film fe(a)sting

The Toronto International Film Festival 2006 is officially over.

This was my first year partaking of it, and I only barely scratched the surface.

I love film, and I've discovered this city is enamoured of it, too. I don't mean the movie star glamour and sightings, which are numerous, but film and cinema itself. Just while standing in lines, I overheard people, ordinary people, plotting out their viewing strategies. I was surprised by how many attacked the festival with a vengeance.

Today, an older man in front of me in a line bemoaned the fact to his friends that he was only seeing one to two films a day, half of his usual fare. Last week a woman spoke to others, who equalled her enthusiasm, about her preference for foreign films over the big-name blockbusters, which she would see later, anyway.

I only saw three films this year, over the last two weeks. And I saw them with my free vouchers from volunteering for TIFFG since January. This festival works on so many levels. Big things that work always fascinate me. Because to make something big work well, with ease, is incredibly difficult. Their volunteer base runs like a marathoner on an adrenalin high.

Too many options, too many films, too many ways to be a part of the festival. But good stuff. Last week I saw Paris: Je t'aime on rush seating, and tried to read sub-titles from a neck-breaking angle in the third row. A film about love and Paris, it was constructed of 18 vignettes created by different directors. It worked for me, especially the closing segment directed by Sideways' Alexander Payne (mighty cute, too when he appeared in the Q&A). My second film last week was a German film Summer 04, which was well done, but about which I'm neutral.

Today I saw Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, which was also four hours long, and concerns Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans. Memorable and important and agonizing and touching. One memorable quote, from one of the many people who speak on screen, was that President Bush 'gave all 'C' students the world over a bad name.'

The jazz musician Wynton Marsalis says in the film that Katrina was like an unflattering image in a mirror, an exact and true reflection of a reality in America, that previously was unseen or denied. Katrina stripped the facade away until the truth was in plain view.

It is a devastating story. I remember the media uproar about how whites 'borrow' to survive, and blacks 'loot', but I wasn't aware of how Rev. Sharpton objected to the American press and specifically requested that they desist from referring to Katrina victims as 'refugees'.

Very thought-provoking. I'm not sure wealthy people from West Palm Beach would be considered 'refugees' in the same situation.

The spring before Katrina, I happened to be in the area north of West Palm Beach that had been hit hard by a hurricane the season before. Along the ocean sand spit populated by mansions and luxury hotels, you could see the government's (which government's?) money put to use dredging up sand from the ocean's bottom to rebuild the beaches. After seeing the care taken to rebuild that strip of Florida beach, it was personally sobering to watch the lack of aid to New Orleans months later, and then again, as it turns out, a year later.

I didn't have the opportunity to see Sarah Polley's film Away From Her, based on a short story by the inimitable Alice Munro, but when I realized I had the story The Bear Came Over the Mountain, unread, I opened the book and read it.

Looking forward to enjoying this feast for years to come.

pilgrimage

This Sunday I am driving up to Muskoka to visit the lodge my mother and I vacationed at for six summers.

I wanted to do this in July, and now it is pulling me, so I must go.

A week from today is the second anniversary of my mother's passing (and today, the anniversary of her mother's passing), and memories slip up and catch me unaware. Sad memories of her illness and last days, but also, more often now, good memories of laughter and friendship.

There is so much I cannot go back to. Her house has been sold, and is another's family home. This Muskoka lodge is still there, and according to a recent talk with the receptionist, still the same.

Some places are magic, or hold a magic place in your life. Patterson-Kaye is magical, to me. I first came upon it in my early 30s. During the Olympic summer of the Ben Johnson scandal, I had gone on a backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail in the eastern U.S., with Willard's Expeditions, an adventure group led by a former car dealership owner from Barrie, Ontario. My tent partner was a doctor from Bracebridge, who happened to have recently been dating Johnson's coach, Charlie Francis. I was sure Johnson's tests had been rigged, when a look from her told me otherwise. (A true scoop, when I had no -- professional -- interest in scoops.)

Every fall, Willard hosted a reunion for people who had made his trips. He opened up his home in Barrie. Since the good doctor lived nearby in Bracebridge, she invited me to stay at her place when I came up for the reunion.

Her place happened to be Patterson-Kaye Lodge. She rented one of the suites with a kitchenette, as it was the off-season. Her 'apartment' was mere metres from a mirrored creek that wrapped around the front and side of the one-storey building. From the large window one looked onto this grey, liquid glass, and beyond, to a small wooden footbridge separating the creek from the lake. All of it in an autumnal stillness.

I don't recall ever having seen a more peaceful, beautiful spot.

More than a decade later, when my mother and I were looking into spending a summer in Muskoka, I remembered this place, but had no hope of finding it, because I never knew its name. And then, I saw a photo of a seaplane in an advertisement, placid near a dock, and I recognized it as that place I had seen years earlier.

And once we stayed there, we knew we had to come back. And we did, every summer for one week, for six years.

Recently, I discovered that P-K had been sold and was concerned about how that had come about, as the Miller family who owned it often spoke of keeping it for their four growing children. But, one of the comforts of the lodge -- that things remain constant and unchanging, like the wind and the rocks and the pines -- still remains. The Millers sold the resort to a niece, and kept it in the family, and the tradition continues. Not an easy thing to do, necessarily, when so many resorts have been bought by international interests. The Millers too, had been approached by Japanese interests offering them millions for their operation and land.

The town of Bracebridge encroaches, the cottages encroach, but still P-K remains a lovely respite and a haven.

So, on Sunday I will drive up and walk around its grounds, and breathe the air in deep.

how deep does this pool go?

Judgement is still out on the health of the copy editing pool in which I have begun to wade.

It may only be a shallow, cloudy and murky pond, overheating and suffocating with overgrowth.

Or, it may yet prove to have a deeper source and life.

At any rate, after one month, I have moved from one day in three weeks, to one day a week. And it is nice to have a little money coming in, instead of just going out.

Looking, however, for that sweet relief of a deep dive.

rainy september

Photo by: moko

treading into tabloid territory

Photo by Beesquare





















Photo by Chaim Zvi


My vote for the unlikeliest couple: John Mayer and Jessica Simpson.

So strange (if true) that it may actually work out - maybe, maybe (?) . . .

Note: the above photo of Ms. Simpson is a wax figure, and not human.