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Jack’s a solid character at 12

Record Breaker
By Robin Stevenson
Orca Book Publishers, 142 pages, $9.95

Reviewed by Marcie Gray

The moment I picked up this book of youth fiction, I thought, “How brilliant! A story about a boy who wants to break world records!” Brilliant, because I’ve found that if you have an emerging, reluctant reader of the male variety–and you want him to read something other than comic books, hand him a copy of Guinness World Records. He’ll snatch it up and quickly memorize who has the longest fingernails, who has swallowed the most knives, who has broken the most bones. So it makes exquisite sense that this book–about 12-year-old Jack and his quest to be famous–would appeal to its young audience.

But Victoria author Robin Stevenson’s novel is not just an accounting of weird and wonderful feats. She uses world records as a device to draw in readers and tell a deeper tale about love and loss and thinking beyond yourself. Stevenson grew up in southern Ontario; she sets her story there, during the Cold War world of the Cuban Missile Crisis and U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Amidst this global chaos, Jack faces his own family crisis. His baby sister dies. Now his mother can’t get out of bed, and his father offers little comfort. Breaking a record takes on more significance as Jack hopes to make his mother laugh and make his father proud. Plot spoiler: Jack eventually realizes to help his family, he’ll have to do more than devour 17 sausages in 90 seconds.

Stevenson sets a tough task for her protagonist, but she helps us believe he’s up for the job by giving him a solid, thoughtful personality and friends who are likeable for their quirks. The story is told in first person, which can be tricky for a writer, and occasionally Stevenson does slip into a voice that is too old for a 12-year-old. I also wonder whether my own 10-year-old son would understand references to “the bomb” and “nuclear holocaust.” Ask him about 9/11 or why airline security is so tight, and he’s quick with answers, but potential nuclear war is too remote.

A little more explanation on the history side might help keep young readers interested. While this book has tension, it still feels like a gentle read, as we follow Jack in his daily life in a small town. I enjoyed the pacing but I’m not sure the sausage swallowing and other exploits would be enough to keep my boy’s nose in this book instead of Harry Potter or Percy Jackson. It’s a safer bet that Record Breaker would really score in a classroom, with a teacher guiding along a group of young readers.

Marcie Gray has a background in CBC radio journalism and is at work on her own novel.

 

Play cures sweet tooth

The Golden Dragon
Theatre Inconnu until May 18, 2013
Written by Roland Schimmelpfennig
Translated by David Tushingham
Directed by Clayton Jevne

Reviewed by Leah Callen

When I sat down in the theatre, I had a bag of sugar-coated Fuzzy Peaches in my purse–candy that I sucked on as I walked to Fernwood. Little did I know the challenge my vice was about to undergo. The Golden Dragon is an avant-garde fable featuring industrious, ant-like workers in an Asian restaurant where everything is always served hot–whether it’s the Thai soup or the sex slave. Shiny woks and dark holes dot the abstract set as the cooks stir up trouble inside and around the Golden Dragon, a place where humanity hungers but is never satisfied. At times, the actors bang the woks with percussive force that is both dynamic and jarring: beware if you have hearing aids!

The story starts with a young Asian man howling with a fierce toothache. His whole mouth is black, perhaps because of his lifelong craving for candy or for home. His fellow chefs decide to yank out the tooth no matter what the consequence; we are quickly shown how all the little choices we make in life add up like ingredients in a recipe. A series of exploitative relationships play out as people will accept almost anything to relieve their emptiness. There are three kinds of patrons at this metaphorical restaurant: those who dish out pain to subdue their own, those who walk away from it, and those who swallow it.

An inventive retelling of Aesop’s fable of the hardworking ant and the carefree cricket takes such a dark turn that your mind will spin. It could even go so far as to represent capitalism’s exploitation of art. The Golden Dragon’s menu comes with a warning: beware of people who will chew you up like a cherry and spit you out like a stone. It’s all point of view: one man’s rotten tooth is another’s lucky dragon; someone’s pain tastes delicious to another.

With some clever, unexpected casting, actors express nontraditional gender. Michael Romano’s fragility as a stewardess and The Woman in the Red Dress was truly touching (he has a lovely voice). Mily Mumford straddled both innocence and arrogance as the Young Asian Man and the Barbie-Fucker. Blair Moro was the epitome of pathos as the pitiful cricket, his chopstick feeler ripped out by the unfeeling. Bingdon Kinghorn and Catriona Black spiced up the story with enjoyable Yang energy. It was curious how characters punctuate their dramatic speeches by announcing each short pause. It’s both comedic and heartbreaking, as characters hesitate to construct their truth. Is all life a script where we speak the lines we think we should or are we always genuine?

At first fragmented and unrelated, the scenes link eventually in heart-stopping ways. The real and surreal mix as the playwright heats everyone up in his paper wok. I just wish there was more of a hook at the beginning. The deceivingly prosaic set-up tries the patience somewhat. At first the fable came across as cute when it was anything but; the production builds up to beautiful choreography that is physical poetry.

Theatre Inconnu productions always stir up the audience emotionally and psychologically. The Golden Dragon challenges us to ask ourselves: are you a caged, self-destructive cricket or an angry, sadistic ant? It’s a warning to not fall into either of those holes. And after watching what happens to those who indulge their cravings, I think this play cured me of my candy addiction. For now.

Leah Callen is a poet-playwright-screenwriter graduating with a BFA any second now at the University of Victoria.

Four distinct visions in MFA show

MFA Thesis Exhibition
Visual Arts Building
University of Victoria Campus
Until May 11, 2013

Reviewed by  Dorothy June Fraser

Any kind of graduate show is going to be an interesting experience. Wandering from gallery to gallery requires a degree of care, as we shake off the intensity of one show in order to see the next. Overall, it becomes an interesting and transformational experience.

Yang Liu’s exhibit, All the Little Things You Left Behind, is built on small pieces, constructions of home and life and the little things that come to represent lived experience. He takes tiny objects and then rearranges these bits of life into larger forms, which he then photographs. The end result is a show that evokes both the architecture of daily life and the values that define culture. The divide between memory and object, construction and composition are present and at odds within Liu’s work.

Hilary Knutson’s Au Secours, drew me in as soon as I set foot in the room. Her approach included cross-stitch, needle-point and screen-printed fabrics, woven together with her virtual presence in the gallery via video. I loved the connection to feminist fibre and craft work that she invoked within the concrete studio setting. The inclusion of chronic pain gave voice to the  physical suffering that comes with art making and is rarely addressed in spaces which we associate with the “artist.”  By providing an alternative to the cold studio space, we see her personal workspace as productive and comforting, subverting the idea that there is one correct model of studio space.

Inside the Outside, despite an innocuous title, succeeds on several different aesthetic levels. Artist Chris Lindsay explores texture and structure as a means of conveying personal experiences. A constructed landscape forces the viewer to a supplicant’s role, stepping over the steel wires that hang on the ground. Across the hall is the sound installation of Lindsay’s that instantly spoke of individual experience within a larger network, reception of information and a larger interaction than the singular human experience.

Lindsay’s fabricated silk thread sculptures are painstakingly crafted: he strings several hundred silk threads through wooden forms to create a dazzling prismatic effect. All of Lindsay’s work vibrates, reminding viewers that frequencies differ between every individual person, every standpoint.

Paola Savasta uses sculptural forms to play with the space of the in-between where 3D objects need 2D representation and vice-versa in her show, The Heir. The sense of play necessary to cover a stool in a bathmat or faux fur provided an intriguing and surprising use of textiles that drew attention to expectations of these objects in daily experience. Soft, faux-fur lined cubicle shelf constructions of The Heir repudiate hard, Minimalist sculptural qualities. In a totally different aesthetic expression, her small end tables and 3D paintings patterned with colourful plaid build sculptures from everyday purposeful, flat surfaces. I think that Savasta’s work questions authority, experience and expectations of objects in the gallery space.

The visual arts students’ works provoke a questioning of everyday existence and suggest the possible (in)sufficiency of spatial reasoning to explain our surroundings.

Dorothy June Fraser is an MA History in Art student at UVic and the online gallery curator for Plenitude Magazine.

Video night experiment succeeds

Video Art @ Garrick’s Head Pub, Victoria, BC
Featuring works by Rick Raxlen, Janet Rogers, Scott Amos, Carolyn Doucette, Pamela Millar, Alejandro Valbuena, Constance Cook, Carrotkid Films, and Morgan Tams.

Reviewed by Julian Gunn

I recently attended an experiment. There were no electrodes involved, though electronics played a key role. Open Space Gallery, MediaNet, and the Garrick’s Head Pub hosted a showcase of local video artists.

The Garrick’s Head expansion crowns Bastion Square and has a friendly, over-scale feeling, with a mixture of ordinary seating and enormous banqueting tables attended by stools. Our party of three occupied a corner of one such edifice, facing the large screens arrayed along the south wall above the bar. Another filmmaker (not part of the show, but very friendly) and an artistic associate sat down across from us, and another pair of viewers joined us further down. There was a general sense of creative camaraderie. The evening was a little ad hoc, in that there were no printed programs, but Doug the MC very kindly lent me his script so that I could make notes on the titles and creators of the works.

The night began with Morgan Tams’ Killer’s Crossing, subtitled “A Pacific Northwestern”–a surreal cow-metal rock opera in miniature, with words and music by Brooke Gallupe (of the late lamented Immaculate Machine). Richard Raxlen‘s playful envisioning of Jane Siberry’s “Everything Reminds Me of My Dog” followed. Raxlen showed two pieces; the second was a visual accompaniment to “Mumbles,” the jazz tune known for its cheerfully incomprehensible vocals, a kind of virtuoso glossolalia. Raxlen’s jumpy, layered lines and half-seen figures worked similarly at the edge of interpretability.

The pub noise sometimes presented a challenge during the quieter or more verbal pieces. Victoria Poet Laureate Janet Rogers‘ contribution, Just Watch, used a simple juxtaposition to powerful effect. Tiny silhouetted figures crossed an unstable surface that seemed to rise and fall above a brightly coloured static scene. I won’t explain the trick of it here, since I found the disorientation so effective, but it’s worth seeking out. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really hear what the speaker in the video was saying.

Scott Amos‘ highly textured experiments in Primordial Soup stirred O’Toole to comment wistfully that it was “Very NFB,” and it did have the exploratory feeling of the golden era of NFB film-making. (A YouTube description notes that Primordial Soup is “an experiment with acrylic paints, India inks and drain cleaner on an old 16mm film.”) In contrast, Paul Whittington‘s L19 Disposed is a bleakly funny dystopian animation that accomplishes a lot of (non-verbal) storytelling in two and a half minutes.

Originally shown on Bravo!, Alejandro Valbuena’s Caffeine uses a cafe and the delicious drug it dispenses to frame dance sequences. My favorite segments reminded me of the risk-taking momentum of Québécois dance troupe La La La Human Steps. Caffeine was followed by Carolyn Doucette’s Little Plank Walk, in which live-action foraging to chanted vocals gave way suddenly and delightfully to experimental saxophonage and edgy animation. Pamela Millar’s Blue Minute Bridge is a metallic noise poem, a visual and auditory dissection of the Johnson Street Bridge, previously screened as part of the BC Spirit Festivals. The evening ended with Constance Cook‘s Anarchist Footwear, a playful depiction of a community’s feet that filled me with reminiscences.

Even with minor sound issues, the night was a success. Many of the video pieces shown are available online through YouTube, Vimeo, and other sources. I recommend that you look them up.

Julian Gunn is a local writer with eclectic tastes.

 

 

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.

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.

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.