Author Archives: gus

Egoyan signature concert intriguing, educational

Pianist Eve Egoyan,
With David Rokeby
Works by Egoyan/Rokeby, Alvin Curran, Erik Satie, Per Nørgård
October 13, 2012, Phillip T. Young Recital Hall
Reviewed by Kelvin Chan

I must confess that I have never been the biggest, medium, or even smallest fan of Erik Satie. Known as one of the most eccentric composers in the history of Western music, he composed in a unique, daring, sometimes downright weird style that puzzles the listener. For instance, where would you find tempo markings like, ”Again. Better. Again. Very good. Amazingly. Perfect. Don’t go too high. Without noise. Far off.”? The answer is The Crooked Dances, one of the two sets of three miniatures from the Cold Pieces that Egoyan performed at her signature concert. Oh, and they are actually easy listening in comparison with a majority of Satie’s output—that is, their mainly consonant, slowly changing harmonies blend into one another, and their brevity gives listeners a clear enough sense of Satie’s style without irritating the ear-drums too much.

But that was the latter half of the concert. It was obvious that the first half, which featured Surface Tension, a multimedia collaboration between Egoyan and her husband David Rokeby, was the main feature of the night. The concept behind the piece is intriguing: a disklavier, or computer interface for an acoustic piano, is connected to a grand piano, whose sound production sends signals to the interface and the laptop computer connected to it (controlled by Rokeby), and those signals will then generate visual patterns that are finally displayed on a large projector screen on stage. Sounds complicated, but it was a remarkable attempt to extend the role of the piano to a visual, as well as acoustic instrument. The work is divided into five improvised movements, and each of them supplies unique visual material for the pianist to work with. My favourite was the second movement, where each pitch class on the piano was mapped to a different colour in the projection, and where different intensities of sound produced circular shapes of corresponding sizes. As Egoyan’s blazing flurry of octaves and cluster chords culminated in an enormous wave of sound, the circles on screen spiraled into a violent whirlwind. Unfortunately the performance was then briefly interrupted by a technical issue involving Rokeby’s computer, but it was sorted out promptly and all was back on track before the audience lost too much of its concentration.

The fourth movement was another highlight in the thirty-minute piece, as three-dimensional blocks were used by the piano to construct a massive tower of abstract geometrical shapes. Throughout the movement, Egoyan appropriately varied her impromptus in register, dynamics, articulation, and even playing techniques (there was an instance where she elbowed the lowest depths of the keybed furiously). Egoyan’s wide array of touch treated the audience to a visual splendour of stunning colours, textures and moods. It certainly helped that the Steinway grand she played on, which was supplied by Tom Lee Music, had been masterfully tuned and voiced beforehand. Never in my four years studying at the School of Music have I heard such a gloriously sounding instrument—not to mention it was three feet shorter than the full-size Model D’s that reside in the recital hall.

What to make of the night, then? It was a valuable experience for those who haven’t been exposed to many contemporary works and sound installations. If nothing else, the diverse techniques employed in these new works allowed the capabilities of a well-prepared Steinway grand to be showcased in full glory. That, in and of itself made the night stay true to its spirit as a remarkable celebration—Satie notwithstanding.

Kelvin Chan is a fourth-year music student at the University of Victoria

Celona updates foundling narrative

Y

By Marjorie Celona
Published by Hamish Hamilton Canada, $30

Reviewed by Chris Fox

Marjorie Celona has updated the foundling novel for the 21st-century. Set on Vancouver Island, the back story of the abandonment, essentially that of the birth parents, is as developed as foundling Shannon’s story. Celona alternates events in the two stories with great skill to create a compelling, suspenseful narrative that finally unites both strands, and in doing so offers characters – and readers – penetrating insights into what constitutes “family.”

Celona’s novel gives a postmodern meta-nod to Tom Jones and like its foundling, Tom, Shannon has a lusty appetite for food: “I don’t want to eat at all if I can’t eat like a wild animal.” However, there the resemblance ends. Unlike Tom, Shannon’s appetite disappears at significant times, and is more likely to extend to illicit substances than to sexual adventures. Readers follow the contemporary foundling (and her sometimes unreliable narrative) as she is moved from one “at-risk” placement to another, finally arriving to relative safety with Miranda and her daughter Lydia-Rose. Here, Celona effectively captures the naïve, strangely confident demeanor that accompanies the troubled, but determined, 16-year-old Shannon’s first steps into independence.

Because there is suspense in this story, I hesitate to give too much away; however, it is no surprise that a child who’s been abandoned wonders how and why she was left and seeks the identity of her biological parents. Shannon’s drive to “find the why” of it all takes her to the Y(MCA), and to the hard-knock downtowns of Victoria and Vancouver. Her earlier traumas make her vulnerable to others, but though Shannon still hurts herself, she has, miraculously, developed a strong sense of self-preservation that impels her to flee the greatest dangers.

Shannon is also lucky. Her luck is that she attends to key pieces of advice given to her by her strongest mother, Miranda, a kindly social worker, and a street musician. This faculty (and the Times Colonist story of her birth) leads Shannon back to Victoria’s YMCA and to Vaughn, the man who witnesses Shannon’s mother leaving her four-pound preemie newborn at the Y’s doors at sunrise. Vaughn is Y’s guardian angel, a weight trainer at the Y. He is a seer, and one who believes he can affect how the future unfolds. Vaughn helps Shannon with her quest by giving her nourishment, mobility, wisdom, and companionship.

Celona’s writing, more gritty than lyrical, makes this compelling tale believable, keeps us reading long after bedtime because we care about Shannon and we want to know what happens. In part, it’s Celona’s use of concrete detail that draws us in. For Victorians, it’s also satisfying to read about “our town” written by a local writer. Celona was a graduate of UVic’s star-studded Creative Writing Program before gaining an MFA from Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. Y’s characters drive in and out of Victoria along Douglas Street, as have we all, passing the Ukrainian Cultural Centre, the Mayfair Mall, and Thompson’s Foam Shop. She also captures the liveliness, friendliness, and desperation of the Dallas Road and downtown park night life as Victoria’s homeless and addicted meet and share drugs. Celona’s vision is empathetic and compassionate; she enables readers to understand the innocence with which horror can arrive and destroy lives.

But she doesn’t leave us there. Shannon’s life begins again – signalled by a clever repeat of the novel’s opening paragraphs – and this time she is more solidly and consciously a part of the family that has been hammered out in the forge of her coming of age quest.
I had to “Add” Celona to my spellcheck as I wrote this; I recommend we add her to the Canadian literary canon as well. Y is a worthy Giller nominee.

Victoria resident Chris Fox just completed a PhD in English, with a focus on Canadian literature. She has been published in The Malahat Review, Ariel, Atlantis and Studies in Canadian Literature

 

Barton’s new book embraces 30 years of writing

For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Collected Poems

By John Barton
135 pages, $19.95
Published by Nightwood Editions

Reviewed by Julian Gunn

The late-September launch of John Barton’s new collected poems, For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin, was so packed that one latecomer had to crawl in behind my seat. I’d just finished browsing the wall of local authors, my favourite part of Cadboro Bay Books. I was sitting down to consume an enormous rum ball when this stranger lay down behind me. I felt suddenly shy and oddly responsible, as though only the uprightness of my posture could prevent this extra person from being flung out into space.

There are two great stops on the Greyhound route of a poet’s published work. (Forgive me – I just got back from a trip up-island.) There’s the Selected Poems and then there’s the Collected Poems. John Barton’s a little young for a Collected, but he’s a major Canadian poet, and For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin, his selected poems, is certainly due.

Boy is drawn from nine earlier books and four chapbooks spanning more than thirty years of published work. Barton’s reading explored his career-long commitment to the fearless expression of what we could call a homo-aesthetics, exploring bodies of land, of water, and of flesh. He opened with “Watershed,” from 2001’s Hypothesis, then moved backwards to “Hidden Structure,” an early poem in which the speaker struggles towards an authentic expression of his desire for men.

Between poems, Barton told us he often advises other poets that they “repeat too much.” Yet John himself has a knack for arresting repetition, a kind of imagist insistence on a particular utterance and its echo: “I arrive at the sea. It repeats me / repeats me” (“Hidden Structure”). This gift found a powerful expression in the one new poem Barton read. The poem, a meditation on the circumstances of Omar Khadr, is a variant on the sonnet. The word “know,” initiated in the first line, recurs in each line that follows, beautifully unravelling our confidence in knowing itself.

Some of my favorite Barton poems are in this collection. “Ecology,” from 1994’s Designs from the Interior, is almost an ars poetica for Barton’s particular merging of landscape and eros: “I loved you / with a passion I could not call love, // instead called ecology.”
There is also less sublimated eroticism in Boy. There are stories of pickups, brief affairs, tenuous loves, often wryly described. In “Aide-Memoire” the speaker caustically lists former lovers like self-marketed products. Yet the language of the poems is infinitely tender, so that they seem less like gritty documentary and more like sacred texts. Transcendence constantly threatens to break through. So a poem about a one-night stand, “The Man from Grande Prairie” ends with the admonition that we “must learn / to stop, learn to carry this darkness / toward each other with unblaming hands / of light.” Barton chose not to include any new poems in Boy, so this collection has a kind of finality, but we can expect this dual offering to continue, transmuted into new forms.

Julian Gunn is a Victoria writer of both poetry and personal essays.

 

Writing, music, feminism “saved my life”

KATE REID (www.katereid.net) is a critically acclaimed Canadian singer-songwriter. She was recently interviewed by local writer/musician Andrea June. Reid performs Sunday, October 14 at 4 p.m. at The Well, 821 Fort Street. (Tickets $20 at the door)

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CS: Your music focuses primarily on queer experiences, from mournful songs about violence to the hilarious “Only Dyke at the Open Mic.” While you proudly promote this focus, media coverage and also points out that your music is for “everyone.” Who are your audiences? Has this evolved over the years?

Kate: While my audience is primarily queer-based, I also have an enthusiastic audience of people who are not in the LGBTQ community — people who identify as heterosexual and who enjoy my music because they see the social relevance of it, enjoy the humour and the stories and understand that the lyrics are more universal than at first glance. My audience has definitely evolved over the years partly because — besides playing PRIDE festivals and queer music venues — I also perform at folk music festivals and other festivals where the bulk of the audience is from outside of the LGBTQ community. Perhaps my audience has also diversified over the years simply because people are becoming more open-minded to LGBTQ issues — that is one of my hopes anyway.

CS: You have three albums out now: Comin’ Alive, I’m Just Warming Up, and Doing it for the Chicks. Yeah, you’re pretty much a Canadian dyke icon at this point. So now that we’re alive, warmed up, and doing it, what’s next?

Kate: Ha ha, dyke icon? I don’t know if that’s true, is it? The project that I’m currently working on is a musical-educational project. It’s comprised of a 17-song recording plus a kit for educators, focusing on the harmful effects of bullying, homophobia and heterosexism, as well as celebrating diverse genders, sexualities, people, families and communities. The idea of doing this project came to me when I met a woman at a folk festival who was pulling a wagon with two kids behind her. My wife knew her and they were catching up after a number of years of not seeing each other. My wife inquired about the kids, asking if they were hers because they looked very similar. The woman laughed and said that one of the children belonged to her and her partner and the other child belonged to another lesbian couple, and the reason why the children look similar is because they had the same father, they share the same donor dad. When I heard this, my mind just starting racing, thinking about all of the possibilities of families out there, especially in the LGBTQ community where the decision to have children has to be a well-thought-out, planned decision. I went home that day and wrote out a list of all of the possible family combinations . . . it was a long list. The concept for this album was further cemented in my mind as a project I needed to do because the two children I am helping to parent tell us they sometimes have difficulty in school explaining why they have two moms and don’t have a father. They have to explain what a “donor dad” is and sometimes they get teased for it. I realized that children growing up in the LGBT community don’t have any children’s songs that relate to their families and the things they may experience because they have gay, lesbian or transgendered parents. I thought it was time that I wrote those songs for them. So, I put out a call to interview children and their parents and then conducted close to 40 interviews with children and their LGBTQ parents and wrote songs about some of their stories and experiences. Then, I realized that if I combined my B. Ed with my musical career, I could create a really cool kit for schools that brought these stories and songs into the classroom. So, besides recording the songs, I have been developing lesson plans, activities and projects to pair with the songs to teach about LGBTQ families. This project is set for release in 2013.

CS: You also offer workshops for secondary and post-secondary schools aimed at teaching students about oppression and stereotypes, with regards to gender and sexuality in particular. What led to this initiative?

Kate: I wanted to offer these because I love working with youth and have done so for many years as a teacher, community support worker, youth camp coordinator and teaching assistant. I aim to bring awareness into schools about visibility for LGBTQ people and the different kinds of oppression. I want youth to discover the benefits of self-expression through writing – that it is a way to heal oneself, to tell one’s story and to heal others in the telling of that story. Writing, along with music and feminism, saved my life and I want to pass that on to youth who may be struggling to figure themselves out. Writing our stories can help us make sense of ourselves, our lives and how we fit into the world around us.

CS: It’s hard not to focus on the “activism” aspect of your music, but you also have an awesome voice — the pure, resonant tone of Joni Mitchell, with the powerful delivery of a rock musician. You keep calling yourself folk-country, but I think you may be in the closet as a rock musician. How did you start playing music? What inspires you, musically?

Kate: Ha, you figured me out! I am a closet rocker. I love classic rock and certainly listened to lots of it in my childhood and youth, from early 50s rock ‘n’ roll to 60s psychedelic rock and 70s classic and glam rock, but I also really love acoustic guitar and I like being a solo artist. My first record was Linda Rhondstadt’s Living in the USA. I played it on my Fisher-Price red and yellow turntable when I was around seven years old . . . I started singing when I was really young — in my Christian school choir and at summer camp. Our school music teacher taught us Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus from The Messiah. It was incredible to sing that as a child. I loved the sound and the feeling of all of our voices harmonizing together. When I was young and identified as a Christian, I used to think that was what God felt like. Now I know that that is what it feels like when people come together and sing, sharing their voices and souls with each other. I would love to sing in a choir again someday.

Later on, I discovered folk artists like Peter, Paul and Mary. I also listened to Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, The Beatles (and, I have to state for the record, I’m not a Beatles fan anymore), and lots of 80s pop and rock, which I still love! I discovered Bob Dylan in high school. I loved his writing — even though I didn’t really get it at the time – it was unlike anything I had ever heard before. Tracy Chapman’s first hit Fastcar got inside of me. Her voice was so different and the lyrics spoke to me even though I was a white, middle class kid living in rural Canada. In university I was hooked on Joni Mitchell’s Blue for an entire year. I also loved Court and Spark. My sister introduced me to the Indigo Girls and I loved them. I knew they were lesbians and when they were singing about love, and I remember feeling intrigued and uncomfortable at the same time, but I kept listening. Then, I discovered Ani Difranco and wham, I was hooked on women’s voices. She sang about stuff no one was singing about. Blood in the Boardroom? A song about women and bleeding and power? I was mesmerized and empowered. When I discovered Ferron, I knew I’d found something important, someone who could write her soul. I will always be a huge Ferron fan. I also listen to lots of classical music and new age stuff with birds and waterfalls and shit like that.

CS: Quick — if I gave you a million dollars, what would you do with it?

Kate: If I had a million bucks, I would build a one-room adobe cabin in New Mexico (so I could get away and song-write) and a straw bale house on a few acres in BC (to live in) and then open a shelter for queer homeless youth (turn it into a non-profit ) so they could have a safe, supportive, LGBTQ place to live while they finished schools and started to figure out their next life moves.

Click Here to Watch a Live Performance

A humble apology to that magnetic strip

An Editorial By Matthew “Gus” Gusul

Now hear this: To the audio cassette, I hereby say a heartfelt, “SORRY!” And I regret it has taken me 16 years to realize my error.

At 14 I became a dedicated vinyl collector when I discovered how beautiful it is to put the needle down on some hot wax. I am talking 33s and 45s. (I did not venture into the sub-genre of weirdo – The 78 Collector.) Simultaneously, I started an all-out war on any other audio format: digital, compact disc, 8-track, or cassettes – all were trash!

But in May I bought a 1982 Toyota Tercel, mint condition if I overlooked a scratch or two. Nestled inside its dashboard I found a fully functioning cassette deck. Bonus. So my wife Liz and I hit the Salvation Army and the downtown Victoria record stores.

Here’s the collection we found:

I am not saying that cassettes are the best audio format; Vinyl still holds that position for me. But some music is meant to be listened to on cassette because it simply sounds better. Musicians and producers used all their skills to make their songs sound good on that tiny magnetic strip encased in a plastic shell. Thanks to my little blue car, I am discovering that music all over again.

Take Journey’s Departure: you have not listened to Any way you want it until you hear it loud and proud banging out of my 1982 speakers . With Journey at full volume, my car is not simply a way to get from A to B; it is a time machine. I can relive the 80s while travelling from Mayfair Mall to Elk Lake on Pat Bay Highway at 75km/h.

Next, The Clash. Wow – just wow. There are so many classic songs on this tape: I fought the law, Career opportunities, Garageland, White Riot. Liz and I yell the Garageland lyrics as loud as we can — “I don’t want to hear about what the rich are doing” — while driving our 30-year-old car through the streets of Cordova Bay or Oak Bay.

A couple of weeks ago I reluctantly turned 30: I felt like I was having a funeral for my twenties. But then I got this brand-new, plastic-wrapped (still with Zeller’s $4.95 pricetag) version of REM’s 1987 release Document. Yup, I gave it to myself. I’d bought it in May and had yet to open it. So, it became a birthday present from 29-year-old Gus to 30-year-old Gus. Listening to such a great cassette turned out to be a fantastic treat. When REM recorded It’s the end of the world as we know it, The one I love, Odd Fellows Local 151, they were envisioning people — perhaps even me! — listening to it on cassette.

Needless to say Guns ‘n’ Roses, Dire Straits, and Bon Jovi all sound great on tape — something I’d never have known without my Tercel. (Note: The Madonna cassette belongs to Liz.)

Maybe this article should be called something like “Ode to the Cassette” or “Kids, throw Away your iPod and Grab your Walkman.”

Matthew “Gus” Gusul is The Coastal Spectator’s Online Editor.

Courageous writers come clean about mental health

Hidden Lives: Coming Out on Mental Illness,

Edited by Leonore Rowntree and Andrew Boden
Published by Brindle and Glass, 264 pages, $24.95
Reviewed by Arleen Pare

The well-known Dr. Gabor Maté writes the book’s foreword. He also writes a back cover blurb which describes Hidden Lives as “(a) privileged if uncomfortable close look at one of the most devastating of human tribulations. For all the honesty of its revelations, Hidden Lives communicates not despair but courage.” These key words, privileged, tribulations, and courage pretty much sum up the reader’s experience. I was keenly aware of the privilege I was being afforded, each page allowing me to regard the details, the emotional pain that mental illness brings to otherwise everyday lives. The tribulations are sorrowful. The courage shines through.

Because I spent two decades working in mental health offices, and because my niece has a serious mental illness, I am personally and professionally familiar with many issues described. Nevertheless, I was riveted. Every story gripped me; I had to keep reading. Each story surprised me with unexpected detail. In “Elm,” Shane Neilson writes “Well, once I wrote poetry. I fell ill. The poetry was in some way intrinsic to the illness. And now I don’t write poetry.” This is an association and a loss I could not have anticipated. Nor could I have expected, in the opening story, “Bad Day,” Joel Yanofsky’s hopelessness about his young son’s future to be so complete that he would welcome the world’s end after reading about an asteroid’s trajectory toward Earth. These are intimate illustrations of the effects of mental illness, the sadness of this human tribulation.

Each story/essay is different not only in terms of point of view (many are written by family members), writerly skill, and proximity to the experience, but also in terms of diagnostic type, intensity of illness, and range of symptoms. Symptoms vary, including threats to others, suicide, or inability to care for self. The results, though sometimes temporary, are often devastating for the individuals with mental illness and for the families who live with and care for and about them.

The order is interesting too. Sometimes a raw piece of writing is juxtaposed against a piece of polished, perhaps professional, writing. At first I thought this structure would be jarring, but in fact, the variety and arrangement worked. Hidden Lives is less about the quality of writing, than the impact of the telling. Even when the writing is raw, maybe especially when the writing is raw, we understand the courage it has taken to put that story on paper. I suspect if all the stories had been polished, the book’s impact might not have been so profound. And it was profound.

After I finished the book, I suggested that my sister, whose daughter has mental illness, might want to read it. She loved it. The sense of support, of not-being-the-only-one-going-through-this-on-her-own, was gratifying. She understood the privilege, and the courage. She understands the hiddenness of mental illness, and she now feels the need to hide a little bit less. Each writer has hidden a little bit less by writing his or her story. This is their courage. Each reader will understand in their own way, and will learn from this book.

Arleen Pare’s most recent book is Leaving Now, published by Caitlin Press

Spirited memoir rejects victim stance

My Leaky Body

By Julie Devaney
Published by Goose Lane Editions,
342 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Jenny Aitken

It takes skill to centre an entire novel on bowel movements, and in My Leaky Body, Julie Devaney does just that. This memoir chronicles Devaney’s battle with ulcerative colitis, from her initial diagnosis to the surgery removing her large intestine years later. Devaney is unflinchingly honest about her inflammatory bowel disease, describing in detail the humiliating enemas, invasive treatments and the hours spent imprisoned in her own washroom.

I was hesitant to pick up this book, thinking, why would I want to read about that? The first few pages showed me I was wrong. Devaney’s conversational tone and dark humour makes her subject accessible, offering the reader an unfiltered view of her passage through the health-care system.

In her early twenties, Devaney attempts to juggle her diagnosis while dealing with the normal stresses of relationship, social life and grad school. Explaining her absences to professors, Devaney meets both hostility and suspicion. She worries, “I’m afraid that people will think I’m faking it – exaggerating to get attention – or, worse yet, that I’m actually ill and someone to be pitied.”

As her symptoms worsen, Devaney must decide whether to continue living in Vancouver or to move in with her family in Toronto: “I’m terrified of staying in Vancouver. But I’m even more afraid that people will be mad at me or judge me for giving up.” Although she wants to stay in school, the lack of support or understanding from her department make this impossible. After much pleading from her family, Devaney moves back to Toronto, acknowledging that she can’t be a full-time student when she is still a full-time patient.

Readers travel alongside Devaney through the overcrowded hospitals and frigid exam rooms. We are with her when she is left in a broom closet because there are no patient rooms available, or when a resident continues a procedure despite her screams that the drugs haven’t kicked in. We are outraged when she is accused of faking and exaggerating her pain, and shocked when she is left for eight hours after a surgery without being allowed to see a doctor or her family, and triumphant when she removes a tampon for a procedure in front of a disgusted medical student.

This memoir does not simply recount one dreadful medical challenge after another; instead we see Devaney when she is just being herself – planning her wedding, visiting her friends, enjoying DVD marathons and even starting to consider chronicling her experiences for this very memoir.

After finally receiving a surgery to remove her large intestine, Devaney questions how to feel sexy with a colostomy bag. Her insecurity builds until her husband makes love to her in a hospital shower.

Despite her harrowing experiences, Devaney remains good-natured throughout, never asking “Why me?” and instead focusing on how she can create positive change.

After recovering from her surgery, Devaney creates a critically acclaimed one -woman show; adorned in a patient’s robe, she recreates some of the most painful and humiliating moments of her life. Devaney also begins providing health-care workshops, to prod doctors and hospital staff to develop more respectful bedside manners.

Through her humour and frank honesty, Devaney demonstrates the importance of viewing patients as human beings rather than as broken bodies. This memoir is not just about illness, or the health-care system or therapy or love. It’s about all those things; it’s about being a patient without being a victim – and it’s about unceasingly rejecting the label “broken.”

Jenny Aitken is a UVic writing student

Antimatter Film Festival 2012

Antimatter Film Festival
October 12 to 20, 2012

Antimatter is celebrating 15 years of subversive cinema with a new venue, more democratic price structure, and the great programming audiences have come to expect from this long-running festival. From October 12 to 20, festival-goers will be
treated to performances, installations and screenings of feature-length and short films from as far away as Iran, Finland and Japan.

This year’s nightly screening series will take place at The Vic Theatre, a 200-plus-seat venue with a 24-foot screen, great sightlines and top-notch projection and sound. Each screening will have pay-what-you-can price structure, allowing more cinema-lovers to enjoy the diverse offerings at Antimatter. Cinephiles will find environmentalism, music, documentary, found footage, analogue techniques, collage and much more in this year’s Antimatter program, which runs the gamut from poignant to provocative.

Screening highlights include features such as Alex MacKenzie’s 16mm performance Intertidal, which draws on inspiration from ’40s marine scientist Ed Ricketts and French filmmaker Jean Painleve to explore the life on BC’s shores and The Great Northwest, Matt McCormick’s retracing of a road trip conducted by four Seattle women over 50 years ago, using nothing but a long-lost scrapbook as his guide. There is also an eclectic mix of short works, such as Craig’s Cutting Room Floor, a film made entirely of single frames discarded by underground legend Craig Baldwin; A Tribe Called Red and Ehren BEARwitness Thomas’ Woodcarver, created in response to the murder of John T. Williams by a Seattle police officer; Manhole 452, a fictional account of the dangers of San Francisco’s manhole covers, and over 100 other films. Many of the films presented at Antimatter are local, regional, or global premieres.

In tandem with Antimatter’s screenings are two installations. Salas… (cartel series), which will be found in the lobby of The Vic Theatre, is an excerpt from Julio Orozco’s “Movie Houses of the Past, Projections in the Future,” wherein the Tijuana native used his photos of the city’s disappearing cinemas to create fictional film posters. October 13 to 27 at Deluge Contemporary Art is Methods for
Composing Random Compositions, where Adán De La Garza uses non-musical objects to elicit 17 different sound performances; De La Garza will be on hand to present the video pieces and discuss his work. Also at Deluge is The Ride, a short film about Vienna’s “Prater,” an urban amusement park.

Antimatter is also excited to be hosting Home Movie Day on October 20, where there will be a screening of Tourist Season, a collection of vintage films of Victoria from the 1930s through the 1980s—and if you have your own Victoria home movies you’d
like to share, be sure to get in touch.

Screenings are a $5–$8 suggested donation; installations are free. Full schedule and program guide available at locations across Greater Victoria, or online at http://www.antimatter.ws

Connect with Antimatter on Facebook for the latest news and updates:
https://www.facebook.com/AntimatterFilmFestival
Volunteer at Antimatter!

We need energetic and dependable volunteers to help out at screenings, events and installations. Earn valuable karma points, see innovative media art and meet artists from around the world!

Call 250 385 3327 or email volunteer@antimatter.ws<mailto:volunteer@antimatter.ws>

Birdwatching revisits unnerving relationship

Blackbird, the preview
Theatre Inconnu (Oct. 5 through 20)
Written by David Harrower
Directed by Graham McDonald

Reviewed by Leah Callen

Blackbird, written by David Harrower, is a psychological drama in which two people flirt dangerously with the past behind a closed door. Una, who lost her virginity at the tender age of twelve to middle-aged Ray, confronts him in a room fifteen years later. Based on true-life sex crimes, Blackbird comes across as both disturbing and genuine.

Two utilitarian tables echo the twin beds in the hotel room where the couple once had sex; fast food wrappers litter the floor. Una contorts mentally before her abuser as they re-taste the past. The tension that binds her to him is palpable. Ray still remembers the subtle cues that trigger Una. He hums and haws and acts small to draw her closer.

Una’s body language conflicts with her words. While she lectures him on social codes, she perches on a table with her legs open to him. I found the pose unnerving. Jess Amy Shead plays Una with a Lolita-esque undertone that feels authentic and unsettling as the character flutters between anger, fear, disgust, and titillation. Something black in Una wants to be seen by this slouching Svengali, by the stare that first drew her in. She’s torn between the desire to poke his eyes out and to be stripped by his passive gaze.

Ray, played with creepy casualness at the preview by Ted Phythian but since replaced by Director McDonald, spends the play watching his bird, looking for a way to seduce her again. He resists his natural instinct for a second or two, but it kicks in. Her appearance makes him thirsty; she reacts with a thirst that seems unquenchable. He’s trained her to sing the tune he wants; he’s the classic predator who only feels sorry for himself.

The plot unfolds with rough, verbal foreplay. An old ease/unease creeps into the atmosphere like a match being struck. What’s most shocking is Una’s choice to stay in this metaphorical cage with Ray. She grimaces as she applies lip gloss, putting up with his poison. She could leave at any point, but there’s so much she needs to say, to shout out into the fluorescent flicker. A blackout jolts us into Una’s shoes. In the dark, we feel her fear and vulnerability on a primal level as she struggles on stage. I could not quite believe in the garbage play-fight between the two characters, designed to show the childlike level at which they meet.

Perhaps playwright Harrower was riffing on the old folk tune If I Were A Blackbird. This play could be a dark twist on that romantic sadness: a maiden abandoned by her first love, wishing to follow him as a blackbird wherever he sails. Unfortunately, there is nothing romantic about what Ray did to Una. The little girl just wanted hugs and chocolate, but he assaulted and abandoned her in the middle of nowhere. He was imprisoned for a short time, but we wonder if Una will ever be released. This play takes an unflinching look at sexual relationships, at the people we think we love but for our own good should let go.

Leah Callen is an aspiring poet-playwright-screenwriter studying at the University of Victoria.