An Autobiography Carved from Biography

Trailer for Moyra Davey’s film, Les Goddesses.

My latest review for VANDOCUMENT is online. This one takes-on Moyra Davey’s challenging 2011 film, Les Goddesses, in which she tells the story of a sad, distant time in her past via the biographies of other women: the 18th Century proto-feminist philosopher and literary figure Mary Wollstonecraft, Ms. Wollstonecraft’s daughters (including the writer Mary Shelley), and Ms. Davey’s own three sisters.

Check it out.

One thing about the review bears mentioning. I attempt to take Ms. Davey’s project seriously and therefore offer my best effort to dissect whatever-the-hell might be going-on in the film. Without in any way abandoning criticality, I am loathe to write derogatorily about any of the work I cover for VANDOCUMENT. My objective there (unlike the sometimes-harsh things I write on memestream) is to present a fair sense of a project or event contributing to the current local art scene while being supportive of the artists and institutions who are putting themselves on-the-line and bringing value to the community. So, if I have committed to a degree of non-negativity and intellectual engagement with Ms. Davey’s work in my review, please do not be misled into thinking that the film is any good. It is not.

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Whoa Nelly!

The preternaturally brilliant Nelly César performs “Fossil” in “Diffractions of the Local” at Vancouver’s Back Gallery Project.  Photo by Roman and courtesy of VANDOCUMENT.

My latest VANDOCUMENT review is online.  I had the privilege of covering a wonderful show at the Back Gallery Project called “Diffractions of the Local”, celebrating the work of seven Latin American artists who live and work in Vancouver: Gabriela Aceves-Sepulveda (Mexico), Nelly César (Mexico), Carlos Colín (Mexico), Guadalupe Martínez (Argentina), Manuel Piña (Cuba), Emilio Rojas (Mexico), and Josema Zamorano (Mexico).

Check it out!

VANDOCUMENT: Creating a Vivid Record of the Thrilling Artistic Present

I’m always a sucker for a well-conceived project, started by passionate, talented people, which has the aim of building community and supporting the creative work of others.  That’s why I am now contributing to VANDOCUMENT, the six-month-old brain-child of local arts photographer Ash Tanasiychuk.

VANDOCUMENT is a collective of photographers, videographers, and writers who are endeavouring to capture the exciting vibe of Vancouver’s arts scene in images and words.  The aim is both to generate interest, awareness, and support for the art-makers in our midst, and to create a vibrant archive that tells the story, if only anecdotally, of the creative surge Vancouver is now experiencing.

My first contribution to the VANDOCUMENT collection – a review of Nicole DesLauriers’s smart, ambitious take on the fin de sicle absurdist play Ubu Cocu, by Alfred Jarry – is now up on the VANDOCUMENT site, for your reading pleasure.

Show-Up

Show-up, people. Just fucking-show-up.

Tonight, Yoo-Mi and I were privileged to attend a performance of Yvette Nolan’s smart, gripping new work, The Unplugging, at The Arts Club Theatre Company’s Revue Stage. The play, set in post-apocalyptic Canada, explores the emotional need for community, the compulsion to generosity, and the go-to sustainability of traditional ways of living.  It also illustrates the dangerous ways in which these virtues are challenged by the venality of a culture that has convinced itself that survival is a zero-sum game. The dialogue is tight, the production simple, direct, and effective, and the acting (by Jenn Griffin, Margo Kane, and Anton Lipovetsky) stunningly superb. By all rights, the 198-seat theater should have been packed.

Instead, there were twenty of us comprising the audience.

Visiting the Forest

On Saturday morning I set an alarm (something I do only rarely), and made the beautiful early-morning drive from Tuolumne Meadows in the Yosemite high country, down Tioga Pass, to the little town of Lee Vining in search of either an internet connection or mobile phone coverage. I had a date. Over my strenuous protest, the ServiceSpace volunteer team known as the Forest Farmers of had scheduled me as the guest on the weekly “Global Forest Call”, an hour-and-a-half of inspirational sharing from the frontlines of generosity.

Those of you who know me will also know that I am an utterly appalling choice for this honor, lacking in both notable accomplishment and the spiritual bonafides most Forest Call participants usually tune-in for. Sure, I can talk a blue-streak; but I even bore myself.

And, in the end, that’s all that was required of me: talk and bore, bore and talk. The session was expertly mediated with questions posed by the always-brilliant Rahul Brown. He asked about the early days of ServiceSpace, my ideas about certain key concepts of service, my staunch atheism, and my feelings about ethics and garbage. When the questions opened-up to the audience, they became more biographical: about my aches and pains, my affection for India, and the like. Talk and bore, bore and talk.

Masochists can find a summary here, written by the irrepressible Audrey Lin, whose optimism and joyful outlook on life certainly color the retelling of the call, as they color so much for all who encounter her.

Meggyleves — Chilled Sour Cherry Soup

Sour cherry season is short, but sweet… or sour… or whatever.  So much to do with these little morsels of yumminess in so little time.  Canning sour cherry compote to serve as a base for sauces to be lovingly spooned over duck and pork throughout the remainder of the year is one priority.  Another is to slurp as much meggyleves — the borscht-like Hungarian chilled sour cherry soup — as humanly possible.

Eating and Belonging: a Conversation

So, I met this girl… on the internet.

No, that doesn’t really capture it. To begin with, she’s a woman, not a girl. A really, really smart one.

More to the point, we met quite by accident, not on JDate or ashleymadison.com. It seems we both live in, and blog about Pondicherry. And we are both a little food-obsessed. So we started corresponding about these things.

Deepa Reddy is a cultural anthropologist by profession, an artist by natural talent and temperament, and a cook by passion. Her blog, Pâticheri, is a thing of beauty, thoughtfulness, and deliciousness. During one of our exchanges — about the semiotics of baking or some such thing — she suggested that it might be fun to take our “ethnographic free-play” public, to post our back-and-forth on our blogs in real-time. With you, Dear Reader, adding your own “deep play” (I promise, that will be my one-and-only cultural anthropology joke) in the comments, this might just be an interesting experiment.

After loosely settling on a topic — national identity and all-things-food — we have decided to let it rip. Let the wild rumpus begin!

MBJ

The Conversation Thread
1. So American! (Deepa) 15 July 2012
2. You Are Having One American Nature Only, I Am Telling (MBJ) 16 July 2012
3. Cosmopolitan Comforts (Deepa) 20 July 2012
4. No Accounting for Taste (MBJ) 24 July 2012
5. What a Mess! (Deepa) 10 August 2012
6. Tell Me What You Eat and I Will Tell You Who You Are (MBJ) 21 August 2012
Reader Comments…

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Dinner of Champions

When our friend, the lovely and talented Andrea Frustaci, triumphed last week in the Burnaby Open Tennis Tournament, we had to have a celebratory dinner. The centerpiece of the menu was moules marinières with a nice crusty sourdough bread. (Dessert, incidentally, utilized the recently-made rose petal jam as a topping for vanilla ice cream, accompanied by lavender shortbread.)

But there were way more mussels than we could eat, and a goodly bit of the rich, creamy broth. So, with the leftovers, a handfull-or-two of bay shrimp, a few yukon gold potatoes, an ear of corn, and supplimental splashes of white wine and cream, I prepared the fantabulous one-pot meal pictured above. Is it a stew? A chowder? A “panroast” a la The Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station? Who could say? Our mouths were full.

Rose Petal Jam

“Do you want roses for jam? My mother’s roses are blooming like crazy and she’s already picked what she will use for the season.” Thus read the text message from our friend Ozlem Sensoy and, within a few days, we were raiding Mrs. Sensoy’s intensely fragrant garden. That evening, we set to making jam.

The Agony of Defeat

I’m back-on-my-back.

A nasty little ankle sprain had been elevated and iced for the better-part of four days, with intervening trips to the doctor and physio and a regimen of careful range-of-motion enhancers, to speed recovery.  To goal was to be fit for last night’s doubles match in the Burnaby Open Tennis Tournament.  Let’s just say the effort came-up a little short.