etc group in copenhagen

Stephen Harper's going to Copenhagen only because he has to.
Diana, on the other hand, is there to change the world. That's our Di.

rover: the hakawati

Here is my Rover review of one of the better books I've ever read: The Hakawati, by Rabih Alameddine.

Instead of Once upon a time, Arabic stories begin with Kan ya makan (there was and there was not). The experience of the story is more important than its veracity because, as all good listeners know, the storyteller is a trickster. “Never trust the teller,” advises a character in The Hakawati, “trust the tale.”

And so, against a backdrop of emirs, jinns, the underworld, spurned wives and fortunate slaves, rehashed Bible stories and Beiruti gossip, Alameddine’s third novel begins: “Allow me to be your god. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story.”

Osama al-Kharrat, a Los Angeles software engineer, returns to Beirut to sit by his dying father’s bedside. Surveying Lebanon after many years away, he muses, “I was a tourist in a bizarre land. I was home.” The bizarre and the familiar intermarry (literally) as the hospital room fills with extended family, home-cooked meals, and stories. On his deathbed, Osama’s father wants to make sure his son knows the tales of his grandfather and the origins of the family name, which means the fibber.

Osama is descended from a line of hakawatis, or storytellers. His great-grandfather, the neglected son of an Englishman and his illicit Armenian lover, learned his trade in nearby cafés. He, in turn, passes it on to his son, and so on. The family saga is narrated with much wit and dizzying descents into underworlds, outerworlds and other worlds. No sooner do you get a handle on a character or a generation, the story breaks for intermission and moves on to the next – a sort of cineplex of a novel. Multi-coloured imps help Fatima enter the underworld to retrieve her hand; the stories of Adam and Eve and Orpheus are given a new perspective; two young boys, one “evil” and one “good” can’t keep their hands off each other; the boy next door grooms his dangerous image until a militia man emerges; the girl next door falls in love with him – or rather, his motorcycle.

An air of insouciance colours the book. Clearly Alameddine is having fun. He names two of his main characters Osama and Jihad. Another character gets caught up in the “delightfully dramatic” Palestinian resistance. In one of the fanciful tales an imp uses a swarm of “lesbian mosquitoes” to protect him. In another, when one character says he cannot live with the shame of having a promiscuous wife, she flatly tells him, “practice.”

Interestingly, certainly for the Western reader, while there seems to be a role and a place for the entire kitchen sink in this book, there is little space for Islam. The al-Kharrat family are a Lebanese house blend: English, Druze, Muslim, Christian. The neighbours are equally diverse and include Italian Jews, Orthodox Christians and the odd Frenchman. Discussion of religion is met with scoffs or shrugs. One gets the feeling that those who do concern themselves with piety are only feeding their baser instincts. Alameddine is concerned with the magic of belief itself, not its institutional facades.

A wondrous tour de force full of in-jokes, cultural references and flights of fancy, The Hakawati is also a touching account of one family keeping their heads down during Lebanon’s civil war. Neighbours mysteriously disappear and local boys suddenly sport machine guns. Uncle Jihad, the glittering wit of the family, is also a gay man who never quite finds love. Osama, sent to America to study and save himself, is lost without his family.

Just as we, upon reaching the last page and closing the book, are lost too.

what evil looks / had i from old and young / instead of the cross the albatross / about my neck was hung

This is an albatross whose carcass was washed up on Midway Attoll, an island in the Pacific Ocean. Chris Jordan photographed it and hundreds more. Birds whose flesh has rotted away to reveal the likely cause of their death: handfuls of bright plastic baubles. Baubles that float in the ocean, litter the beaches, that look like food, that choke the airways, that poison the young, that kill the flocks - tens of thousands a year. Bottle caps. Lighters. String. Bags. Shoelaces. Keys. Erasers. Crayons. Microchips. Jewelery. Batteries. Pens. Vials.

You look at these pictures and you can think one thing only. What we're doing is not enough. Nothing short of overhauling our entire detritus-producing economy will save these birds from choking on our garbage. It won't help that you turn down your thermostat, it won't help that you use a cloth bag instead of plastic, it won't help that you buy a fuel-economy car, it won't help that you install a solar panel to power your television, it won't help that you run a paper-less office. None of it will help because none of it gets to the core issue - which is that it ALL HAS TO GO.

Everything.

I mean, isn't that what these photos say to you? Don't they say that nothing short of total dismantlement of our bauble culture will save these birds? Is there any other way? The oceans are already full of dead zones, coral reefs are dying, the rainforests continue to be encroached upon. It really is out of control. And somewhere on a tiny Pacific island the albatrosses are slowly dying.

Remember the ancient mariner. His ship was lost in the arctic but then an albatross came to lead them home. But the ancient mariner, a man who would be comfortable in today's culture, shot the bird. Bad luck and bad spirits descended upon the ship and the crew died. He is forced to wear the dead bird around his neck. I'm really not doing it justice - read it yourself. But the ancient mariner then survives another shipwreck and spends his life in agonizing psychic and physical pain. Pain that is allayed only when he tells his story, which he does to a passing wedding guest.

I am in psychic pain when I see these dead birds.

lifestyle coaching

Ranting and naming names is never a good thing. Forget what it does to the other guy, me it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

So now I'm going to rant and not name names. Let's talk about Alex K. Is that anonymous enough for you? Kafkaesque enough? It's that letter K.

Pretty, shiny Alex is in his early 30s. He's a lawyer, a conflict mediator, a lifestyle coach, and a jet setter. He advises corporate executives and government departments. He is also, modestly left unmentioned on his website, an all round creep. With those credentials, how could he not be? Because of shared property issues (Montreal shared triplex ownership) we've had some consistent dealings with him in the past few years. He is, in no particular order:

- Lazy. Lets his wife do all the heavy lifting, phone calling, organising.
- Unresponsive. A typical email to him takes 4 to 6 weeks before we get a response.
- Obsequious. Master of the empty smile, the quick handshake, the domineering body language.
- Good looking. In that soft, doughy way that will fall apart in another 10 years.
- Suspicious and tight. Makes us justify and prove every little building expense and maintenance.
- Entitled. Treats us like his personal concierge team, instead of the neighbours that we are.
- Quick to anger. You have to see the emails.

This is an educated and successful guy. This is a guy who moves through the world like an ice-breaker moves through the Arctic. Coldly. The irony that he is a conflict mediator and a negotiation trainer is just too rich to believe. Who the hell is paying him the big bucks?

What is going on with my crappy mood these days? Don't even get me started with Yoga Bitch on the third floor. I suspect that she thinks an elevated consciousness is a corner office on the 23rd floor. If anyone's going to create a yoga corporate empire, she will. I suppose I don't even have to add that she's not very friendly.

I need a holiday. I need my baby back. What is it with all the uninspiring people?

butterfly boucher

Everything I know about Butterfly Boucher I learned in the last ten minutes. I've had songs of hers on compilations here and there, but never explored her beyond that. But after this weekend, I now am curious. There is a CD in my car that Little Kid likes. We don't use the car much, but when we do, in goes that particular CD. And we listen to this one song over and over and over again. This weekend, with the driving back and forth and in and out and round about, I figure I heard this ONE song about 75 times. Little Kid is a musical parser. She hears every instrument, listens to every nuance of the voice, notices when it comes in, when it curls around, when it waits. She wonders why this note is here and why that instrument is there. This song has caught her imagination and, now, it is seared into mine.

Butterfly Boucher:
- that is her real name
- from Australia, lives in the UK
- plays almost all the instruments
- her Changes duet with David Bowie is in the Shrek 2 soundtrack
- label snafus resulted in a 2006 album being released only this year
- she looks like a cross between Jennifer Garner and Cate Blanchett

twisted image

I am going to do somethng not very nice. I'm going to write about somebody I only barely know and then I'm going to say not very nice things about them. It's not because I hate them, or that they are a bad person or even deserve my rancour, nor is it because I have any kind of grudge. No, I'm going to do this because I am thoroughly fascinated by how this person got to where he is. Truly, it's a fairy tale, full of fairy dust and moon sprinkles and little elves making shoes in the middle of the night.

When I worked at a software gaming company for too many years not long ago, we had a communications director for a little while named Mitch Joel. He was a nice enough guy, if a little bland and obsequious. But he was alright, got on well with others in the sandbox, and managed to always look busy. Never mind that he never did any actual work. He blared music all day long, chatted with the shiny boys who looked up to him, talked ad nauseum about what he was going to do, and travelled to every techno and marketing junket available. He was that kind of guy. In a moment of downswing and shake up, he was let go. I can't say he was missed for more than a second. His actual contribution had been, as far as I could tell, nil.

Since then, however, he has fashioned himself, according to his own bio, into a "visionary marketing guru." Hello? He still doesn't seem to have an original thought in his head, nor a talent for real work, but boy can he market his pants off. He has published a book, won some awards, travelled the globe. It all looks so juicy and good on paper. But don't waste your money.

We don't need to hear about global warming any more - stories like Mitch Joel's are enough to let us know that civilisation is doomed. How did it happen that our society became one in which learning to "brand yourself!" was the way to success? How is it that, in the wake of one of the biggest and dirtiest financial collapses ever, we still respect white men in suits who are going to tell us everything we need to know about marketing? Aren't these guys the enablers of disaster, the ones who told the Emperor how cool he looked?

No offense to Mitch Joel, he's just another systems masseur. Guys with no particular talent (or with a hidden talent that they have chosen to ignore) but who have learnt how to massage the system for full benefit. Doesn't matter what the system is. He'd be equally adept in Pharaonic Egypt or Stassi-infected East Germany -- he plays by the rules and gets rich doing it. He's the Great Oz, booming his voice from behind the curtain, pretending that anything more than common sense is his own personal marketing concoction.

I guess Mitch Joel is happy. He's the little lost princess who kissed the right frog and suddenly woke up rich and popular. I bet it's a mystery to him too, how he got to where he is, how it is that anyone really listens to him let alone takes him seriously. Who am I to care that he has his own personal Rumplestiltskin spinning gold somewhere in his dank and lonely tower?

I guess it's every bit as fascinating as learning about those fish who live off the bellies of whales, or parasite viruses, or bed bugs for that matter. Apparently, after 10 years, the weight of a mattress is almost exclusively made up of bed bugs and their husks. How much does the weight of the Earth change if it filled with "gurus and visionaries" like Mitch Joel? If your intellectual environment includes Mitch Joel, just how many different types of environmental disasters are there? I suppose if you put 100 Mitch Joels in a room for 100 years you eventually end up with a Shakespeare play. Titus Andronicus surely.

And on that note, I leave you with my haiku on the matter.

Same old, same old toy
a bald man turns like a top
upside down he spins

la danse

First Lévi-Strausse dies - at the mûr old age of 100 - and now Frederick Wiseman has a new movie out. Vive les vieux or, as I'm sure the French would have it, vive les vieux cons.

Wiseman began his film career alongside cinema verité filmmakers such as the Maysles brother, Pennebacker, Barbara Kopple, and the NFB greats such as Michel Brault and the Challenge for Change program. This was a direct break from the patronising documentaries of the past, where omniscient narrators reinterpreted images and where formal interviews took the place of raw emotions. These films, often in black and white and about subject matter otherwise overlooked by mainstream producers, exploded with vitality and urgency.

One of my favourite of these filmmakers is Frederick Wiseman. Perhaps more than any other filmmaker of the time, Wiseman approached his subject matter with little preconception, letting his camera be written on as if it were a blank slate, faithfully following the minutae and characters of the institutions and contexts he was exploring. A contemporary example of his method would sort of be Michael Moore - if you removed the bluster, the ego, and the ideology.

We're used to it now, cameras everywhere and reality tv bringing even the most vapid of us out onto centre stage, but back in the 60s and 70s when Wiseman plunged his camera into dark corners, passively watching and waiting, we were shocked. Some of his films anticipated if not actually inspired real social change:

Titicut Folies, 1967, about inmates in an insane asylum.
High School, 1968, student life never looked so bleak.
Hospital, 1970, you don't want to get sick.
Juvenile Court, 1973, you don't want to get arrested.

There's dozens more but those are the only ones I've seen (and all of them in film class). Other titles seem equally evocative: Welfare, Meat, Sinai Field Mission, Model, Near Death, High School 2 (1994), Domestic Violence, etc. Most compelling title of all may be the 1971 film, I Miss Sonia Henie. Now that I'd like to see.

So, glad to see he's still alive and working. Even better, that he's made a film about that hothouse topic, the ballet. And the ballet in France, no less. Oh, la, la. I love dance, but I especially love ballet. It's the posture - I just can't get enough of good posture. He made Ballet in 1995 (according to Wikipedia), so I wonder what he's doing now that he didn't do then. I'll just have to see it to find out.

I'll walk, no run, no jetée to the cinéma!

harmonium

I love playing Harmonium in the morning, especially early mornings. Celine Dion may be who most people now associate with Quebec, but really the heart and soul of this province lies with Harmonium. And, more specifically, the dulcet, emotional, longing voice of Serge Fiori.

I was too young to appreciate them in the 70s, but I listen to them now and hear the background music of my childhood, the soundtrack of Montreal.

Pour une instant...
Just for a minute, I forgot my name
But that's what let me write this song
Just for a minute, I left behind my mirror
But that's what let me see myself better
Without hesitation, I dove into the dark
Caught like a wolf without hope
I lost time to make up time
I need to find myself, to tell my story

Pour une instant....

summer wine

The sun is glorious today though few birds are left to trill about it. Children dash back and forth, heavy backpacks not slowing them down one bit. Sidewalks littered with splashes of coloured leaves.
Here's a classic. The always underrated Nancy Sinatra, the too-often forgotten Lee Hazelwood.

sigourney weaver's acid test

This is fun to watch. Sigourney Weaver narrated a short documentary, Acid Test, about the growing acidification, and ultimate destruction, of our oceans. It is a chilling, if somewhat pedestrian, film. In any case, an important message. You can watch it here.

Here she is, however, on Fox and Friends last week, some American tv show. The two hosts, bolt upright and panting like puppies, try to get her to talk about Avatar, the new James Cameron film coming out in a couple of months. She plays a small role and they contextualize her presence on the show by referencing her role in the Alien series. But she wants to talk about Acid Test. And so she does. The male host is clearly vexed, while the woman is eventually gracious and asks a few questions about the film. It's just too much for the boy dog: "If you're watching at home ... clean up your plankton!"

tundra watch (great canadian websites): rabble.ca

Without even trying too hard, I find that I spell Canadian, buy Canadian, sing Canadian (I know all the words to the Canadian lyrics of This Land is Your Land. Yes, I even get choked up), watch Canadian, play Canadian (winter!), travel Canadian, eat Canadian.... you get the picture. I don't know if it's so much an articulated patriotism, as just a general warm & fuzzy feeling I have about this country. It certainly has alot to do with being the daughter of an immigrant, especially growing up in the expansive Trudeau multicultural years of the late 1960s and 1970s.

In those days, the story we told ourselves was that Canada was gentle, free-thinking, forward-looking, peace-loving, and open. The landscape was as wide as our hearts. My schools were always a thick mosaic of cultures and religions, my neighbourhoods a cacophony of languages old and new. Being Canadian was about embracing the world and embracing the future.

Flash forward to the new millenium and the story is no longer a fairy tale. In fact, fairy tales have been rejected in favour of committee-driven usability reports. Too many Prime Ministers cosying up to our neighbours to the south, not enough visionaries with either the will or the power to do anything about it. We waste our energies on inter-provincial fractionalism and resentments. And we've lost such huge manufacturing swaths that all that is left is dirty oil and we'll hang on to that even if it kills us. And baby, you know it will.

But we have to remember who we are and define what we want. With that in mind, Tundra Watch is my new weekly profile of great Canadian websites. Some will be small, others will be exhaustive trawlers, but they all will be great. Cause that's just how we do things up here.

The first website is Rabble.ca. They are, as they say, a community-supported non-profit media site. It's also the best source in this country for intelligent writing on domestic and international policy and trends. Pulling in writers from across the board, from both mainstream and off-the-radar press (Naomi Klein, Rick Salutin, Linda McQuaig, Heather Mallick, etc), it is critical, incisive, sometimes hilarious and always awesome. Rabble podcasts and RabbleTV also pull in and conglomerate clips on everything from the latest obscure conference to this week's featured Indie music.

It's all about the filter, it's all about you who trust and whose opinion you're going to give some weight to. If you want to go a little deeper, if you are willing to question the status quo, the party line and some creature comforts in the process, it's time to join the Rabble.

And if you still love turning your face up to catch the snowflakes, stick with me. I got one of those old wooden toboggans that'll kill your ass. But if you break something in the process we'll go to the hospital and fix it for free. Oh yeah. Tundra Watch has "Canadian-style" health insurance.