Are there any adults left at Tiff? The other day I went to a screening in a movie theatre on the top floor and noticed that they branded that entire floor as “Varda”. There were menus on the tables, in the vaguely public area outside the restaurant by the same name, advertising Varda’s offerings. I’d be very surprised if Agnes Varda or her estate allowed Varda’s name to be used for a commercial enterprise. But here we are. There is a restaurant, of all things, in the Tiff building called Varda.
The reason though that I wondered if there were any adults left in the organization was that said restaurant advertises a happy hour in honour of Varda’s film Cléo de 5 à 7. Anyone who’s seen this film will know that the five to seven period covers the time the protagonist is waiting to hear from her oncologist. She is waiting to see if she has cancer or not. Even if Cleo had ended up not having cancer, this would have been a bad association for any cinq-à-sept happy hour. Cleo however does have cancer, although it’s less advanced than she feared.
Come try our discounted drinks while awaiting the verdict from your oncologist?
Community papers are a thing of the past, right? Not in my part of town, which has 2 printed community papers in circulation.
What is going on? They have ads and everything. I doubt that they pay their contributors (the Contact Us page on the Bridge website does not mention any compensation) though I did see a Christopher Hume column about the rough shape of King East in the last issue of the paper. I expect he volunteered it.
(He is right though, King E. is in a bad shape and where it’s developed, it’s overdeveloped (the SAS, the Globe and Mail behemoth), whereas around Princess St. a developer just killed and boarded up all the business and is doing nothing with the block for the longest. There are bits of Queen East that are dead like this, and not only around the new Ontario Line construction site in Moss Park: it’s the SE side of Queen E at Parliament St, for example, that’s deader than dead.)
Banned Books and the Brilliant Authors Who Write Them: I discovered this lecture series by Ira Wells at Hot Docs Cinema very late and only made it to the next-to-last lecture, which was about Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. It was a beautifully structured image-supported talk that began with Atwood as a young writer getting her first reviews and early press coverage, then spent a chunk of time on the creation and reception of Tale itself, to finish with the present day echoes of the novel and Atwood’s own activism for freedom of expression. I did not expect to hear the mention of Trudeau government’s freezing of the convoy supporters’ bank accounts on this occasion, so that was fun; the silence was, ahem, pregnant as the denizens of the republic of Annex listened to Wells compare that recent event with Gilead freezing women out of the banking system in Handmaid’s Tale. The talk concluded with an excellent 15 min segment on the Bill C-63 and why it’s a bad idea. The only quibble I had was that at 2 hours with no audience interaction or a Q&A, the lecture felt too long. If there’s no time for a proper Q&A, get maybe only 3-4 questions in each time?
An unexpected addition to my Solo Chronicles:
Deborah Levy’s Real Estate was a delight. We’ve seen so much fragmentary autofiction and confessional nonfiction lately that I almost didn’t pick this up, but the Levy auto-bio mini-series is a different kettle of introspection. Not as bourgeois as Cusk, not as spaced out as Offill, Levy’s writing is materialist and looks at the place that real estate and money occupy in a working writer’s life. A lot of us have dreamt of a certain kind of house and Levy the narrator keeps building up her (un)real estate dream, adding new bricks and new fantasy items over the decades. It’s time to grow up however, and stop dreaming about a magic house on a magic hill. It will be the empty-nest flat in an aging tower block in London, and writing residencies (one in this book is in Paris), and writing sheds on friends’ properties, and invitations to holiday stays. We meet some of her friends and learn of their troubled marriages, observe her getting propositioned by a much older already partnered Frenchman, follow her daughters attempting independence from their mother’s benevolent micromanagement. Levy’s own divorce after 20 years still echoes, but not loudly.
The trouble was how to live a creative life in old age.
And
It seemed to me all over again that in every phase of living we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves.
And
I was thinking about existence. And what it added up to. Had I done okay? Who was doing the judging? Had there been enough happy years, had there been enough love and loving? Were my own books, the ones I had written, good enough? What was the point of anything? Had I reached out enough to others? Was I really happy to live alone?
So much this. And a little later:
My fifties had been a time of change and turbulence, energetic and exciting. A time of self-respect and perhaps a sort of homecoming. So there you are! Where have you been all these years?
Announced as Ken Loach and Paul Laverty’s last collaboration (the director is apparently retiring), The Old Oak will not be remembered as one of their best. The story of a Syrian refugee in the fallen-on-hard-times Durham has all the usual Loach-Laverty mannerisms: sentimentality, high minded political statements shoehorned into the dialogue, principal characters who all but directly talk to the camera to tell of their predicament, the mythologizing of the miners’ way of life, and where would the drama be without the exaggerated and condensed baddies. There’s also a small dog being mauled to death by a larger dog for no clear dramatic purpose. The handful of beautiful scenes in which Syrians and local Durhamians bond through art, eating together, and grief, are alas not enough to save the film. For a better one on the topic of how to create solidarity between immigrant/refugee newcomers and the local dispossessed and under-employed population, see Loach-Laverty’s 2007 drama It’s a Free World.
It’s not clear what the point of this book is. I love the idea of Kara Swisher: a pint-size, dead serious, no-nonsense tech journalist who is well-connected to all the major players of the tech pantheon and also a San Francisco lesbian of a certain age with a penchant for leather jackets and sunglasses in all weathers. But we get all that swishology and more from her many podcasts now, hosted either solo or with the pod partner Scott Galloway. And any semi-regular Swisher listener would have heard her say many times that she doesn’t like books: they’re too slow (and too slow to digitize, which is, she believes, the future of everything that can be digitized), no one reads anyway, and she wasn’t going to write any ever again. But she did—apparently this deal with Simon & Schuster includes another book to come—and I’m not sure why. There are some good anecdotes here about Elon, Zuck, Bezos and Murdoch, but they’ve mostly been told before. The apocrypha around her time working for John McLaughing is also well known (“Many people have stabbed me in the back, but you have stabbed me in the front. I appreciate that, Kara!” “Any time, son of a bitch.” Etc.)
There is almost nothing about Kara outside work, and the sum total of the information about her two main relationships—the first with a top Google executive, later an Obama administration appointee, with whom she had twins, and later with a writer and editor who birthed her two much younger kids—could be assembled in a page or so. There is a lot of “I foresaw this problem for company X” and “As I told Elon/Mark/etc. back then”, but not a lot of practical solutions on how to deal with the tech-created problems, though some EU agencies get the nod. Most disheartening of all, Swisher’s politics seem stuck in 2016. I took a peak at her Twitter TL the other day, and she’s RT-ing people who call the recently-resigned NPR old-timer Uri Berliner a whiner and a fake. And the other day on her podcast “On with Kara Swisher” I heard her going nuclear on Jonathan Haidt for suggesting that the sharp rise in trans-identification in teen girls might be the result of social contagion, girls’ greater suggestibility and the influence of social media. What sharp rise, what social contagion? Nothing to see here, Swisher insists, and moreover anyone saying that is parroting the homophobes of yore. Oh Swisher. Maybe take those sunnies off from time to time.