Saturday, March 31, 2018

Unsane

Stephen Soderbergh shot this intense, polished thriller in just 10 days on a budget of only $1.2million — entirely on an iPhone camera. That becomes a matter of theme as well as medium.
  The speed of production results in a breakneck narrative pace. Heroine Sawyer is swept out of her normal life into an imprisonment and abuse she can’t stop or resist. Her plunge plays against the security of her desk job — appraising commercial loan applications for a bank. The plot unreels in scenes of high tension and explosions.
Her career in fiscal analysis is undermined by that assault on her sanity. The title is telling. This is not about the insane — the state of madness — but about the absence of sanity. The neutral state, the unsane, doesn’t necessarily denote the presence of a madness, the insane.
The iPhone also gives each shot an immediacy and closeness. Whether in the streets, in the woods, in the ward, or in a car trunk, Sawyer is right here — which means we’re right there with her. The medium is the agent and the emblem of her vulnerability.
We eventually realize our tracking shots of her put us in the perspective of the stalker she (possibly irrationally) suspects of following her. We’re on her line.
Sawyer learns of her friend Hoffman’s torture and death when Strine leaves the shot on a cellphone under her pillow — along with her mother’s wedding ring. Killing his rival and his target’s mother advances his plan to run off with her. 
It’s also a film of voices, intimating secrets whether of passion or of dread. Close voices, like you get on a cell phone. The film opens on the obsessive Strine’s voice, heard in the forest where he will later trap Sawyer. As with the intimacy of the tracking shots that put us into his position, he recalls the blue she wore when he first saw and fell in love with her. 
In their confrontation in her solitary cell, Sawyer undermines Strine’s power by voicing his secrets, then demanding he bring down and rape the inmate whom Sawyer knows to have a concealed knife. 
The iPhone medium lends weight to these scenes of voices. Significantly, Sawyer’s mother complains that Sawyer has not engaged in close conversation since her father died. At work a colleague suggests a voice of honey might work better than one of vinegar. That works for her against Strine in the solitary cell. 
In the last scene Sawyer is again taken over by a voice in her head, which draws her close to killing an innocent man she takes to be the dispatched Strine.
When Sawyer meets a one-night stand she makes him promise never to try to see her again. But that precaution doesn’t suffice. Out of fear of being stalked, she recoils even from him. 
She moved to the city to escape a stalker, but even at the end she’s haunted by the sense she is someone’s prey. A brief scene with her predatory boss supports that sense on a more realistic plane. Being paranoid doesn’t mean one is not being threatened. Here Sawyer is actually someone’s prey — despite the fact she has a neurotic sense of that. And she may be unsane but not insane.
Revealing Hoffman to have been an investigating journalist evokes Samuel Fuller’s classic, equally efficient B thriller Shock Corridor. There too the main character, an investigative reporter, is maddened by the world he entered to expose but that now won’t release him. This time the facility allowed by the new tech enables a fast addition to the Me Too movement, revealing a woman living a paranoid anxiety that's actually rooted in her society.
     Always a dab hand at genre films, here Soderbergh proves the Hitchcock genius of turning the latest technological advance to thematic purpose. 

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

The Death of Stalin

The title and plot stress the death of Stalin but the film’s primary thrust is the birth of another tyranny. The dictator gives way to the oligarchy. 
This film takes Stalin as a starting point to reflect upon the current advent of the community of obscenely wealthy exploiters of government office, world wide. As democracy retreats, the oligarchs advance. 
As in his earlier film In the Loop and the successful TV series he wrote, Veep, director Armando Iannucci plays a political drama for very broad satire and even broader, wildly inventive profanity. High drama plays out with astonishingly venal characters. Ideals are just something to violate. 
The film is probably accurate in its depiction of scurrilous backstabbing and manoeuvring for position in the wake of Stalin’s death. 
But Iannucci is not interested in the narrow details of that history. His real subject is the mechanics of unprincipled politics, specifically how naked self-service betrays all principle under the false pretence of patriotism. 
That’s why none off the characters make even an attempt at a Russian accent. Iannucci wants the drama to reflect Western society not just Russia.
The two lead Americans, Jeffrey Tambor and Steve Buscemi, play variations on their familiar roles — the pathetically insecure arrogant and the sour, playful killer, respectively. 
The rest of the cast is British, as are the film’s general irreverence, farcical pace and knockabout comedy. Iannucci doesn’t even try to make this seem Russian. The Russian specific points out to every other world government that uses patriotism as the lipstick on its pig hunger for power.
  The film shows more cruelty than a farce normally does. At first, the torture, assassination and mass arrests play around the margin of the action. Beria’s proclivity towards rape is tossed off by his telling a guard to bring in a mattress and to wash the girl. But his sadistic murder moves the inhumanity of the dictatorship to centre stage.  
The frightened guard speaks for all soldiers too scared to get involved in anything: “Should you shut the fuck up before you get us both killed?” The medal-heavy Marshall Zhukov speaks for all arrogant generals: “Right, what's a war hero got to do to get some lubrication around here?” 
This Khruschev actually steals a line from The Sopranos. When Stalin’s son says he wants to speak at the funeral Khruschev responds sarcastically “And I want to fuck Grace Kelly.” Uncle Junior’s choice was Angie Dickenson. Smarter. 
As in so much of the world today political disappearance and worse are a constant threat. Stalin has eliminated all the good doctors, for fear of them poisoning him. When the conductor orders the symphony to stay, to repeat their performance, he has to assure them: “Don't worry, nobody's gonna get killed, I promise you. This is just a musical emergency!”
       So too Stalin’s son’s vehement demand on his fumbling national hockey team: “Come on, play! Play better!” Zhukov’s medals evoke Kim Jong-un’s and his generals’ blinding arrays, or Trump’s glittering array of bankruptcies and lawsuits. Similarly, Andreytev reports getting a call from “The Secretariat of the General Secretariat. Of the General Secretary. The Secretary of the General….” Politics is a layering of empty authorities, pretending to values and significance. 
The chaos in this Kremlin tempts us to read it as a funhouse reflection upon Trump’s White House. That certainly works. But the film — and its source comic book — must have been in the works before Trump’s presidency was known for its disorder, corruption and incompetence. 
     If it has proved prophetic, it’s because Iannucci realized that such oligarchic dictatorship is not unique to post-Stalin Mother Russia but a world-wife phenomenon. You can find it in Putin’s Russia, North Korea, Syria, China, Trump’s ambition, indeed wherever patriotism proves the last refuge of the greedy tyrant. 

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

A Fantastic Woman

The title corrects Marina’s description by Sonia, Marina’s newly dead lover Orlando’s ex-wife. Sonia calls her a “chimera” because she can’t wrap her head around the idea of a trans-sexual. So, too, her son Bruno’s sneering “I don’t know what you are.”
Sonia expresses the ostensibly civilized response to the woman born with a male body. That’s slightly better than Bruno and his friends who confront Marina with vulgarity and violence. “Chimera” suggests an unnatural monster. Marina’s brother-in-law, though restrained by her sister, is only a little more accepting of her. Orlando’s brother understands and respects their love — but, with his damaged leg, he can’t stand up to Sonia.
 Rather, Marina is “fantastic” — a superlative creature in her sensitivity, generosity, emotional openness, warmth and even a blazing talent. The term includes the “phantom” of her transcending her congenital physicality—but goes beyond that. She is arguably the most fantastic character in the year’s world cinema — justly awarded the Best Foreign Film Oscar. (Having seen only The Square and Loveless, I didn’t think I’d say that.) 
The narrative is framed by Marina’s two singing performances, which show her transcending her loss and abuse. In the first, Orlando attends her club performance of  a bluesy ballad. The lyrics dismiss her recent lover as outdated as yesterday’s papers. It’s a sensual, witty performance by an apparent woman. 
The film closes on Marina performing a magnificent aria by Vivaldi, called “The Bride is Despised,” beginning in long shot then closing in till the singer fills the screen — and us — with her emotion and beauty. 
Both songs work in context. In the first, Marina enjoys a romance contrary to the song’s pretence to disruption. If its articulated loss anticipates Orlando’s death, the words are even more ironic because Marina can’t put Orlando behind her like yesterday’s news. His family won’t let her — not properly grieve him, nor properly move out of his flat. While Sonia denies her any farewell, Bruno and his friends assault her criminally.
The end lyrics summarize Marina’s alienation from Orlando’s family, their wholly unwarranted hatred and bile. She is the “bride” they despised and abused.
  But her magnificent contralto voice shows her soaring beyond their minuscule minds and hearts. Her performance shows her transcending the world’s unfair rejection, and the loss of her lover, to achieve a magnificent success as both a woman and a singer.
  Orlando’s family turns physically threatening and initially even deny her the couple’s dog Diabla. (In that family the devil has to be a woman.) The police process seems calculated to humiliate her, declaring her distinctiveness as guilt.
Orlando died just as Marina was moving in with him. So his death compounds her emotional loss with complete deracination, homelessness. Her search of his sauna locker for a lost document gives us — and her — hopes for a will that might somehow secure her. That proves a blind alley. 
     Ultimately Marina’s survival is based wholly on her own strength of character, virtue, ability and will. 
In one brilliant shot the naked Marina has a small mirror over her genitals — showing her face. The face shows the woman Marina knows she emotionally and psychologically is and was born to be. The police define her by the male genitalia she still carries, but that mirror — and her indomitable sense of self — know better. This film may help us come to that understanding too. 
But confident I’m not. After the film, the cowboy-hatted senior at the next urinal volunteered: “That’s the worst film I’ve ever seen.” So, too, Trump ignores the magnificent contribution that some 15,000 transgender soldiers have made to America in insisting on his ban against their service. 

 

Memorial: An Auction Reunion










     I got a great deal at the auction last week. And no GST.
     The sale of antiques, art and Canadiana was at the DeWinton Community Hall, a shade south of the Calgary city limits, where the hills snuggle up to the clouds and the downtown towers look almost ready to start fading from view.
     Although I was familiar with auctioneer Sheldon Smithens from city sales, I was intrigued by the elderly gent in the brown ranch-cut suit who relieved him. That was the veteran Larry Irvine. When Larry took the mike, he recalled that Sheldon's mother Rae clerked his sales 41 years ago and he was delighted to work with her now.
     Larry is your old-style auctioneer. His hypnotic stream of price and prattle pulls in your overbid before you can stop. He remembers what he sold Mikado tea sets for, 30 years ago, so you're all thrilled at the bargain today. He won't pretend to like something he doesn't. Besides, that scratched pine school-desk finds its price and buyer whether the auctioneer likes its memories or not.
     The name was familiar from my first life in Calgary, before I left in 1963. But there could have been several Larry Irvines. Since returning six years ago I've delighted in my old contacts and sites. My new wife teases me for living in the past. I say that's the privilege of age: Playback is my payback.
     When he stepped down for Sheldon's return I beckoned Mr. Irvine over to the side, behind the richly carved Victorian armoire:
     "Did you use to sell real estate in the 1950s?"
     "Yes, why?"
     "You sold my parents our first house in 1950, then our second three years later."
     "Well, let's see now. What's your name?"
     "Yacowar, but you wouldn't remember us. You had lots of customers."
     "No, I remember."
     I assumed he was being professionally polite. Like waitresses who half-smile at my jokes. Or young Wally Buono, when I started to recall old-time Stampeders. But Larry continued:
     "It was on 12th Avenue."
     "Yeah. 12th Avenue East."
     "Then I wanted your father to buy a house further out. Sam said no, it was too far, his asthma, he couldn't get to it. But I told him it was a good deal so he bought it."
     "That was our third house, on 33rd St. and 17th Ave. S.W."
     I'm astonished that Larry remembers my family at all -- but all those details! How big a memory can a frail body hold? Larry's recall pours out as if I've pulled out a cork.
"Your house on 12th, the lady who was selling, she was Scottish. What was her name?"
I help him reach:
"Gourlay."
"That's it! Mrs. Gourlay. She was asking $15,000. This one man [Larry names him]slapped down an offer, 14 cash, but she said no. She didn't like him. I showed your dad the place and he wanted to get it for 12. I thought she'd take 13. 'See if you can get her down to 12,' he said. I said, 'No, I'm not going to. If you want to offer her that, then you go tell her.' So he did. She finally let him have it for 12-five."
     That happened in 1950. One closure among -- how many that year?           That's 51 years ago but Larry digs out the details as if he's reading from a diary.
     "I'm amazed at your memory!"
     "If you ask me what I had for breakfast this morning, maybe I couldn't tell you, but things back then -- clear as a bell."
     "You were our family's agent. You were our friend."
     "Sam's sister -- Sara, and Morris -- I found them houses. Zeke [their son] comes to see me sometimes. Bobby [Zeke's late wife] she was a wonderful person."
     "I have this vivid memory. When my folks decided to move from East Calgary, Dad asked you to come over. I remember you had a blue bruise on your thumb. You'd hit yourself with a hammer or something. I was fascinated by your blue nail."
     "I remember that. A woman slammed a door on me."
     Larry is well along his 80s. He left real estate for auctioneering. When he retired he did stone, then wood carving. Now he has just bought a leather sewing machine so he's making things in leather. On his DeWinton farm he raises prize-winning horses and chickens. A plaque on the community hall acknowledges his work for local charities. He has had his health problems -- cancer, open-heart surgery -- and he lost his wife, but Larry Irvine is very much alive, in hand, mind and memory.
     "Thanks for coming up to me," he said. "So many of my friends are gone, it's good to connect like this."
     Suddenly this congested 59-year-old professor was that East Calgary eight-year-old again, fascinated by this warm, generous man, more colourful for his bruises. And he was suddenly back as our family friend, when he shaved his commission to close a deal.
     I got a few bargains (with GST), although not as many as the young mother beside me. But meeting Larry Irvine after 51 years was the best deal of the sale. Two human antiques rubbed memories and came out gleaming. Renewed. Maybe that's what memories are: the lemon oil for the handyman-special stage of life.

Monday, March 26, 2018

Oh Lucy

Oh Lucy may well have set a record for the number of suicides in a romantic comedy.  Normally there would be…[sound of calculator] um, yes, approximately none. 
Here we start with a citizen’s suicide in the underground, another one reported soon after, then climactically two failed attempts. One is by the beautiful young niece, the other by the mousey middle-aged heroine. And the son of the man who saves her killed himself too. 
      Oy Lucy. Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn this ain’t. The suicides punctuate a panorama of lives lived and wasted in quiet desperation. 
The film’s title and trailer carried not an inkling of the darkness in this “love story.” A repressed Tokyo office worker discovers her wild side when she falls for her young American English teacher and follows him out to sunny California. From the moment she adopts her new American name of Lucy and dons the crazy Harpo blonde wig, love and hilarity ensue. Spoiler alert: Nope.
The clues come early. Our first view of “Lucy” is behind the white face-mask that connotes fear of infection, fear of contamination, fear of life.  She witnesses the first subway suicide and hears about the second. She’s uncomfortable and cramped in her office job, a room of exposed desks, where even her eventual humiliation plays out in public. 
Her stunted emotional life dates back to her first love, whom her sister stole and married. Lucy’s sex with Tom avenges that, though at her niece’s emotional expense as well as Lucy’s sister’s. 
It’s hard to sympathize with Lucy. She’s duped by her flighty niece into (over)paying for the English lessons. After tutor John departs, the dashed Lucy explodes at her colleague’s retirement party, brutally and pointlessly exposing the sham sentiments of the occasion. 
Our glimpses of Lucy’s apartment are of a chaotic mess of random and lurid junk, an emblem of her own doomed dream life perhaps. Liberated from Japanese restraints, in America her sexual predation deepens her indecorum and delusion.  
Indeed no-one here is wholly sympathetic. The dashing hugger John may come on as the fresh American spirit but he proves a jerk too. He abandoned his wife and daughter for the adventure in Japan, then abdicated his responsibilities to chase his latest fancy. If he indeed did quit a teaching job at Stanford, then he stands with Lucy, the niece, her mother, another example of people who make disastrous life choices.
A fringe character provides the only stability. English student “Tom” embraces John’s compulsion to embrace but proves able and committed to that emotional, human life. The goofy prosaic Japanese man proves the saviour Lucy craved to find in the dashing American. 
     After Tom saves Lucy the film closes on the note off their romantic promise. But it’s in the underground, where the suicides happen. And it took his son’s suicide to snap Tom into human intimacy. It may start with John’s shallow friendliness but in Tom it blossoms into a true connection.     

Saturday, March 24, 2018

Memoir: Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Wrestling


We were painting our kitchen when the Kellns dropped by. Chris's parents had farmed near Leader and were my parents’ good friends. When his job with the CPR moved the young couple to Calgary, they rented a house on 3rd Street around 15th Ave SE, just three blocks down from the three-storey frame rooming house which gave us our home and living.
"It's Thanksgiving," Chris insisted. "You can't work on Thanksgiving. We're having turkey, you’re coming, no excuses. We’ll eat around two. Stella’s made more than enough food. ”
Ruthie and I had never tasted turkey. Though nothing there was not kosher, that dish with all those trimmings seemed exotic, tantalizing, goyish. The stuffing had nuts and spices we’d never tasted. There was a red berry jam to eat with the meat. What a terrific idea: jam with meat! The dessert was a wonderful pumpkin pie, with your choice of vanilla or chocolate ice cream, but we kids got a little of each. The men had a bottle of beer with the meal. It was all so sophisticated.
Chris paid me special attention. "You like hockey?" 
"I don't know."
"You ever go to a hockey game?" 
"No."
"Look, Sam. Why don't I take your boy to a hockey game on Sunday. You come too. It's a lot of fun. It's the Big Six League. They play in the Pavilion at the Stampede grounds. Just teams from around here, the towns. It's Sunday so they can only charge a silver collection. I always put in two bits, that would cover him too. I'd like to take him.”
Dad saw my silent prayer and agreed. 
So Chris took me to the Sunday hockey games. Though I always said he didn't need anything — Mum had taught me that — when Chris went for a coffee he always brought me back a hot dog or a bag of peanuts.
I loved the game. My favourite team was the Canmore Legionnaires. They had a pepperpot redhead named Phil Kotchonoski and an Andy Chakowski who were dynamite on blades. But just being in the stadium with other boys and men, that was a thrill.
Then Chris started taking me to the wrestling matches on Tuesday nights. This needed Mum’s special permission because it was a school night. But I begged. I promised to do all my homework before and not to be tired the next day. 
Her son was taking a major step away from her, from her values, with all those rough sports. But when Dad sided with me, she gave in. I had to grow up some day. Theoretically.
Chris never let Dad or me pay for anything. It was like Dad had over the years built up a credit that Chris was trying to repay. Treating me was the least he could do for his sick old friend. 
Years later Mum told me what favour Dad had done Chris, back in Leader. When Chris wanted to marry Stella his Protestant family were aghast because she was a Catholic. His parents would disown him. His cousins and brothers would break every bone in his body if he married “the Catlick.” Dad, whom the Kellns esteemed, tried to talk sense into them.
          “Have you met her? Stella is a wonderful girl. Beautiful, she’s smart, a fine homemaker. She’s a beauty! You never tasted her pierogy?  Her poppyseed strudel? You should be honoured to get her in your family. What are you thinking? You’d break up your family because your son married a woman he loves? You’d rather he married someone he didn’t love? Then he’d be in hell or he’d have to fool around. That would make you happy? Chris is a good boy and he’s lucky to get a girl like Stella. Don’t forget, since her he stopped drinking. You should be proud.”
I think some of the Kellns would never accept Stella. But bolstered by Dad’s support Chris married her -- a decision he never regretted.
***
In sports I could participate imaginatively in a world from which my clumsiness and weakness disqualified me. Dad, I’m sure, would have excelled at any sport, if he’d ever had the time to play any. He had been, after all, well known as a bronco buster and all-around capable rancher before he was felled by his asthma and a broken leg. 
Sports also drew me into the outside world. I started to read the Herald every afternoon, not just the comics, but reports on the hockey teams in the Big Six and Western Hockey Leagues. I listened to the WHL Stampeder hockey games on the radio, then moved on to the Saturday night NHL
I would have sold my soul to go see a WHL game. But it was expensive. Maybe half a buck, for a kid. So, I told himself, why pay when you can hear it for free on the radio? 
***
I was an even more avid wrestling fan, thanks to Chris's introduction. 
The matches almost always pitted an obviously evil man against a virtuous one. The good guy had the superior skills -- like George Gordienko from Winnipeg -- but the bad guy usually won -- by breaking the rules!
 If you can win by breaking the rules, who wouldn’t? The good guys, that’s who, so they usually lost and I’d go home angry and frustrated but excited and happy to have been there.
The referee could never enforce justice. His incompetence was especially apparent in a match between women wrestlers or when the midgets, like Little Beaver and Sky Low Low, came to town. But those matches were always funny anyway -- midgets and women pretending to fight like men! -- so it didn't matter much what happened. The tragic miscarriages of justice only happened when real men were involved. 
Occasionally there would be a match -- always a preliminary -- between two good guys. Like George Gordienko vs. Stu Hart. This would be touted as a return to the classical glories of The Greco-Roman Game. The Science of The Mat. It was boring. 
In those matches I’d wonder which good guy would be the favourite. For the ethnics involved, the choice was clear. The Italians would cheer for the Italian, the Ukrainians for the Ukrainian, and so on. Of course, there was never a Jewish wrestler. Never. Not between Jacob and Goldberg, not one. 
But if there was no ethnic issue the choice of hero hung in the air. Usually the issue was only resolved when one stepped over the line and threw a punch. Until that moment, each wrestler battled not just his opponent but his own temptation to break the law. The first punch restored the normal dialectic.
I concluded from that: life itself must be a constant battle to resist that outlaw impulse. Good and evil make war even within a hero. You don’t need a villain to find evil, not when you can grab an advantage by breaking some rule. 
So when two good guys battled cleanly, eventually one would cross the line and become the villain -- until next week’s match against a bigger villain -- and make the victim the hero. It sure was easier to be good when you were up against an evil that was outside you.
When a match pitted two villains against each other, the audience sided with the more local one. Though Al "Mr. Murder" Mills was everyone's most hated villain for months, he immediately became the hero when he faced Kenji Shibuya, with his dread Sleeper Hold. For Al Mills hailed from Camrose, Alberta, and the sinister Oriental from -- ostensibly Japan, though in fact from a no more mysterious East than Cleveland.
***
I especially appreciated wrestlers who had a specialty hold. It usually had a fancy name but was something very basic. Anyone could do it, but this one wrestler had developed it to a point where it distinguished him from all others. 
Pat McGill had his drop-kick, Legs Langevin his Javanese Stretch, Earl McCready (from Amulet, Saskatchewan!) his Rolling Cradle, and those two exotics, The Cardiff Giant and Shibuya, their Sleepers. 
The last such specialty I remember was Tex Mackenzie and his Bulldogger, but Tex always smiled when he talked about it, like he knew it was hokey. As this was on Ed Whalen's television show already, it was. 
But in the old days, when wrestling was pure, when it was on radio not TV, I liked the idea that somebody could distinguish himself by developing a simple signature hold. A personal specialty.
When Pat McGill sat his dazed opponent up high on the turnbuckle, then drop-kicked him off it, it proved not just skill but confidence. Had Pat missed his mark, he could have flown out of the old Victoria Pavilion onto 17th Avenue! To the Dilly Dilly almost! (That’s where you got a rainbow of ice cream flavours for five cents a huge scoop.)
*** 
My favourite wrestler was Paul Baillargeon. Paul was a muscular, handsome young Quebecois from a family of wrestling brothers. 
All the Baillargeon brothers were weight-lifters converted to the sport. Younger Adrian had a brief career in the Calgary ring but never caught the local fancy. Older Jean would climb up a special telephone pole that had been rigged up in the arena. Strapped to his back was a platform carrying eight or ten men or a live horse. Battling in the ring he was less impressive.
Paul was the best wrestler. His specialty was the Giant Swing. It began as the harmless Full Nelson, but with Paul Baillargeon’s arm-strength it meant game over. With his arms up around the adversary's neck and shoulders, Paul would lift him and swing him around the ring, 360 or 720 or 1440 degrees, until -- quite disoriented -- the victim could be slammed to the mat for an easy pin.
That usually worked, but not when Paul took on the towering Sky High Lee. Every giant swing Paul managed only got Lee’s feet entangled in the ropes. I forget who won.
One night Paul Baillargeon was matched for the world championship against the great Lou Thesz. Thesz travelled the globe, defending his belt every night in a different arena, always accompanied by his manager, the legendary star of The Golden Age of Wrestling, Ed “Strangler” Lewis. 
When I saw the reverence accorded Mr. Lewis, I wondered how a Strangler could be a hero. Maybe he strangled the right people, I decided, bad people, who deserved to get strangled.
But there was a problem. Paul’s chance to win the world title in Calgary was on the usual Tuesday night. But this Tuesday was not like other Tuesdays. It was Pesach
No, Dad insisted, I could not go to the wrestling match that week. I had to stay home for the seder. No, God wouldn’t understand. Well, He would understand, because He knows and understands everything, but He would not approve a boy from a good Jewish home skipping a seder for a wrestling match. 
No, not even a world championship. A Jew puts religious responsibilities first. Jehovah was more important than Paul Baillargeon. Besides, if I went to the wrestling match who would ask The Four Questions?
Okay, I planned, I’ll ask “How is this night different from all other nights?” But then I’ll add “Because this is the night my Paul can become World Champion and I couldn’t go see!” 
But Dad proposed a Solomonic compromise that assuaged my revolt: Between sections of the seder I could slip out to the kitchen radio for updates on the match. 
In the event, right after the chicken soup with matzo-ball dumplings, Paul Baillargeon proved the sacrificial goat. Lou Thesz squirmed out of Paul’s Full Nelson and took his championship belt on to the next night’s challenge in Medicine Hat.
    ***
Baillargeon's most epic confrontation was with the aforementioned villain, Al "Mr. Murder" Mills from Camrose. Mills and his younger brother, Tiny, an even larger hulk in black tights, were a vicious, no-holds-barred tag team. They were equally effective as solos, though Al was the more lethal. 
Al Mills was beating up on everyone. When Paul Baillargeon was contracted to put Mr. Murder in his place, it was as clear a collision of Good and Evil as you could find outside the Bible comics in the waiting room of the Ursuline convent (where Ruthie and I went for our Saturday morning piano lessons).    
The two men fought it out weekly for over a month. In every match, Paul would take the upper hand. But Mr. Murder’s chicanery — sometimes involving help from his brother outside the ring (which was really against the law) or an oversight by the dumb referee — would turn the victory to Mills. When Mills punched Baillargeon bloody, I remember leaping out of my seat screaming in my thin voice: "Get dirty, Paul! Get dirty!" Chris smiled at my ardor -- but shared my indignation. 
I knew it was wrong to urge my virtuous hero to break the rules. But he was getting slaughtered. Sometimes you have to cross the line to defend yourself. Maybe some laws are not so inviolable after all. 
Of course, Paul could never quite get dirty. When he cocked his fist at Mills, the villain would cower until Baillargeon softened back into honest strategies. Then Mills would beat the hell out of him again.   
In my hero’s worst humiliation, Mills punched Baillargeon senseless, then picked him up, carried him to the corner, sat him on the turnbuckle, turned and walked away. Paul's white handsome face was a streaming red pulp. I never forgot that sight.
Years later I learned that some wrestlers were known as “bleeders.” They carried a razor blade taped to a finger with which they would cut their own face, causing the bleeding we attributed to the villain’s haymakers. My Paul was a bleeder not a sacrificial saint. Still, he rules.
***
In 1953 Calgary had a murder. The victim was a woman named Hannah Middlestadt. The Herald reported that she was the sister-in-law of two wrestlers from Camrose, Alberta, Al Middlestadt, who worked under the name, Al "Mr. Murder" Mills, and his brother, aka Tiny Mills. Police were looking for clues to who might have murdered the woman.
So the evil Mills brothers had changed their name! Shortened from Middlestadt. My faith was shaken -- until Mum assured me, No, trimming the name does not mean they’re necessarily Jewish. Other people also change their names, for other reasons. 
But still, there was the murder. 
"Dumb cops, what's the matter with them?" I seethed to myself. Sometimes to Dad, who would patiently listen. "Can't they see? It must have been Al Mills! Nobody else could have done it! Some family fight maybe and he went crazy, like in the ring. If he’s called Mr Murder he’s probably done it somewhere else already. What's the matter with them? Are the cops as blind as the damn referees?"
"Don't swear," Dad corrected softly.
I thought I should investigate the murder myself. Like the Bowery Boys would’ve. Maybe if I followed him after a match, Mills would lead me to some incriminating evidence. I would turn him in to the police and be a hero. Paul Baillargeon could return. 
But the detective’s mother wouldn’t let me. Wrestling was on a school night. If I didn’t come right home with Chris after the match she wouldn’t let me go at all.
The police never did charge Al “Mr Murder” Mills. In fact, in May, 1954, another man was hanged for the crime. He was the last capital punishment case in Canada. 
But Mills got his comeuppance anyway. It was in the ring, from the then-living legend -- Stu Hart.
In those days Stu Hart was a preliminary wrestler. That is, fodder in the opening matches. He wrestled clean but he didn't have George Gordienko's flair. Or Lawrence O'Toole's handsome face (a moustache just like Errol Flynn’s). Every week journeyman Hart wrestled in the first or second bout. Sometimes he won, but usually he lost to some new villain, about to rise through the card. 
Then one week Hart refereed a main event, in which Al "Mr. Murder" Mills got out of hand, which was not unusual. He punched the referee, also not that unusual. But when the referee punched back, that was. Especially when Referee Hart -- his striped shirt ripped and reddened -- ran Al “Mr. Murder” Mills out of the ring all the way back to the dressing room. Mr Murder was scared of this referee!
The main event the next week pitted Al Mills against Stu Hart. Mr. Hart defeated Mr. Murder handily. Mills left town, his tail between his legs, and I never heard anything about him again. The next week it was announced that Mr. Hart was taking over the Calgary wrestling franchise.
"Boy," I thought, "it's a good thing Stu Hart won that one!" The very idea that Mr. Murder Mills might have taken over the local wrestling government made me shiver. How could I have lived with such injustice? But what could I have done about it?
***
I have a postscript. 
As late as my MA year in Edmonton I would occasionally follow the pro wrestling circuit on TV — the high-powered industry Stu Hart created. It was popular culture. It was theatre — an exercise of our tendency to make myths to live by. Of course by now I knew it was fakery — but it was fiction, a fabrication that told some kind of truth.
Hence the national stereotypy — sly Japanese, evil blond Nazi Germans, brutish Russkies, fiery Irish, etc. Sweet Daddy Siki was the poor man’s rewrite of Cassius Clay. The various Haystacks — Muldoon, Calhoun, etc. — were the simple country rubes in their farm overalls confronting city slickers. Gorgeous George — in reality a highly skilled athlete and wrestler — played the Effeminate card as a way to stir up the homophobic’s anger and inadmissible fear. Pro wrestling was just another way of reading the macro culture out of a micro.
 I even used wrestling in my popular culture courses, analyzing the conventions of that particular theatrical form, especially the different dynamics in the arena and on TV.  As it happened, one live episode I’d assigned my class happily slipped into an out-of-ring drama in which Randy Savage’s lover/manager got caught in a love triangle. That effectively turned the wrestling match into a soap opera, even to the point of the camera following the fallen grappler into a hospital room. 
Fast forward another few decades. The Winchester Gallery in Victoria is exhibiting paintings by one George Gordienko. 
I have to phone. Yes, they confirm, it’s the same George Gordienko. 
That sparkling clean wrestler from Winnipeg turns out to have lived a double life. He was also a painter — and a very good one. His work evokes Miro in its brightness, whimsy and edge. 
Indeed Gordienko’s travels as a wrestler introduced him to modern art. He’d hit the galleries wherever he was booked to fight. Then he studied painting in Europe. He came to move in the higher circles of European art. He showed with the likes of Miro and Picasso.
Indeed, one dealer got Gordienko to meet Picasso, at the latter’s home. Gordienko wanted to talk art, Picasso wrestling. Turns out Picasso was a huge wrestling fan. He insisted on reserving a daily afternoon period in which he would leave his work or family to watch it on TV. 
In fact, Gordienko lived a triple life. Here he was one of those dutiful “clean” wrestlers, working the prelims, fodder for the newest villain to pass through. But abroad Gordienko established a real reputation as a villain. He was a spectacular success in Europe and especially in India, where a monstrous crowd threatened his very safety, so powerful was his villainous persona.   
Gordienko was clearly a master of the craft, on both forms of canvas. His painting is crisp, lively, bright,  a pleasure to move through. In wrestling,  he was so strong, agile and capable that Lou Thesz and Strangler Lewis invited him to become Thesz’s successor to the world title when Thesz decided to retire. 
There was a hitch. Again, it was his life and engagement outside the ring. He was also a thinker. In the forties Gordienko had been drawn to socialism. He’d briefly been a member of the dread Communist Party. So he couldn’t cross the American border. America’s loss was Europe’s and India’s gain.   
There’s a lesson even there. 

Friday, March 23, 2018

Fiction: The Blind Date


Of course, the blind date was inevitable. Whatever would or would not result, we just had to meet. It was written. So to speak. 
Her very close friend (since Grade IV) Annie had married my very close friend (since Grade VII) Bernie. That was four years ago. Now they were very happy together, enjoying a stability they could only hope to share with their respective friends, Polly and me. Jake. 
Who knows what they told Polly about Jake. I don’t. Never did. They probably don’t remember. I know Polly doesn’t. In fact, she doesn’t remember the date at all. As far as she is concerned, I made the whole thing up. All this I made up. What I’m remembering I’m imagining. That happens. 
But I certainly remember what they told me about Polly. She was like me, they said, an English grad, a poet, a hippie. Very Bohemian, they said. Like me. 
Of course, even in this kind of extended family all things are relative. Annie was a nurse, Bern a sociologist, so I guess to them my being a supposedly swinging bachelor with English degrees and a few poetry readings behind — below? — my belt made me a hippie. 
That’s certainly not how I thought of myself. I’d gone straight through from high school, through a BA and MA, then — after two years of teaching at a rural junior college to save the money — on to a British PhD in English. Pre-Shakespearean fiction, in fact, which is not your usual Head-land. I was no hippie, not compared to all the college drop-outs and acid heads I used to know. At 26 I had a PhD and a tenure-track job. I was if anything a nerd, not a hippie. 
Back then, of course, the term was “brain.” Spoken with the same sneer now accorded “nerd.” The implication of the earlier term was that the designate was predominantly, perhaps even only, a “brain,” all other avenues of being left negligible.
But. Compared to the other profs at my new Ontario university…? 
I was the only one in the department still single. The only one thumbing along on the late ‘60s drug and sex trips. I didn’t seek much out but willingly went along with what was offered. Did the grass, the hash on the electric coil and tin-foiled pipe, the mescaline, the acid. Even cocaine, once, on a train hurtling through the night to Montreal with a stripper I met in that transit. After a week she dumped me for a Satan’s Choice guy. Because I was a nerd, I assured myself. A”brain.” Her failing in imagination, not mine.
I was also the only English prof in jeans and a leather sport jacket (a style I begrudgingly retained even after Trudeau made it fashionable). The only one with a pony tail (back then: very black. Now there’s a growing bald spot where the pony tail used to start. I digress.)
Then there was my discipline. In the academic sense. 
In the new Department of English and Film Studies I was The Film Guy. That alone made me cool, hip, if not indeed a hippie. 
I also did pop culture. Public lecture on the Beatles’ White Album. The themes and structure thereof. Themes and structure in Monty Python. Themes and structure in the Herman and B.C. cartoons. Separate papers, those. I was into themes and structure. 
My academic work left the department oddly ambivalent. A lively lot, they were quite happy to offer my courses in the department: Intro to Film Studies, The Director’s Cinema, The Silent Film, Studies in National Cinemas. But they could not be persuaded to accept any of them in place of the English major requirements. 
I could assure them that my analytic strategies in film were precisely theirs in literature. At the Learned Socks I unloaded a paper, “Breathless in the English Class,” which proved that. 
But I was analyzing films not literary texts. And some were in foreign language. 
Finally they offered a compromise.  The other courses would be acceptable as options, but only The Silent Cinema could be taken as an English credit. There the students were at least reading the inter-titles. That reading made it English. 
      They were a lively lot.
So compared to my colleagues I was a hippie — as I seemed to Annie and Bern. But not to me. And to Polly? Who knew. 
I hoped she’d find me that. At least, find me kindred in spirit, interests, values, but mainly that spirit. I was 29 then, ready for The Relationship I’d decided to forgo until I had my Phud in hand and tenure on track. And if I were going to gamble on marrying, a friend of such close friends brought some reassurance. Especially if she was as hippie as I was. 
Not more, not less, just right. That would be nice.
One other thing they told me about Polly. I remember. They said she was on the rebound. “That’s good,” I said, “because I’m a bounder. Something in common. That should work out.” 
So why not. I was in Vancouver for a Shakespeare conference. August, 1971. I have evenings to spend. Or invest.  Polly has a flat in an old house in Kits. Annie gave me Polly’s number and I called. So she was expecting to hear from me. I called and we made a date.

***
“Come in,” I heard, after my firm but wary knock. “It’s unlocked.”
“It’s me. Jake.”
“Hi. I’m Polly. I’m in the bath. Make yourself at home there. I’ll be out in a jiff.” 
That started it. The debate. What to do.
The original plan — my proposal when I called — was a quick bite, then a movie, then a drink after to talk about it. That was always my date plan. The bite to introduce ourselves, the movie for a shared experience, the chat to get our minds working and possibly (oh, please!) in tandem. As I used to say, Is the unexamined film worth watching?
The film was to be Carnal Knowledge. Just released. Jules Feiffer script, Mike Nichols directed, great cast — and the kind of subject matter that could be expected to break the ice. A good First Date movie, I figured. 
But Polly was apparently running late. Apparently too late for that schedule. We’d probably need the food. So that would cut out the movie. Shit. The problem with running late.
Or was she? 
What if she weren’t “accidentally” running late? What if she just didn’t buy into the plan? 
What if she were hippier than I — by a long chalk. Whatever that means. (From an Ealing comedy, I suspect.) What if she planned to be “running late,” to be in the tub, to be naked, when I got there. 
What if this were her test for me? They said he was hip, but how hip is he? Let’s just see.
  I knew what a straight guy would do. Shuck the light jacket, sit on the sofa and start browsing through that Malahat Revierw lying on the coffee table. That’s what. Cool and simple. Flexible, rolls with the punches. Reads. 
But what if she didn’t want another boring straight? What if instead she wanted to see how hip I was?  
This was a rare situation, I realized. We were arranged to meet by people who knew us both well. They assumed we’d hit it off. So we had a head start on a new relationship. 
Now there we were. She’s naked in the tub, I’m clothed on the sofa. I could go in to her. 
I could first say something cool and gallant, like “Can I scrub your back?” 
Corny.
I could just go in and start.
Intrusive, presumptuous, most uncool. By today’s standard, an assault. Hip or not, actionable. 
Or…. 
I could take off all my clothes, leave them on the sofa with the Review, and walk into her bathroom naked. My naked to her naked. That would be a sharing not an imposition.
Now, that would make this first date An Experience. Given that head start, if I did that we would be meeting naked, open, unabashed. Instead of two strangers meeting and gradually feeling each other out, guessing about what’s hidden, slowly probing, uncovering together, we’d be starting out with a full exposure. We’d meet in full openness. Nothing hidden. Then from there proceed to a relationship. 
Meeting cute? We’d be meeting clean. And cute. 
We’d be putting on links instead of removing layers.
We’d also be finding out what nakedness with a total stranger feels like. Not a total stranger, of course, because that aforementioned “head start” lent legitimacy. That would be an experience. 
I could even hop into the tub with her. No, the water displaced could be messy. Too much.
That would be a first date to remember — and proof that neither one of us was stifled by convention. If it all worked out, it would be an experience we could share hilariously with Annie and Bern (“Oh, those wild kids!”). 
We’d never tell our children. 
But wait. What if she wasn’t testing me? What if she truly was running accidentally late? Did I want to risk that? 
What would she say? “That is not what I meant at all, at all. That is not what I meant at all.”
What to do. To seem. Who to be.
I picked up the Review and read a Robin Matthews story. Or maybe it was some verse. I don’t remember all the details. Pretty sure it was Robin. 
Though it could’ve been George Bowering.
Eventually Polly came out and we had our date. 
I don’t remember a thing about it. Nothing happened. No click. No follow-up.
My guess is we would have gone out for Chinese because that was Vancouver. I saw Carnal Knowledge on my own a night or two later. It wasn’t the same. That kind of film you have to have someone to discuss it with. To connect over. 
I have absolutely no memory of Polly except her name and our common friends who set us up. What I clearly remember — and often replay in my mind — is the idea, the urge, that I had and was too timid to try. One of those Frosty roads not taken. Should instead have heeded Yogi: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
But I didn’t and nothing came of it, not even a fuller memory. My recollection in tranquility froze on that indecision. 
***
A year later I was in a love affair back home. Another year later we had a daughter and got married. After three years we split up. 
Some 40 years after that I meet Polly in Victoria. She’s a retired teacher, a much published and honoured poet. She has written fine, very moving poems about, inter alia, her lost loves. Of course I am not among them. Oddly, I can’t help regretting that.
Whenever I heard her name or came across her poetry I assumed she was the hippie from that long ago blind date.  But now I don’t know. She has no memory whatever of me, that date, even that our friends set us up. She doesn’t remember ever being a Bohemian.
      "I was so frightened in those years. So timid. Oh, if you had walked in on me like that, in the bathroom.... I would have just died!"
I suppose I could have the wrong girl. Or the wrong memory.