a feminist writer." Hell, yeah!
Tremblay asks tough questions and offers no easy answers.
As the show is in previews, I'm not going to review the mostly fine cast here. I can say I really enjoyed last night's preview and I will tell you that if you decide to go, you are in for a fine, if challenging night at the theatre.
For the rest of the week, I've been ensconced at home, enjoying the adventures of the Elliot sisters as they struggle to become self-sufficient proprietors of a fashion house in London between the wars. THE HOUSE OF ELLIOT is a 12- part mini-series from the BBC from a few years back. It has all the usual features of the BBC's best work: characters that hook you in, a fine cast, good writing, directing that doesn't get in the way and fabulous art direction. Deco design, blue-stockings, a good history lesson about life in London during that period, and a coterie of love interests of the chiseled jaw, dark haired, blue-eyed, worldly, witty, devil-may-care romantic type I have always found tough to resist have made me look forward to coming home from work this week. If you love this sort of thing as much as I do, put on your silk dressing gown, make yourself a cocktail, and settle in for a trip back to the Jazz Age. As guilty pleasures go, this is pure, harmless fun. That good video store near you will certainly be able to get it for you.
When you turn your life into art can you ever be fair to the people you are writing about? Who decides what was real, and who is telling the truth about events long past? Whose memory do you trust: your own, or the memories of the people you loved ,or despised? Can we ever let go of the residual pain of childhood abuse or neglect? How do you write silence? What does silence allow: good and bad, in life and in art?
As is often the case with Tremblay, the play is also an excoriating exploration of straight white male privilege, the abuses that so frequently attend it, and the affect of those abuses, physical, sexual, and emotional on the lives of the people who are dependent on those men. Few have ever better depicted domestic hell than Tremblay. I walked out of that theatre last night shaking with rage, remembering men I grew up it who were that dad.
I've always felt Tremblay and Tennessee Williams wrote most realistically and truthfully about the lives of women. The young friend I was with said; "He's a feminist writer." Hell, yeah!
Tremblay asks tough questions and offers no easy answers.
As the show is in previews, I'm not going to review the mostly fine cast here. I can say I really enjoyed last night's preview and I will tell you that if you decide to go, you are in for a fine, if challenging night at the theatre.
For the rest of the week, I've been ensconced at home, enjoying the adventures of the Elliot sisters as they struggle to become self-sufficient proprietors of a fashion house in London between the wars. THE HOUSE OF ELLIOT is a 12- part mini-series from the BBC from a few years back. It has all the usual features of the BBC's best work: characters that hook you in, a fine cast, good writing, directing that doesn't get in the way and fabulous art direction. Deco design, blue-stockings, a good history lesson about life in London during that period, and a coterie of love interests of the chiseled jaw, dark haired, blue-eyed, worldly, witty, devil-may-care romantic type I have always found tough to resist have made me look forward to coming home from work this week. If you love this sort of thing as much as I do, put on your silk dressing gown, make yourself a cocktail, and settle in for a trip back to the Jazz Age. As guilty pleasures go, this is pure, harmless fun. That good video store near you will certainly be able to get it for you.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Complex Bereavements: The Descendants
I am in middle-age and people are dying around me at a rather alarming rate. I've reached the stage in life where I'm invited to more funerals than weddings. At least once a month, someone I know loses a parent. It's the circle of life.
Losing a spouse in middle age is another story and it has happened to a few people I know through death as well as those awful, mid-life crisis divorces. We expect to lose our parents around now, not our partners. The shock and grief can feel catastrophic.
This is the situation George Clooney's character Matt King finds himself thrown into in Alexander Payne's fine film, "The Descendants".
King's wife Elizabeth is one of those spoiled Daddy's girls you meet in clubhouses around the world. Forty-five going on fifteen, she's a life-time addict to that preferred cocktail of certain members of the privileged classes: a mix of booze, money, too much free time, ennui and its attendant addiction to cheap thrills and attention-seeking behaviour. The combination has finally led to the inevitable disaster: a water-skiing accident that has put her in a coma.
Clooney plays a kind of person I see often in life, though seldom in a film: the man whose sense of self is defined by holding it together while everyone around him is falling apart. Sadly, this containment is usually achieved at the expense of holding his own emotions and the emotions of everyone dear to him at a considerable remove. When all else fails, he goes jogging or gets on a plane.
Payne, who has written, among other scripts, "Sideways" has made a wonderfully nuanced film about a middle-aged man bruised by love's caprices and suddenly subsumed by emotions he's long held at bay with work, work-outs and duty.
The scion of a family of wealthy, hereditary landowners, the appropriately named Matt King is the only member of his large, upper-crust clan who is not a ne'er do well subsisting on the remnants of unearned privilege and squandered trust funds. Instead, he has a real estate law practice and manages what's left of the family land in Hawaii.
His reasons are sound: someone has to go to work and someone has to be able to think straight but his family's emotional needs have been badly neglected. He's so out of touch with what's going on in his own home he hasn't noticed his wife is having an affair. It falls to Alexandra, his teen-aged daughter to tell him.
Every woman in King's life is having a melt-down: his eleven-year old Scottie is throwing lawn chairs into the pool, his spoiled wife is in love with a ponce of a real-estate agent and his eldest daughter is drinking hard and sleeping with stoners.
Shailene Woodly as Alexandra gives a terrific performance as a bottle-rocket of rage, grief and neglect. Her mother has been too busy drinking and screwing around at the clubhouse to pay her much attention and her dad is always at the office. She's been shipped off to boarding school but nothing is going to keep her away from the kind of flamboyant trouble kids get into when they're starved for attention and only get it by being self-destructive.
The accident with its ensuing revelations about what has actually been going on with his family has finally turned the emotional tables on King. For the first time in his life, he finds himself in the unenviable position of trying to figure out what is going on inside the head of his suddenly unavailable partner. He's the centre of a hurricane of his own overwhelming feelings and he's at a dead loss.
In the end, King realizes what he must do in order to attend to all he has been entrusted with. He must truly give of himself: to live a life aligned with his real values, offer his protection not to the cabal of leeches in his extended family but to the land that has made them all wealthy and to his daughters who need his love, his affection, his time, his true feelings and his open and unguarded presence.
This is a film well worth watching. If you missed it in theatres this past winter, rent it at a video store near you.
Losing a spouse in middle age is another story and it has happened to a few people I know through death as well as those awful, mid-life crisis divorces. We expect to lose our parents around now, not our partners. The shock and grief can feel catastrophic.
This is the situation George Clooney's character Matt King finds himself thrown into in Alexander Payne's fine film, "The Descendants".
King's wife Elizabeth is one of those spoiled Daddy's girls you meet in clubhouses around the world. Forty-five going on fifteen, she's a life-time addict to that preferred cocktail of certain members of the privileged classes: a mix of booze, money, too much free time, ennui and its attendant addiction to cheap thrills and attention-seeking behaviour. The combination has finally led to the inevitable disaster: a water-skiing accident that has put her in a coma.
Clooney plays a kind of person I see often in life, though seldom in a film: the man whose sense of self is defined by holding it together while everyone around him is falling apart. Sadly, this containment is usually achieved at the expense of holding his own emotions and the emotions of everyone dear to him at a considerable remove. When all else fails, he goes jogging or gets on a plane.
Payne, who has written, among other scripts, "Sideways" has made a wonderfully nuanced film about a middle-aged man bruised by love's caprices and suddenly subsumed by emotions he's long held at bay with work, work-outs and duty.
The scion of a family of wealthy, hereditary landowners, the appropriately named Matt King is the only member of his large, upper-crust clan who is not a ne'er do well subsisting on the remnants of unearned privilege and squandered trust funds. Instead, he has a real estate law practice and manages what's left of the family land in Hawaii.
His reasons are sound: someone has to go to work and someone has to be able to think straight but his family's emotional needs have been badly neglected. He's so out of touch with what's going on in his own home he hasn't noticed his wife is having an affair. It falls to Alexandra, his teen-aged daughter to tell him.
Every woman in King's life is having a melt-down: his eleven-year old Scottie is throwing lawn chairs into the pool, his spoiled wife is in love with a ponce of a real-estate agent and his eldest daughter is drinking hard and sleeping with stoners.
Shailene Woodly as Alexandra gives a terrific performance as a bottle-rocket of rage, grief and neglect. Her mother has been too busy drinking and screwing around at the clubhouse to pay her much attention and her dad is always at the office. She's been shipped off to boarding school but nothing is going to keep her away from the kind of flamboyant trouble kids get into when they're starved for attention and only get it by being self-destructive.
The accident with its ensuing revelations about what has actually been going on with his family has finally turned the emotional tables on King. For the first time in his life, he finds himself in the unenviable position of trying to figure out what is going on inside the head of his suddenly unavailable partner. He's the centre of a hurricane of his own overwhelming feelings and he's at a dead loss.
In the end, King realizes what he must do in order to attend to all he has been entrusted with. He must truly give of himself: to live a life aligned with his real values, offer his protection not to the cabal of leeches in his extended family but to the land that has made them all wealthy and to his daughters who need his love, his affection, his time, his true feelings and his open and unguarded presence.
This is a film well worth watching. If you missed it in theatres this past winter, rent it at a video store near you.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Tainted Love and Painters' Muses at the local video store near you
I am currently living in a house with a giant television set and not much else. I decided not to hook up to cable and instead, to rent movies until a good part of that giant list of "films I'd been meaning to get around to seeing but hadn't" was worked down. I figure it will take most of the summer. An 11: 00 PM late show and a glass of wine is a great way to end the day.
Yes, I know about NetFlicks and yes, it would be cheaper to download. Polyester is easier to look after than silk, you can have a starter marriage and trade up in five years, the furniture at the Brick would be cheaper than shipping the stuff I have in storage, driving is faster and more expedient than a bike and President's Choice has all kinds of bag salad and frozen entrees that are fine in a pinch. However I am committed to small, local video stores the way I'm committed to local booksellers, small, private retail, home cooking, rickety antique furniture, bicycling or walking instead of driving, disintegrating vintage clothing of natural fibres and true, lasting, faithful, mutually committed love, the kind that never dies: built on trust, respect, shared interests, value, goals, affections, passion and a proper courtship. I am committed in a hopeless romantic, impractical, quality of life, Holy Grail kind of way. Sometimes the thing that is a a little hard to find or have is the one worth having. I am not a "settling" kind of girl.
The video store in my neighbourhood is a Rogers outlet. Very clean, very large, lots of snacks and recent films, nice young staff and hardly any back catalog of old films. It's fine for the recent Oscar nominees you missed, but its the rental equivalent of that guy your well-meaning friend from university sets you up with: beige pants, a job, a car, a degree and nothing to talk about.
This week, in a compare and contrast consumer move, I headed back down to my old 'hood and into Queen Video. They have at least two locations: one near Bloor and Bathurst and one near Queen and Spadina. The store is small. They don't sell food. The directors they carry are listed on the window. The inside is painted black: like a theatre. It's the video equivalent of the guy who will never be rich and never be boring. Toronto has a few good, private video rental outlets. In Winnipeg, there was a great place called Village Video which I understand is going to be demolished for a bigger Shoppers' Drug Mart. It's too bad.
The 7 day rental rate for three films at Queen Video is $4.00 less than the 7 day rental rate for three films at Rogers, but that is not the main reason to shop there. Queen Video gave me a membership back when I first moved to Toronto 25 years ago. A new university grad, I had no bank credit card, which many places required back then to rent a movie. Not Queen Video: I lived around the corner in the apartment over the bank at Queen and Spadina and that was good enough for them.
Queen Video has nearly everything somewhere and a staff that knows where to find it. There's a woman working at Bloor and Bathurst who has been there since I was living on Spadina all those years ago. I think she has a PhD in film from the U of T. Films based on books by Proust: "we'll dig them up." That obscure South Asian film that won at Cannes a few years back: "yes of course."
This week, I finally got around to seeing "Love is the Devil", a BBC production from 1997 featuring Derek Jacobi as the famous English painter Francis Bacon and a young Daniel Craig as Bacon's much younger, booze-addled, drug-addicted, petty criminal lover George Dyer. The film manages to convey Bacon's own disturbing yet beautiful visual aesthetic as an overriding cinematic motif while showing a truly awful relationship between two men who love and abuse each other both in and out of the bedroom. Bacon is portrayed here as a sub in the bedroom who publicly tortures and humiliates his Dom, a younger man of lower social status and far less education who is financially and emotionally dependent on him. As Dyer, Craig manages to leak emotional damage from every pore. The performance is a brilliant evocation of a man in so much pain it hurts to watch him.
The other film I saw this week was equally disturbing but for entirely different reasons. Rogers had "Midnight In Paris", Woody Allan's latest offering, which was highly praised for its romantic view of Paris in the 1920s and the salon of painters and writers resident there in the period. Allan's evocation of the past was truly charming. On the other hand, he's filming in Paris, a city that is beautiful at nearly every turn. The costumes and sets were lovely and he has a great cast in a series of cameos of famous artists and writers. Really who wouldn't want to go for drinks at Gertrude Stein's ( Kathy Bates as the only woman of any intellectual substance in the entire film other than a museum guide at Versailles) or with Fitzgerald or Hemingway?
As is so often the case with Allan, the couple at the centre of the story is comprised of two people who are equally distasteful characters and so poorly matched that anyplace other than a Woody Allan movie they would never have gotten past a second date.
We are supposed to believe the solipsistic and neurotic screenwriter has fallen in love with a bubbly and bubble-headed bourgeois girl who lives to shop. The dialogue between them is mostly so stilted and brittle I scarcely believed they ever got into the sack never mind into an engagement. No one over the age of 12 could lack the insight required to see these two are equally awful and woefully ill-suited.
The frustrated novelist wanders the streets of Paris late at night until he meets and falls in love with an imaginary Frenchwoman, the muse (and mistress) to a few painters. It is a great credit to Cotillard that she makes a meal of an insubstantial character.
Even the considerable charms of Owen Wilson couldn't sell me on the putz at the core of this story. When he steals his fiance's jewellery to give it to another woman I wanted him to get the great romance of a night in a Paris prison. I'm sure a French judge could have explained why it's wrong on every level to steal your girlfriend's jewellery to give to your mistress.
Allegedly MIDNIGHT IN PARIS is a film about the folly of nostalgia, of wanting to live in the past. Allan's last few outings have made me wonder what world he's living in. Woody Allan is now old: very, very old and his views of women are so mired in some kind of 1950's misogyny, I now find it impossible to swallow my distaste when I watch them.
Then there's the rich middle-aged guy thinking he prostituted his art without any real look at what choosing art for a living means for most of us who do. Hemingway and Modigliani were starving in Paris during the period Allan depicts here. They were in cafes because those Montmartre garrets were unheated. I wanted Hemingway to talk about what his decision to write cost him, what he gave up to earn his career that eventually became lucrative. At that point, Porter, Stein and Fitzgerald would have been buying him dinner.
Rent it for the scenery and the subplot but don't expect a great film or any great insights into male-female relationships, the economics of choosing art for a living or human nature.
Next up for me is TIME REGAINED, a film of the last volume of Proust's famous novel "In Search of Lost Time". I'll see Paris again and this time through the eyes of the French, which I am truly looking forward to. I will also check out one of the shows currently on offer at CanStage on Monday.
Happy Easter or Passover, gentle readers. I'll speak with you again next week.
Yes, I know about NetFlicks and yes, it would be cheaper to download. Polyester is easier to look after than silk, you can have a starter marriage and trade up in five years, the furniture at the Brick would be cheaper than shipping the stuff I have in storage, driving is faster and more expedient than a bike and President's Choice has all kinds of bag salad and frozen entrees that are fine in a pinch. However I am committed to small, local video stores the way I'm committed to local booksellers, small, private retail, home cooking, rickety antique furniture, bicycling or walking instead of driving, disintegrating vintage clothing of natural fibres and true, lasting, faithful, mutually committed love, the kind that never dies: built on trust, respect, shared interests, value, goals, affections, passion and a proper courtship. I am committed in a hopeless romantic, impractical, quality of life, Holy Grail kind of way. Sometimes the thing that is a a little hard to find or have is the one worth having. I am not a "settling" kind of girl.
The video store in my neighbourhood is a Rogers outlet. Very clean, very large, lots of snacks and recent films, nice young staff and hardly any back catalog of old films. It's fine for the recent Oscar nominees you missed, but its the rental equivalent of that guy your well-meaning friend from university sets you up with: beige pants, a job, a car, a degree and nothing to talk about.
This week, in a compare and contrast consumer move, I headed back down to my old 'hood and into Queen Video. They have at least two locations: one near Bloor and Bathurst and one near Queen and Spadina. The store is small. They don't sell food. The directors they carry are listed on the window. The inside is painted black: like a theatre. It's the video equivalent of the guy who will never be rich and never be boring. Toronto has a few good, private video rental outlets. In Winnipeg, there was a great place called Village Video which I understand is going to be demolished for a bigger Shoppers' Drug Mart. It's too bad.
The 7 day rental rate for three films at Queen Video is $4.00 less than the 7 day rental rate for three films at Rogers, but that is not the main reason to shop there. Queen Video gave me a membership back when I first moved to Toronto 25 years ago. A new university grad, I had no bank credit card, which many places required back then to rent a movie. Not Queen Video: I lived around the corner in the apartment over the bank at Queen and Spadina and that was good enough for them.
Queen Video has nearly everything somewhere and a staff that knows where to find it. There's a woman working at Bloor and Bathurst who has been there since I was living on Spadina all those years ago. I think she has a PhD in film from the U of T. Films based on books by Proust: "we'll dig them up." That obscure South Asian film that won at Cannes a few years back: "yes of course."
This week, I finally got around to seeing "Love is the Devil", a BBC production from 1997 featuring Derek Jacobi as the famous English painter Francis Bacon and a young Daniel Craig as Bacon's much younger, booze-addled, drug-addicted, petty criminal lover George Dyer. The film manages to convey Bacon's own disturbing yet beautiful visual aesthetic as an overriding cinematic motif while showing a truly awful relationship between two men who love and abuse each other both in and out of the bedroom. Bacon is portrayed here as a sub in the bedroom who publicly tortures and humiliates his Dom, a younger man of lower social status and far less education who is financially and emotionally dependent on him. As Dyer, Craig manages to leak emotional damage from every pore. The performance is a brilliant evocation of a man in so much pain it hurts to watch him.
The other film I saw this week was equally disturbing but for entirely different reasons. Rogers had "Midnight In Paris", Woody Allan's latest offering, which was highly praised for its romantic view of Paris in the 1920s and the salon of painters and writers resident there in the period. Allan's evocation of the past was truly charming. On the other hand, he's filming in Paris, a city that is beautiful at nearly every turn. The costumes and sets were lovely and he has a great cast in a series of cameos of famous artists and writers. Really who wouldn't want to go for drinks at Gertrude Stein's ( Kathy Bates as the only woman of any intellectual substance in the entire film other than a museum guide at Versailles) or with Fitzgerald or Hemingway?
As is so often the case with Allan, the couple at the centre of the story is comprised of two people who are equally distasteful characters and so poorly matched that anyplace other than a Woody Allan movie they would never have gotten past a second date.
We are supposed to believe the solipsistic and neurotic screenwriter has fallen in love with a bubbly and bubble-headed bourgeois girl who lives to shop. The dialogue between them is mostly so stilted and brittle I scarcely believed they ever got into the sack never mind into an engagement. No one over the age of 12 could lack the insight required to see these two are equally awful and woefully ill-suited.
The frustrated novelist wanders the streets of Paris late at night until he meets and falls in love with an imaginary Frenchwoman, the muse (and mistress) to a few painters. It is a great credit to Cotillard that she makes a meal of an insubstantial character.
Even the considerable charms of Owen Wilson couldn't sell me on the putz at the core of this story. When he steals his fiance's jewellery to give it to another woman I wanted him to get the great romance of a night in a Paris prison. I'm sure a French judge could have explained why it's wrong on every level to steal your girlfriend's jewellery to give to your mistress.
Allegedly MIDNIGHT IN PARIS is a film about the folly of nostalgia, of wanting to live in the past. Allan's last few outings have made me wonder what world he's living in. Woody Allan is now old: very, very old and his views of women are so mired in some kind of 1950's misogyny, I now find it impossible to swallow my distaste when I watch them.
Then there's the rich middle-aged guy thinking he prostituted his art without any real look at what choosing art for a living means for most of us who do. Hemingway and Modigliani were starving in Paris during the period Allan depicts here. They were in cafes because those Montmartre garrets were unheated. I wanted Hemingway to talk about what his decision to write cost him, what he gave up to earn his career that eventually became lucrative. At that point, Porter, Stein and Fitzgerald would have been buying him dinner.
Rent it for the scenery and the subplot but don't expect a great film or any great insights into male-female relationships, the economics of choosing art for a living or human nature.
Next up for me is TIME REGAINED, a film of the last volume of Proust's famous novel "In Search of Lost Time". I'll see Paris again and this time through the eyes of the French, which I am truly looking forward to. I will also check out one of the shows currently on offer at CanStage on Monday.
Happy Easter or Passover, gentle readers. I'll speak with you again next week.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Morro and Jasp: Go Bake Yourself
I saw this show opening night at NextStage back in January, the day I got back from my Christmas holidays and three weeks of cooking and hanging out with my sisters and my brother.
Nothing takes me back to my childhood with my sibs the way these two do. Amy and Heather may not be the next Julia Child in the kitchen, but when it comes to clowning, their work is far from half-baked. In fact, the show totally cooked! That night, I laughed and cried, which to me is the mark of a great clown show.
Their show "Morro and Jasp Do Puberty" five starred and sold out here, and across the country: deservedly so. I saw it in Edmonton this summer in a packed theatre, and was knocked out by their heartfelt and very funny examination of the joys and travails of female adolescence.
This time, the duo are playing with a warm-up clown act that changes nightly. A number of very talented performers are appearing on their bill, including Chris "Hilarious" Gibbs. The first time I saw Chris onstage, my sides hurt for two days afterward from laughing.
Tickets are a low, low $15. The show continues until this Saturday, March 30th at Cahoots Theatre. For further details check out their website at
www.morroandjasp.com/
Nothing takes me back to my childhood with my sibs the way these two do. Amy and Heather may not be the next Julia Child in the kitchen, but when it comes to clowning, their work is far from half-baked. In fact, the show totally cooked! That night, I laughed and cried, which to me is the mark of a great clown show.
Their show "Morro and Jasp Do Puberty" five starred and sold out here, and across the country: deservedly so. I saw it in Edmonton this summer in a packed theatre, and was knocked out by their heartfelt and very funny examination of the joys and travails of female adolescence.
This time, the duo are playing with a warm-up clown act that changes nightly. A number of very talented performers are appearing on their bill, including Chris "Hilarious" Gibbs. The first time I saw Chris onstage, my sides hurt for two days afterward from laughing.
Tickets are a low, low $15. The show continues until this Saturday, March 30th at Cahoots Theatre. For further details check out their website at
www.morroandjasp.com/
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Made In Daggenham and The Painted Lady
This week: music, a dance performance (of sorts), a film and a few musing on the labour market.
I made it to THE PAINTED LADY to see James Cohen's band featuring my friend Lloyd Peterson on vocals and guitar. It's Canadian Music Week, the bar was packed with industry types and a young crowd out to party. The band was cooking and the place was rocking. I had a great time chatting with Lloyd and some other friends from Winnipeg who were in town for the festival and I was reminded of just how much fun it can be to get out there on a Saturday night and hear a good band.
The Painted Lady is a charming room, with chandeliers, fairy lights and walls covered with pictures of women performers, painters' muses and burlesque artists. At a certain point during my friends' set, a woman got on the bar in a burlesque outfit and proceeded to remove a layer of clothing. She had a garter on and it was stuffed with $5 bills. In 2012, in a democratic country where women have equal rights (in theory) and half the patrons in the bar were women, there was a half-naked woman dancing on a bar for money.
The university age daughter of a friend of mine was there as part of our group. She's studying at Queen's and is a few years younger than the burlesque performer. She said to me, " What do you think? Is she empowering herself or is this old school sexual exploitation and objectification of women? I can't look at her and not feel sad and a little dirty." Indeed. I looked at the walls covered with pictures of naked women and the girl writhing on the bar and thought," I like this room, I like these people and I'm having a good time but I can't believe we're still having this conversation twenty-five years after I was in university. Moreover, since this is a straight bar and 50% of the patrons are women, I can't believe, in the interest of equal rights, we don't have some comely young man on that bar too, with someplace to stuff cash in his codpiece" That in my limited experience only happens at bars for gay men and stagettes with male strippers. Sexual exploitation is far from equal in the straight community. Is that because there are fewer straight young men who need $50 that badly?
Then last night I finally saw MADE IN DAGGENHAM a feel-good picture set in the late '60 in the UK about the first group of women to go out on strike for equal pay for work of equal value. Equal pay became law in Britain in 1970 and now women all over the industrialized world have equal pay for work of equal value, the film proudly concludes.
Wait a minute: in Canada the postal workers' union finally won their equal pay for work of equal value case at the Supreme Court of Canada last November. That's right: November 2011 was when the defining case for equal pay for work of equal value was finally won in this industrialized nation.
The switchboard operators at Bell had fought the same issue all the way to the Supreme Court and lost several decades earlier. I know because my aunt was hoping the back pay she'd have received would have supplemented her meagre retirement. Meagre, because Nortel stock is now worthless and most of the employees took a stock split and had 50% of the stock that was to finance their retirement in a now-worthless company. The postal union had been fighting the matter of equal pay for work of equal value since - wait for it: 1976.
According to Statistics Canada, in 2008, women working full time, on average, earned 76% of what men earned. If they were in a unionized work environment, this crept up to 93.7% which is closer to wage parity. If you're on the shop floor at Ford, or you're an ACTRA member, like I am, chances are that you and the guy sitting next to you in the lunch room are being paid a similar wage rate if you are in a similarly skilled trade.
I'll bet you there's no union for the girls or boys dancing on bars. I mean, they could go to Actors' Equity, pay dues and qualify, but it is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
What would it take to really empower women? Equal pay for work of equal value and more unionized jobs. Fewer women would be shaking their butts for a living if other work was readily obtainable and paid better, but mostly that's not the case. Is it better than it was 30 years ago? Yes. Is it equal? No, hell no.
Retail remains the largest employer of women and is the worst paying and the most unstable employment with the worst benefits. If you really wanted to change the lives of working women, we'd need, as a society, to support the unionization of retail. We'd also need to aggressively encourage young women so stop thinking of themselves in terms of their marketability sexually and more in terms of their marketability in well-waged labour: construction trades, engineering, social sciences and yes, nursing and teaching school.
That's a likely to happen as me waking up a foot taller and ten years younger tomorrow morning.
I can't tell you how immeasurably it saddens me that I rarely see women on the Fringe circuit doing material that's not about sex, dating or child-rearing. This year Laura-Anne Harris did a show about Judy Holliday and the McCarthy trials and 5 starred and sold out and I can't tell you how happy that made me. Religion, politics, art, history, music, dance, and psychology may all factor in, but dating and domestic material dominate the discourse in the main, when the speakers onstage are women.
All the women actress I know over 35 complain about the paucity of good roles available. More male playwrights are produced, more men run theatres in this country and more men appear onstage, and yes, I can back that up statistically.
When I wrote WONDERBAR! I was trying to use the metaphor of the "relationship" show to talk about how capitalism encourages women to tie their hopes and financial futures to a man, instead of fighting like hell to get paid like men get paid. The day that finally happens across the boards women will finally have real power. It's tough to vote with your feet and leave a bad relationship if you can't afford to feed yourself or pay the rent if you walk.
Women shake their cans at THE PAINTED LADY for the same reason women went on strike in Daggenham. It has nothing to do with feminism and everything to do with capitalism . Women will never have equal rights or an equal position in society until we have financial parity. The burlesque performers I know are lucky to make a $100 a night. You bet the commodifying of sexuality, gay or straight is exploitation: the good, old-fashioned capitalist way.
I made it to THE PAINTED LADY to see James Cohen's band featuring my friend Lloyd Peterson on vocals and guitar. It's Canadian Music Week, the bar was packed with industry types and a young crowd out to party. The band was cooking and the place was rocking. I had a great time chatting with Lloyd and some other friends from Winnipeg who were in town for the festival and I was reminded of just how much fun it can be to get out there on a Saturday night and hear a good band.
The Painted Lady is a charming room, with chandeliers, fairy lights and walls covered with pictures of women performers, painters' muses and burlesque artists. At a certain point during my friends' set, a woman got on the bar in a burlesque outfit and proceeded to remove a layer of clothing. She had a garter on and it was stuffed with $5 bills. In 2012, in a democratic country where women have equal rights (in theory) and half the patrons in the bar were women, there was a half-naked woman dancing on a bar for money.
The university age daughter of a friend of mine was there as part of our group. She's studying at Queen's and is a few years younger than the burlesque performer. She said to me, " What do you think? Is she empowering herself or is this old school sexual exploitation and objectification of women? I can't look at her and not feel sad and a little dirty." Indeed. I looked at the walls covered with pictures of naked women and the girl writhing on the bar and thought," I like this room, I like these people and I'm having a good time but I can't believe we're still having this conversation twenty-five years after I was in university. Moreover, since this is a straight bar and 50% of the patrons are women, I can't believe, in the interest of equal rights, we don't have some comely young man on that bar too, with someplace to stuff cash in his codpiece" That in my limited experience only happens at bars for gay men and stagettes with male strippers. Sexual exploitation is far from equal in the straight community. Is that because there are fewer straight young men who need $50 that badly?
Then last night I finally saw MADE IN DAGGENHAM a feel-good picture set in the late '60 in the UK about the first group of women to go out on strike for equal pay for work of equal value. Equal pay became law in Britain in 1970 and now women all over the industrialized world have equal pay for work of equal value, the film proudly concludes.
Wait a minute: in Canada the postal workers' union finally won their equal pay for work of equal value case at the Supreme Court of Canada last November. That's right: November 2011 was when the defining case for equal pay for work of equal value was finally won in this industrialized nation.
The switchboard operators at Bell had fought the same issue all the way to the Supreme Court and lost several decades earlier. I know because my aunt was hoping the back pay she'd have received would have supplemented her meagre retirement. Meagre, because Nortel stock is now worthless and most of the employees took a stock split and had 50% of the stock that was to finance their retirement in a now-worthless company. The postal union had been fighting the matter of equal pay for work of equal value since - wait for it: 1976.
According to Statistics Canada, in 2008, women working full time, on average, earned 76% of what men earned. If they were in a unionized work environment, this crept up to 93.7% which is closer to wage parity. If you're on the shop floor at Ford, or you're an ACTRA member, like I am, chances are that you and the guy sitting next to you in the lunch room are being paid a similar wage rate if you are in a similarly skilled trade.
I'll bet you there's no union for the girls or boys dancing on bars. I mean, they could go to Actors' Equity, pay dues and qualify, but it is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
What would it take to really empower women? Equal pay for work of equal value and more unionized jobs. Fewer women would be shaking their butts for a living if other work was readily obtainable and paid better, but mostly that's not the case. Is it better than it was 30 years ago? Yes. Is it equal? No, hell no.
Retail remains the largest employer of women and is the worst paying and the most unstable employment with the worst benefits. If you really wanted to change the lives of working women, we'd need, as a society, to support the unionization of retail. We'd also need to aggressively encourage young women so stop thinking of themselves in terms of their marketability sexually and more in terms of their marketability in well-waged labour: construction trades, engineering, social sciences and yes, nursing and teaching school.
That's a likely to happen as me waking up a foot taller and ten years younger tomorrow morning.
I can't tell you how immeasurably it saddens me that I rarely see women on the Fringe circuit doing material that's not about sex, dating or child-rearing. This year Laura-Anne Harris did a show about Judy Holliday and the McCarthy trials and 5 starred and sold out and I can't tell you how happy that made me. Religion, politics, art, history, music, dance, and psychology may all factor in, but dating and domestic material dominate the discourse in the main, when the speakers onstage are women.
All the women actress I know over 35 complain about the paucity of good roles available. More male playwrights are produced, more men run theatres in this country and more men appear onstage, and yes, I can back that up statistically.
When I wrote WONDERBAR! I was trying to use the metaphor of the "relationship" show to talk about how capitalism encourages women to tie their hopes and financial futures to a man, instead of fighting like hell to get paid like men get paid. The day that finally happens across the boards women will finally have real power. It's tough to vote with your feet and leave a bad relationship if you can't afford to feed yourself or pay the rent if you walk.
Women shake their cans at THE PAINTED LADY for the same reason women went on strike in Daggenham. It has nothing to do with feminism and everything to do with capitalism . Women will never have equal rights or an equal position in society until we have financial parity. The burlesque performers I know are lucky to make a $100 a night. You bet the commodifying of sexuality, gay or straight is exploitation: the good, old-fashioned capitalist way.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Respect for the Dead
I am not reviewing anything today. Instead of going to the theatre or the cinema I attended two funerals. Two separate sets of friends lost their mothers this week. In spite of the truly beautiful weather it was a sad, solemn and sobering week.
At my age, this is fairly normal. I have many friends dealing with elder care or dying parents: some are dealing with teen-aged children and elder care simultaneously.
My own father passed away three years ago. I think of him everyday and often wish I could speak to him. Thankfully my mom is fine and we speak every week.
My father is interred in St. Charles Cemetery. His father, his mother, his grandmother and many of his relations are there. It is next to the Catholic church where he served as an altar boy and across from the convent where both he and his mother went to school. The land the church is built on was donated to the church by my family.
My father was very stylish and elegant, as were the two women who died this week. None of those people of another generation would have dreamed of attending a funeral in other than a suit or in the case of the ladies, perhaps a conservative day dress and a cardigan.
This probably makes me quite old-fashioned but I was shocked to see men without jackets and women in tight pants tucked into boots and cocktail attire complete with stilettos, textured hose and bare cleavage at a funeral. If it had only been the twenty year-old crowd dressed this way, I would have understood, but it was people my age who ought to know better. People, this is not a bar on Friday night.
My father always noticed what people wore. I felt his burial was the last time I would dress for him and I chose my black day dress with great care. One of the ladies whose funeral I attended this week was one of the most elegant women I have ever known. I wore a suit out of respect for her. I know if it had been the other way around, she'd have done the same for me.
The last thing we do for the dead is attend their funeral. It is not the place to show how hot you still are. I know standards of formality are more relaxed than they were, but out of respect for the dead, I'd like to propose men and women my age cover up and dress like grown ups not kids at a club at least when attending a wedding, a funeral or a job interview. Moreover, they might teach their children to do likewise. If I sound like a grumpy old lady, I'll take the rap. Most of the people I know with any standards of dress are dying like flies and someone needs to hold up the side.
At my age, this is fairly normal. I have many friends dealing with elder care or dying parents: some are dealing with teen-aged children and elder care simultaneously.
My own father passed away three years ago. I think of him everyday and often wish I could speak to him. Thankfully my mom is fine and we speak every week.
My father is interred in St. Charles Cemetery. His father, his mother, his grandmother and many of his relations are there. It is next to the Catholic church where he served as an altar boy and across from the convent where both he and his mother went to school. The land the church is built on was donated to the church by my family.
My father was very stylish and elegant, as were the two women who died this week. None of those people of another generation would have dreamed of attending a funeral in other than a suit or in the case of the ladies, perhaps a conservative day dress and a cardigan.
This probably makes me quite old-fashioned but I was shocked to see men without jackets and women in tight pants tucked into boots and cocktail attire complete with stilettos, textured hose and bare cleavage at a funeral. If it had only been the twenty year-old crowd dressed this way, I would have understood, but it was people my age who ought to know better. People, this is not a bar on Friday night.
My father always noticed what people wore. I felt his burial was the last time I would dress for him and I chose my black day dress with great care. One of the ladies whose funeral I attended this week was one of the most elegant women I have ever known. I wore a suit out of respect for her. I know if it had been the other way around, she'd have done the same for me.
The last thing we do for the dead is attend their funeral. It is not the place to show how hot you still are. I know standards of formality are more relaxed than they were, but out of respect for the dead, I'd like to propose men and women my age cover up and dress like grown ups not kids at a club at least when attending a wedding, a funeral or a job interview. Moreover, they might teach their children to do likewise. If I sound like a grumpy old lady, I'll take the rap. Most of the people I know with any standards of dress are dying like flies and someone needs to hold up the side.
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