Author Archives: Andrea

Films worth revisiting: The Fog of War

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
Directed by Errol Morris; Starring Robert McNamara as himself

Reviewed by Joshua Zapf

This 2003 Sony Pictures Classic opens with some black and white footage of former United States Secretary of State Robert McNamara preparing for a press conference.  It then shows a wartime montage played back to sweeping strings and stressed flutes. From that point onward, the film’s tension  never abates. Fog of War is an interview with McNamara, President of the Ford Motor Company and former President of the World Bank. It is a history lesson that does not sidle around difficult issues and involves a man who, with determination, lived an amazing life burdened with decisions that, right or wrong, caused his vilification.

“Any military commander who is honest with himself will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He’s killed people unnecessarily–his own troops or other troops–through mistakes, through errors of judgment. A hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand. But, he hasn’t destroyed nations. And the conventional wisdom is ‘don’t make the same mistake twice, learn from your mistakes.’ And we all do. Maybe we make the same mistake three times, but hopefully not four or five. They’ll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. You make one mistake and you’re going to destroy nations.” –Robert McNamara

Fog of War viewers follow eleven lessons from McNamara which range from “Empathize with your enemy” to “Maximize efficiency” to “You can’t change human nature.” Viewers step into the war room and hear the conversations of John F. Kennedy and McNamara during the Cuban missile crisis. Viewers become privy to the startling facts of how close mutual destruction came to the nations of Earth.

Director Errol Morris shifts focus to McNamara’s early life and the initiation of the Second World War. From there we witness a whole new side to the Pacific Theatre. Bravery is bested by statistics: tackling fuel efficiency so that more sorties could be run overtop of Japan, the mathematics behind using firebombs that burned Tokyo to the ground. For those who knew only the nuclear attacks on Japan, to see the loss of life based solely on firebombing is startling, gut wrenching and physically chilling.

At times the montages of fire, bullets, personnel, and explosions that overlay McNamara’s narration feel heavy handed. They make his voice seem unwavering in the face of deciding the fate of others.  Yet, that is the basis of this film. To see the face and logic of someone rationalizing the decisions of war–where the freedom of some outweigh the deaths of others. What makes Fog of War so compelling is McNamara’s penchant to look inwards, without guidance from Morris, to ask himself the most difficult moral questions. Such honesty coupled with humanity is what should beat in the heart of leaders, and here we see a man who doesn’t shirk from responsibility–knowing his job would leave him a monster.

The movie visits McNamara’s time with Ford and the introduction of the seatbelt–McNamara figured he could save upwards of twenty thousand lives. Morris then begins to shift the focus towards the Vietnam War, but stops in at John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Whenever Robert McNamara’s confident voice cracks from pressure, falters in lieu of teary confession, when Philip Glass’ soaring original score lifts McNamara’s voice so that we can feel it more than hear it, Fog of War is at its best. It educates, empathizes, critiques. A more touching and fear-rousing documentary may not exist.

Joshua Zapf loves rediscovering movies from the past. 

Double Feature at Spiral, Victoria

Jennifer Louise Taylor & Born in Cities (formerly called Auto Jansz & Andrea June)
7:30 pm, Saturday, May 4
Spiral Cafe, Victoria, 418 Craigflower Road
Suggested $7-12

Join us for an evening of folk, jazz and indie-pop originals–and your old favourites to sing to!

Jennifer Louise Taylor has toured Canada and the US, and been a guest studio musician for CBC national radio. From the acoustic roots tradition, her songs weave a tapestry, both fun and meaningful. Focus Magazine describes Jennifer Louise Taylor’s “velvety contralto [as] magical.”

With a combination of guitar, piano, accordion, and precise and powerful vocals, Born in Cities plays a fresh new sound they call “Cabaret Folk,” one that made them 2012 Vancouver Island Music Awards nominees (Auto Jansz — Female Songwriter of the Year; Andrea June — Female Vocalist of the Year). These lively performers have impressed audiences from BC to Germany.

Everyone welcome. Invite friends on Facebook here.

Timberlake entices with glamour

 Justin Timberlake
The 20/20 Experience (RCA Records, 2013)
Produced by Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Jerome “J-Roc” Harmon

Reviewed by Chris Ho

Lights up on stage right. Trails of cigarette smoke. Stage curtains drawn, revealing the dapper string section of the orchestra. May I present to you: The 20/20 Experience.

The first track instantly introduces the glamorous 1950s New York throwback, which is then infused with the familiar R&B pop sound that is unmistakably Justin Timberlake. And with some exceptions, the mixture of these elements essentially encapsulates Timberlake’s latest album, The 20/20 Experience.

Having been on a musical hiatus for six years, his highly anticipated comeback couldn’t have been classier. If painting the town with your friends in a stylish suit and tie getup wasn’t already on your list of priorities, it soon will be. Timberlake brought sexy back with the previous record FutureSex/LoveSounds, and now, he’s bringing classy back with The 20/20 Experience. In particular, “Suit & Tie” grooves in a way that could only be suitable in a select number of clubs. The clean and soulful sounding vocal melodies are paired with relaxed, finger-snapping beats, and topped off with a classic interjecting trumpet line. It seems as though Justin Timberlake disappeared from the music scene, only to reappear with a newfound Sinatra-esque edge, and an old big band to back him up. And yet, somehow, his music seems even more original (and perhaps experimental) than ever.

Timberlake has always tended to instill his work with a generous amount of vocal layering and pleasing harmonies, but never before like this. Between the strategically placed string parts, interesting electronic sounds, and soft backup vocal lines, the production of the album puts the listener in a head-bobbing trance. The brilliance of this comes in the fact that it’s difficult to pick out the specific musical elements that create this effect, because it’s ultimately the overall exceptional production as a whole that does it. Although, at the same time, the interesting electronic sounds found in tracks like “Blue Ocean Floor” and “Dress On,” certainly seem to stand out in a very tangible way.

An album that incorporates very classic musical elements while staying true to the artist’s creative integrity and trademark style generally tends to be audibly enticing. Such is the case for Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience, which gives us the familiar, the old, the new, and then some. The particularly striking tracks include “Suit & Tie,” “That Girl,” “Pusher Love Girl,” and “Blue Ocean Floor.”

Chris Ho is a UVic graduate and Victoria-based singer-songwriter.

Vancouver author to read at downtown library

Save this date: Thursday, May 9, 2013, from 7 to 9 pm

Canadian author, editor and teacher, Betsy Warland, will be reading from her latest book, Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing in the central reading room, in the downtown branch of the Greater Victoria Public Library, as well as sharing tips on writing and publishing. Warland’s presentation will be followed with light refreshments and an opportunity to network and brainstorm GVPL’s role within Victoria’s writing community. Register online or call your local branch for more information. Registration begins April 2. Presented in partnership with the Community Arts Council of Greater Victoria.

Vagabond’s melodies extraordinary

Jeffrey Michael Straker
Vagabond (2012)
Produced by Danny Michel

Reviewed by Blake Jacob

Vagabond is the precisely arranged fifth album of singer-songwriter-pianist Jeffery Michael Straker. Jeffery “swears he was born under the piano on the family farm” in Saskatchewan, and his experience shows. The album is a flawless work of art, skillfully produced by Canadian multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter Danny Michel. Straker’s music is sometimes described as “piano-folk-pop-cabaret,” which proves how impossible it is to label him with any particular genre. The variety of moods in his music is refreshing. From the high energy and flamboyance on “Sans Souci,” to the gentle, wistful sound of “Burn The Boats,” this album is consistently delightful to the ear. It begged an immediate second, third, and fourth listen.

Vagabond is noteworthy because of its impeccable presentation of an array of extraordinary piano melodies. A particular jewel on Vagabond is “Myopia.” It is a surprising up-tempo track full of lilting, light piano work contrasted with power vocals. “Raven” has the swelling chorus for the entire audience of a sold-out concert hall to sing along to. So does the “deep down, deep down inside of my soul” of the chorus of “Rosetta Stone.” Straker is skilled at pulling heartstrings. “Birchbark Canoe” heals and breaks the heart at the same time with memorable climax and cadence and a woefully sung, “maybe we’re better off as friends.” Straker is an excellent vocalist, displaying variety in a seemingly effortless way. His skill is especially apparent on “Cathode Rays,” where his voice ranges from gravelly to silvery to wonderfully tremulous.

Interestingly, Straker is a descendant of Beethoven by six degrees of student-teacher lineage. Perhaps the magic of innovation connects them. Vagabond is easy to become obsessed with because it is so expert and unique. After you hear it one time, be prepared to listen to nothing else for several months . . . maybe indefinitely.

Blake Jacob is a Vancouver Island poet whose essential nutrients are optimism, wordsmithery, and captivating melody.

Novel captures effects of genocide

The Imposter Bride
By Nancy Richler
Harper Collins, 360 pages, $29.99

Reviewed by Chris Fox

Nancy Richler’s The Imposter Bride is a haunting, often beautiful, read. It offers history and insight into human relations as it explores how the two shape each other in this story of one woman’s search for the mother who left her, as an infant, to be raised by her father and his family.

Most of the novel, Richler’s third, is told from the perspective of this woman, Ruth, as she grows up in the warm embrace of the Jewish immigrant family that her mother, posing as Lily Kramer, married into before fleeing Montreal for Canada’s hinterland to protect herself. Little Ruthie is hurt by her mother’s abandonment, which her father cannot even begin to explain. At thirteen, at a family Seder, she asks why this mother, whose periodic gift of stones seems to both affirm and to grieve their bond, is not there with them. When her father answers that they “really don’t know,” Ruthie sets the course that she will run when she has become Ruth, an experienced mother herself: “Then maybe I’ll have to find her and ask her.”

This primary narrative unearths itself almost like a mystery while Ruth’s seeking also provides the raison d’être for a layered narrative, based in Montréal, but also reaching back to Amsterdam, Poland, and Palestine during and after WWII. In particular, Richler’s deft development of the back-story of Ruthie’s two grandmother figures, which are brought together, initially, by the imposter bride, is heart-warming. Initially, both are quite unappealing characters, but as they befriend each other and share their stories, readers will find themselves befriending them, too.

Richler’s rich tapestry of characters allows readers to share several diverse stories of Jews who, like the grandmothers, escaped Europe earlier to settle in Montréal, as well as immigrants like Ruth’s mother, who came later and is beginning again, post Second World War, bereft of relations, with only a stolen identity and her dream of “Canada.” Her first impressions of Canada’s endless “dark forest” and towns that are “mere specks in the eye of the desolation that surrounded them” recall accounts by Susannah Moodie a century before and also mirror the impossible losses that haunt “Lily” and underwrite the novel as a whole. In Ruth, and her children, we see Canadian Jews discovering their heritage in order to live more fully in the present. This makes The Imposter Bride an excellent springboard for consideration of the effects of war and attempted genocide and how these horrors distort individual lives and reverberate through generations. Richler’s novel is filled with adroit and apposite prose that, paradoxically, holds its own stone, a respectful silence, at its heart.

Chris Fox is a Victoria writer who recently completed her PhD in English.

Essays capture author’s past and present

Gabriola Island resident George Szanto writes fiction, including mysteries, and nonfiction. His most recent book is Bog Tender: Coming Home to Nature and Memory, a moving collection of essays about time, personal history and the natural world. Szanto was a university professor at McGill University in Montreal for many years but is also an inveterate world traveller. His most recent novel was The Tartarus House on Crab, which (full disclosure) Lynne Van Luven edited. He’s a past winner of the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a National Magazine Award recipient. He recently answered Van Luven’s questions about Bog Tender, released in March 2013 by Brindle and Glass Publishing of Victoria.

George, you quote both Henry David Thoreau and Garson Kanin at the outset of your book. Can you comment on Kanin’s observation that “we do not remember chronologically, but in disordered flashes” and its relationship to the way you organized this new book of essays?

I’ve wanted to write about the bog on our property, and about some of the moments that have been the most consequential in my past life. They seemed like two completely different projects, until I found a structure for the bog narrative—since the bog changed so much over the year, I decided to follow its transformations for a twelve-month period. Then slowly, as I thought about each month, it became clear that many of those important past moments could be associated with specific months. Then it became relatively easy to let the months of the year give order to those past bits. On my website I cite the words of one of my favourite writers, Samuel Beckett: “To find a shape to satisfy the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” Kanin says we remember in disordered flashes, and he is correct. But to write a memoir as a series of disordered flashes would be not only uncontrolled, but deadly for the reader. So what I was looking for was a structure that rang true, a kind verisimilitude of disordered remembering, and it became the shape to satisfy my messy memories of past life.

When I finished reading Bog Tender, I thought that it represented rather elegantly the thoughts of a contented man who has lived his life well. Would you say that is accurate, or just a horribly mawkish misunderstanding?

The only misunderstanding there is that you put it in the past tense: I am still living my life well—or at least hope I am. It’s been a very good life, and continues to be. Though I had hoped to be able to write full time and make a living off it from the moment I received my BA, that was not to be. So I spent many years teaching at universities, which I often enjoyed—interaction with often very smart students—and sometimes had a harder time with— noxious administrations and toxic bureaucracies—but wished all the time that I could be writing and making a full living off it. When I retired it became clear that I didn’t need to make writing my financial livelihood, but I could write full time. And I’ve been doing that, and with great pleasure.

When I first saw the title of your book of essays, I took the word “tender” in the sense of loving something tenderly.  Now I see you mean it as in “caring for, attending to.”  Do you think attending to the natural world comes more essential to writers as they age?  If so, why?

I know a number of writers who, as they age, become less and less interested in the natural world. Far from attending, they prefer to avoid it. Personally I couldn’t do that—the natural world (and sometimes even the unnatural world) has been too important to me over my lifetime. Sometimes I find beauty and peace in nature; sometimes too, I have to add, I find squalor and corruption. But the latter two come mostly with the help of some of my fellow humans, both the aging and the young. And then nature truly needs tending.

I’m glad you ask about the title. The original title was Tending Bog, which I liked because it seemed more active. But then it was pointed out to me that if I called it Bog Tender I could bring in, with the pun, the tenderness, the gentleness and fragility of the bog. What never occurred to me, but was pointed out by the National Post reviewer, is that “tender” has a third meaning: tender is money. So I can say my wealth lies in my relation to the bog—it is my liquid tender.

George, I know you always have more than one work on the go. Tell me how many different books you are writing right now, and talk a bit about your writing methods.

For the most part, I find it uncomfortable to talk about present projects; if I talk about a book I’m working on and explain it well, then somehow I come to feel I’ve told that story and now I don’t have to write it. But I can talk about the book Sandy Duncan and I have just finished, the fourth in our Islands Investigations International series, Always Love A Villain, set on San Juan Island. We’ve dealt in the three previous novels with art forgery, transgendering and corrupt sports practices. Villain deals with plagiarism and other forms of intellectual theft. Aside from that, I’m at various stages in two novels of my own, different from what I’ve done in the past. One is an international caper story, the other a large family saga.

As to writing methods: when I’m in the midst of a project I try to write every day. I used to be able to do this for as much as eight hours a day. Now if I can do five, I’m lucky. We have on this property both our house and our guest cottage. The guest cottage is, as you know, on the other side of the bog. I head out to it between 10 and 11 in the morning—in the book I call it my daily commute—and get to work. This usually involves reading and re-writing what I’d done the day before, which also gives me the momentum to continue from there. I do a lot of re-writing, both as I’m going along and after the first draft is done. I know many writers can’t stand rewriting, but for me it’s one of the most rewarding aspects of the project. Writing is hard, facing a blank page or screen. Rewriting becomes a matter of shaping what’s already there, and that gives me great pleasure. I even enjoy (sometimes) cutting, when I can see that the elimination of what might be wonderful passages (but not part of this book) will make the story stronger.

I’ve only been on Gabriola Island a few times since I moved to the West Coast, but it seems to me that you bring your corner of it to life in a most convincing fashion. Do you, like Thoreau, now “derive more subsistence from the swamps  . . . than from the cultivated gardens in the village?”

A cultivated anything is a project that’s already done. I get pleasure in the making process, stepping into the unknown, trying something new. Swamps and bogs hide secrets, under their waters they contain mysteries, maybe dangers, much that is invisible to the human eye—often it’s the nose that begins to ferret out all that concealed material. That’s what makes the caper and the family stories intriguing for me—I’ve never tried those kinds of projects before. At least not in print.

Force Field launched at Planet Earth Poetry

Victoria launch of Force Field: 77 BC Women Poets
Sunday, April 28, 6 pm
Planet Earth Poetry at Moka House
1633 Hillside Ave, Victoria

“Every poet in this book is a force field unto herself. You’ll find poems that communicate openly, poems that sleep naked, wear veils, lick icicles, boil kettles dry. All we asked was that the poems be alive, a daring adventure, a kiss in an open eye.” — Susan Musgrave, Editor

Join the event on Facebook.

Poet’s first book brave and fierce

1996
By Sara Peters
House of Anansi, 65 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

Sometimes you need a poet who will lead you into the dark woods without promising to bring you back to safety again. Sometimes you need a poet who will show you the decomposing bear at the edge of the river—and the kids placing red gumdrops along its spine.

Sara Peters is this poet, and this exceptionally brave and fierce first collection left me shaken. Every poem is surprising, though Peters never uses the same trick twice. Often I found myself holding my breath for multiple poems at a time before she turned the knife in my gut. Peters was born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Boston University and was a Stegner fellow at Stanford University from 2010 to 2012.

The first poem, “Babysitters,” sets an appropriately eerie and mysterious tone for the collection. At the end of the poem, I realized the rest of the book would consist of things parents would never talk about in front of their children.

A foreshadowing:

. . . But when she thinks herself
alone, you hear back seat of the car, then
with a trench knife, in the orchard. Secrets thud
like June bugs against screens,
and all you have to do is let them in.

The collection consists of six sections with five poems each, which provides a pleasing sort of symmetrical reading experience. Peters’ controlled lines work best when they slowly release distilled moments and the rhythms provide an almost incantatory effect:

She didn’t mean to braid the horses’ manes and tails
hundreds of times with so much élan—French, four-stranded—

but up was the only unoccupied direction,
so how else to get there? And always

these questions: Who set those fires?
Who broke those mirrors? Is that your blood?

Peters’ poems often have narratives and through them she tells stories of teenage nostalgia, physical attraction, heartbreak, family, religion, nature and the body wearing down. She is skilled with a knife and handles heavy topics with impressive emotional restraint.

From “Bionic”:

My brother’s twenty-two and therefore believes he’s bionic.
He’s home from school,
he’s supposed to look after our mother for the week.
She’s senile and probably dying.
He’s cruel but his cruelty’s probably temporary.

He’s dressed her in a T-shirt that says
I kill everything I fuck // I fuck everything I kill.
She stares into a bowl of cornflake milk;
I carefully cover my breakfast in ketchup.

My brother is funny and blunt.
Whenever I say something sentimental,
or talk—for example—about the ocean,
he says, You know what?
You should write a poem about that.

While there were points where I thought Peters tried to tackle too much within a poem, I won’t soon forget the haunting details and alarming imagery. This is a collection of secrets, a photo album of things not meant to be photographed—and we should be grateful for the chance to look.

 

Jenny Boychuk has just completed her BFA and is thinking about her future.