Monday, July 25, 2016

Filmmakers meetup/ The Sherlock Holmes Exhibit/ Containment TV show


Jul. 8, 2016 Filmmakers meetup: I went to this earlier this week.  We did a table read, as in we read part of a script (that one of us wrote) together.

Jul. 9, 2016 The Sherlock Holmes Exhibit: I wanted to go to it when I first heard about it being at the Telus World of Science.  I entered a sweepstakes in the Edmonton Journal the first time it came out.  I bought a pack of 10 stamps at London Drugs so I can send my entry for the contest.  I didn't win.  Then a second contest came along, and I entered it again.  This time I won 2 tickets to see the exhibit.

I first asked S at work because she had a birthday in Jul. and I asked what she wanted to do for it, and told her about this.  She was busy.  I asked if a couple of other friends and my brother and either busy or not interested.  I went with my friend Cham.

I went to work in the morning and got home in the afternoon.  I read the business section of the newspaper for an hr before I took 2 buses to get to my friend's job so she can drive us there.

There was a gift shop at the Sherlock Holmes part.  There was stuffed dogs, Sherlock TV show stuff, and t-shirt.

There were lots of 18th century pictures and news articles on display.  There were some videos playing.  Some maps, Scotland Yard.  Lots of darkness, and only good lighting on the displays.  There were good sets and displays.   It feels like we were on a set of a TV show.  There were living rooms and book shelves.

There were costumers from the TV show Elementary.  The quote from the show stood out to me was: "Work is the best antidote to sorrow."

"Every good story evolves from character."- Robert Doherty, creator of the TV show Elementary.

I'm going to put the above in my inspirational quotes.

There were lots of props from the TV show and movies (with Robert Downey Jr.)



There was Detective Comics: Sherlock and Batman were on the cover.  Woodstock from Peanuts was wearing a Sherlock outfit.

There were videos like ballistics. 

Then we went to different parts of the centre like the human body section:  Robothespian is talking and moving arms robot.

The Science Garage: There were big magnets to make a design.  A little rock climbing part.  It's kind of loud in there because there were mainly kids and families.

Syncrude Environment Gallery: There was a picture of the Earth in this sphere.  It was projected on it.  The worker Joel explained it to me and showed clouds moving. 

Tracy: Can you show tornadoes?
Joel: Tornadoes are too small to see.  I can show you hurricanes.

That was kind of interesting.

There was a big aquarium with a big flat blue fish.  There was even the clown fish like the one in Finding Nemo.

Population explosion: "History shows that the rate of innovation keeps pace with the population growth.  More people, more minds, ideas and inventions, more opportunity to create change.  Will population be our undoing or our inspiration?"

Flashback: This reminds me of when I was in gr. 10 and went a band and choir field trip to Vancouver.  We went to Vancouver Science Centre.  They had that population explosion thing too. 

This also reminds me of gr. 11 when I was in Social Studies class and watched The People Explosion.  I want to say that we should not be having kids.

Discovery Gallery: It was more of a little kids section for kids as young as 3 yrs old.

Space Place: There are lots about planets and astronauts.  This East Indian guy who worked there asked: "Which planet weighs more?  Saturn or Earth?"

Tracy: Saturn.  No wait, Earth, because Saturn is a gas giant.
Guy: Yeah.  Saturn could float on Earth's water.

He then showed me this computer game that's really challenging.  You have $6 billion to hire a crew, a space ship, and gather things from this planet.  He told me a 10 yr old almost won it.  Most people never finished the game.

There were lots of mind games and puzzles to solve.  It's to be educating and entertaining.

After all the exhibits, we went to the gift shop.  There were lots of stuffed animals of dinosaurs and science toys.

My opinion: Overall, I thought it was average.  The last time I was at Telus was when I was in gr. 7 and it was a school field trip.  We went and saw an animal documentary there.

An adult ticket costs $27.95.  The human body/ biology, and all the other exhibits weren't really interesting to me.  Probably because I'm not good at or like science.  The human body has all these trivia.  When I was talking about the planets with that guy, he was telling more trivia.  I felt like it wasn't really important and/ or I can use it.

I'm sure some of you guys are like: "But c'mon it's fun.  It is kind of educational."  I feel like I was too old for it.  I'm all about important information that I can apply like those job articles on how to be more productive and job interviews.  It's good to do something different like go to the Science Centre.  I do like being able to touch everything there and interact.

I was here for about 1 hr and 15 min.  I'm sure there are some of you who would stay longer.  Yeah, well I won free tickets.  If I paid that much, I would probably stay longer.  I did write everything I saw and did there and type it up here. 

If I was at K-days, I would be there for hours.  Last time I was there was in 2014 and I was there from 12pm-8pm.  I paid $16 to get in.  I need to see everything.

Jul. 11, 2016: I saw the Elementary pilot when it first came out.  I wrote about it on my blog.  I saw the pilot and never watched it again.  After the exhibit, I don't want to watch it.  I didn't really connect with the characters.  I may watch the new movies with Robert Downey Jr. 

Complaints: I'm going to add another complaint about Bravo TV.  I had complained I got a free preview for Bravo on Telus on my preview channel 4.  Then it changed to OWN.  I had recorded a few shows that I was going to watch and then was unable to.

Then I was going through my TV channels, and found out that I did get Bravo.  I had missed the season 7 premiere of Pretty Little Liars and then I recorded the 2nd episode to watch (and watched it.)

I see that Animal Kingdom was on, but it was onto their 4th episode.  I am very specific about wanting to watch the pilot first.  It's very rare that I watch the middle of a TV series unless it's a crime drama like CSI: NY.  You can go and watch any episode and it doesn't follow a whole season long arc.  I decided to not record it or watch it.

There was the 2nd episode of Guilty that was airing after PLL.  I saw the first few min. of it.  I have to watch the pilot first so I didn't record the 2nd episode of that.

Amanda Knox: Also it kind of reminded me of Amanda Knox, even though the writers may have thought of the idea before the case happened.  I was watching 20/20 about Knox and they talked to her parents and sister when Knox was accused of murdering her room mate.  I would have to say after 20/20, Knox seemed to be not guilty.  I saw the episode in 2007.

According to Wikipedia, Knox is exonerated.



Jodi Arias: While I'm at it, I saw this on 20/20.  In this case, I think Arias did kill her boyfriend.  She seemed arrogant when she was talking to 20/20 by saying: "No jury would convict me."  She's in prison.  I had to look up when the episode aired, and it was in 2013.



Then a week after I watched PLL, I don't have access to Bravo anymore.  That was mildly annoying.  I thought I can watch these shows, and then I can't.  Then I can, and now I can't.

I'm always saying I'm trying to cut down on TV and only watch TV shows I love, or really like and am interested in.  I would usually watch like 7 shows regularly.  I usually watch 3 TV shows every week as it comes, and then record the others and so I can watch all one show with like 8 episodes.  I then watch one show's 8 episodes in a span of a week.

Containment TV show: I'm going to add this.  I was so excited about this show and woke up early to watch the new episodes I recorded the night before.  I did for the first 3 episodes.  Then I watched it after work.  Then I recorded it all and watched it here and there.  I may like this show more if I watched all the episodes in a week.

I had to go through my email drafts to find this, but this show got cancelled.  It was announced on May 12, 2016 due to low ratings.  They were going to air all the episodes and not renew it.  I don't know, maybe Netflix or another channel will pick it up.

Jul. 19, 2016: I was right that I would like this show if I watched all the episodes in a week.  I loved it.

The first and foremost reason was for the actor Chris Wood, who I first saw on The Vampire Diaries.   He plays a cop on this show and he's a very likable character.

The question is: What if Wood wasn't in it?  Would you still watch the show?

I would, but I wouldn't like it as much.


I wrote this on my May 13, 2016 draft:


Containment: I was on the internet last night and I found out about this.  I was a little sad, but then again they did say the show was a "limited series event."  There was a possibility that there would be a second season if the ratings were good.  Now it seems after 3 eps it proves the ratings weren't good.



Here's an excerpt from the article:

It should be noted that Containment was touted as a limited event series ahead of its launch. (Prior to that, though, executive producer Chris Ord told TVLine, “We’re looking at the first season as its own thing, but it’ll leave us room to go forward and do more.”)


Jul. 20, 2016 My favorite parts:

Funny: In the pilot Jake (Chris Wood) is talking to Lex on the phone:

Jake: Some guy just sneezed 4 feet from my face!

Sexy and romantic: In the episode "There's a crack in everything."  Jake is taking a shower and his love interest Katie is outside.  She is touching his back through the curtain.  He turns around and they touch hands.  He kisses her through the curtain.

Good acting: Katie may have been infected and she is showering.  Jake is sitting outside and crying.

There is another scene where Jake goes to the rooftop and needs to take a breath and cries a bit when Katie may be sick.

The parts where he's crying should be in his demo reel.  I looked it up on YouTube, but there's no demo reel.

I wrote the above this morning.  Now it's at night and I found this through Facebook.  Now I may have to watch Supergirl for him.  But I don't know if I will like it.  We'll see his character and role he has in the show.


I wrote about this show before, and how I wasn't really interested in it:



"Wood, meanwhile, recently landed a recurring role in the second season of PBS’ Civil War drama Mercy Street. He’ll play Lance Van Der Berg, a handsome Union captain lodging at the Green home, where he strikes up a budding romance with AnnaSophia Robb’s Alice."

I probably won't watch Mercy Street because I don't like historical drama.


May 13, 2016 TV show cancellations:

Second Chance: This show got cancelled by Fox.  I kind of knew it had a pretty low chance it would get a second season.  It came out on a Wed. and then it was moved to Fri. nights.  When Fox moves shows to Fri., then it's usually mean not good ratings.

Well I liked it and I got to watch a whole season.

Robert Kazinsky

✔
‎@RobertKazinsky
Those of you who tuned in to watch we were privileged to perform for you.


Jul. 21, 2016: It's the third week of Jul. and I have been seeing promos of returning shows and new shows coming this fall.  I have been writing about old shows I haven't written about yet to mitigate my excitement.

Jul. 23, 2016 Day off: Today is my 2nd day off this month.  I usually get 1 day off a month.  I woke up early around 6:30 am as usual.  This time I read my newspaper outside on my lawn chair in the backyard.  It's kind of cloudy today.  I like reading in the afternoon when it's warm with sunshine.

I also switched activities by writing about TV shows for one of my other emails.  I love watching TV and writing about these shows.  Only if the show is good.

This is kind of my new project.  I have put up job articles and book reviews into my blog/ emails and gave those articles to my friend S.  Now I'm writing about TV shows and recycling my old scrap paper that I wrote on it.


I watched a Zoo ep today.



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"Sex and the single cartoonist"/ "No going gently for, thank you very much"

May 23, 2016 "Sex and the single cartoonist": I cut out this article by Brad Mackay in the Globe and Mail on Apr. 30, 2011:

In the early 1990s, my girlfriend and I considered it our duty as self-righteous university undergrads to write to cartoonist Chester Brown concerning a story in his comic book Yummy Fur. If I remember correctly, the offensive storyline in question detailed in a non-judgmental - and almost clinical - way Brown's lifelong obsession with pornography.

I'll spare you the details of my politically correct proto-feminist bluster. Let's just say that as a devoted fan of his brilliant, groundbreaking alt-comic, I recall being genuinely distressed that he would threaten to throw it all away in favour of an examination of an issue as objectionable as (gasp) pornography.

To Brown's credit, he reprinted my letter without comment in a subsequent issue of Yummy Fur. As for me, I eventually graduated from university, grew out of my ideological training pants and quickly learned to appreciate Brown's fearless approach to his art.

Little did I know, he was just getting warmed up.

Given how I reacted two decades ago, I can only imagine how fans of Brown's recent work, 2003's bestseller Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography, will react to his new graphic memoir, Paying for It. His first all-original graphic work, the book's subtitle - A Comic-strip Memoir About Being a John - does a nice job of summing up the plot. And on the surface, Paying for It is as advertised: an exposé of the prostitution industry from the first-person perspective of a repeat customer.

But it also somehow manages to be about more than just its author's journey into john-dom, wrangling with issues such as the nature of love and sexual attraction, all thanks to Brown's almost-fiendish command of the medium.

The book begins in 1996 as his relationship with CBC Radio personality and musician Sook Yin-Lee comes to an unexpected end. While most people would wallow in self-loathing, Brown takes the news as an opportunity to explore his feelings about romance in general. Witnessing his ex's new relationship bloom, then wither, girds him in his opinion that romantic relationships are inherently destructive.

Fast-forward a couple of years and Brown is resolved to try out prostitution as a means of satisfying his sexual desires. From there, he slowly and methodically lays out his progression through the foreign (to most of us) world of prostitution, chronicling his intimate experiences with more than two dozen prostitutes over a five-year period. Along the way, he presents his case for the decriminalization of the profession to his friends and family, which will seem self-serving to some readers.

But Brown is well aware of society's attitudes toward prostitution and has built this book with such care and precision that I'd be shocked if even my devout Catholic mother weren't sympathetic to his world view - at least a little.

This care is evident in the various levels that the book operates on. First and foremost, it's an exploration and justification of prostitution as a logical option between consenting adults. But it also plays out as a tricky tale of unromantic love: a heartfelt argument against the ingrained cultural trappings of romance, and a fierce defence of the often overlooked joys of other forms of love (such as platonic, filial, interpersonal).

And it's funny. As is the case in most of his other autobiographical comics, Brown sets himself up as the target of the jokes. Joe Matt, a good friend and recurring character in Brown's work, gets the lion's share of the yucks here. I especially liked Matt's reaction after he learns Brown has visited a prostitute: "This is disturbing, but it's also good gossip."

Of course, the art is as idiosyncratic as ever. Brown forgoes the six-panel grid and turns down the cross-hatching that he used in Louis Riel for a small, rectangular eight-panel layout inspired in part by the comics of Carl Barks. These oblong panels house some of the year's most effective cartooning, capable of lending dignity to even the most awkward sex scenes.

The book is not without its faults, though. Brown's decision to obscure the faces of the women he has sex with to protect their identities is bound to lead to criticism that he's objectifying them. And it's difficult not to feel that a female perspective is missing here, especially since all we see of them is their frequently naked bodies.

Then there are the copious appendices and notes, which Brown has reserved for his real axe-grinding. Though often amusing (especially the notes by his friend and fellow cartoonist Seth) and thought-provoking, they are at times reductive and didactic. Some read like something you might find tucked under your car's windshield wiper, like his comment that "any government scheme to license sex would be evil." Possibly, but in what world is this an actual concern? In the end, though, I expect most people will judge this book on the comics, not the commentary, and these are some of the best comics of Brown's career.

Simply told in a deceptively straightforward manner, Paying for It is a defiant work of truth-telling and a welcome return to autobiographical comics from one of the medium's incontrovertible masters.

Brad Mackay is an Ottawa-based writer who co-edited The Collected Doug Wright: Canada's Master Cartoonist, to which he also contributed a biographical essay.


"No going gently for, thank you very much": I cut out this article by Stephan Amidon in the Globe and Mail on Apr. 30, 2011:


Emily, Alone is one of those rare books in which nothing particular happens and yet just about everything seems to be going on. Stewart O'Nan's 12th novel is a sequel of sorts to his well-regarded Wish You Were Here (2002), which dealt with the white, middle-class Maxwell clan as it tried to come to terms with the recent death of their patriarch, Henry. A decade later, Henry's widow Emily soldiers on, surviving in quiet suburban solitude in the too-big Pittsburgh home she refuses to vacate. Her life is a progression of difficult negotiations with both the past and an outside world which is leaving her further and further behind. Should she sell Henry's monstrous old Oldsmobile for a more practical car? What is to be done about her sister-in-law Arlene's smoking, which is clearly killing the woman? Should she put down the family dog as he grows increasingly decrepit?

The book opens with Arlene's terrifying collapse as the two women shuffle through the breakfast buffet at the Eat 'n' Park. It turns out to be nothing more than a transient "episode," though it nevertheless provides Emily with an intimation of her own mortality. Although she dreads becoming "one of those old ladies obsessed with death, hearing it in every tick of the clock and creak of the floorboards, as if it were prowling around the house like a burglar," the prospect of her demise proves impossible to ignore. It pervades everything, from a bout of strep throat, which casts her into a tenebrous netherworld, to Henry's old tools in the basement, "lined up by size on pegboard, having fulfilled their lifetime guarantees."

This is not to say that the novel is gloomy or morbid. It percolates with life, most immediately in the form of Emily's family, who descend on her for holidays like panic attacks. The first to visit is her daughter Margaret, a recovering alcoholic with a personality more befitting a troubled teenager than a 50-year-old mother of two. O'Nan's depiction of the mother-daughter minefield, in which the smallest of remarks can rapidly escalate into a full-scale donnybrook, is one of the novel's finest achievements. Rather less resonant is the Easter-time visit of her feckless son Kenneth and his lesbian daughter Ella, which proves to be one of the few moments in the book that feels perfunctory.

For the most part, however, O'Nan's storytelling is as patient and meticulous as his heroine. He illuminates the everyday with splendid precision. Readers who appreciate psychological nuance and fictional filigree will delight in Emily, Alone. O'Nan has the rare ability to take small moments - the writing of thank-you notes, for instance, or a visit to a flower show - and invest them with a mysterious power the source of which you can never quite identify. This precision is never more effective than in the rendering of Emily herself, with her affinities for Masterpiece Theatre, the plain-spoken decency of Bob Dole and the lesser works of Van Gogh, those that are too obscure to be reproduced on a postcard.

In perhaps the book's most poignant scene, Emily happens upon her grandson Justin, an astrophysics major in college, as he gazes at a website streaming images from the Hubble space telescope. "He leaned aside so she could see the screen. It was supposed to be a galaxy, but all she could make out was a white smudge in the night sky." It is typical of this fine book that, out of one fleeting moment, O'Nan can so wholly conjure his heroine's upcoming date with the heavens.

Stephen Amidon is the co-author, with his brother Dr. Thomas Amidon, of The Sublime Engine, a biography of the human heart.


"John Brown's bawdy": I cut out this article by James Adams in the Globe and Mail on Apr. 30, 2011.  I found it on Pressreader so I can't copy and paste it here.

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"A typical john"

This was posted on my The Vertex Fighter blog on Jul. 2016.  This is supposed to be on Tracy's blog.  I'm posting this now.


"A typical john"




Dec. 25, 2015 "A typical john": I cut out this article/ book review by Mark Medley in the National Post on Apr. 30, 2011.   It's about prostitution and it's insightful:


In a recent Toronto Life cover story entitled “The Secret Life of a Bay Street Hooker,” a veteran Toronto detective opined that “very few condos in the city would not have escorts working out of them.” The cartoonist Chester Brown can attest to that. Years ago, when he was still regularly frequenting prostitutes, an ad for a particular hooker caught his eye. He clicked on a map on the brothel’s website, which directed customers to a condo on King Street West.

“Looking at the map, I realized it’s my building,” Brown says, laughing. “I never did go. I think it would have felt funny. Although it would have been very handy …”

Unlike most johns, Chester Brown is unusually candid about his experiences in the Toronto sex industry, which he chronicles in a darkly humorous and painfully honest new graphic memoir, Paying For It. The 50-year-old is one of the world’s foremost cartoonists, and Paying For It is among the most anticipated comics of the year. For those only familiar with Louis Riel, his critically acclaimed comic-strip biography of the Métis revolutionary, which was published in 2003, Brown’s newest book may come as a shock. Readers will learn more about Brown — and see more of him — than they probably ever wanted.

Paying For It, however, is actually a return to the autobiographical musings that established Brown’s career. In some ways, this is the perfect companion piece to The Playboy, which came out in 1992. In that book, a young Brown grappled — both emotionally and physically — with his love of Hugh Hefner’s titillating magazine. Whereas the Chester Brown found in The Playboy was ashamed of his actions, in Paying For It, Brown is open — and somewhat proud, you could say — about his relationship with sex workers. The Playboy, he says, “kind of freed me up to be able to talk about that side of myself. To be open, not to be ashamed, about admitting to watching pornography or talking about my sex life.” Paying For It, in some ways, is a celebration of the world’s oldest profession.

In the summer of 1996, Brown and his long-time girlfriend, actress and radio personality Sook-Yin Lee, broke up. In the months that followed, Brown began to question the necessity of “romantic love” and the arguments, jealousy and effort that usually accompanies such relationships. After a prolonged period of celibacy, Brown decided to visit a prostitute. He paints a surprisingly endearing portrait of the process: Unable to find a streetwalker, he turns to the back pages of a local weekly; he’s worried about being arrested by police, or getting mugged, and unsure of the proper etiquette — does one pay the hooker before or after the act, for instance. “It takes guts to walk into a place like this,” says the young woman, “Carla.” (All names have been changed, and faces are never shown). After leaving the brothel, Brown writes that he felt “exhilarated and transformed” and that “a burden that I had been carrying since adolescence had disappeared.”

It has never come back.
“I just kind of felt like I’d been freed or something,” Brown says, during an interview at a coffee shop in his Toronto neighbourhood. “All these people walking around with their concerns about romantic love, and how do I find love, and how is my relationship going, and all that kind of stuff. And suddenly, I felt like I wasn’t involved in that world or that way of thinking anymore.”

It’s a world that exists just under the surface of our own, a world of (sometimes misleading) classified ads, online forums where johns post reviews, and changing identities; sometimes the woman Brown thought he was meeting was not the woman who opened the door. Paying For It documents visits with all 23 of the prostitutes Brown frequented over the course of five years; some he slept with once, some he saw several times. By the end of his odyssey, he’d learned that the old stereotypes — the hooker with the heart of gold, like Nancy in Oliver Twist, or the villainess, like Cathy Ames in East of Eden — are just that: stereotypes.

It’s not just prostitutes who are stereotyped, but johns as well. Brown says one of the motivations to write this book was to explain things from a john’s point of view, making Paying For It sort of a 21st-century version of the anonymous Victorian tell-all My Secret Life. That said, Brown calls himself “a typical john.”

“I do think I’m typical in that probably most johns are introverted, not the outgoing type, and probably don’t feel confident in being able to get women to go to bed with them without paying for it,” he says. But “in at least one significant way, I’m not typical, in that I’m very open and out about it. Probably most johns would be ashamed, and wouldn’t be telling their friends.”

Which Brown does, almost immediately after sleeping with a hooker for the first time. One of the most interesting moments in the book occurs when he recounts his visit to friends and fellow cartoonists Seth and Joe Matt, who is blunt in his assessment: “You cheated.” This idea that sex is something one works for — almost a reward — is one Brown rejects.

“One of the things a man is supposed to do is he’s supposed to be able to get sex easily,” he says. “The more easy you can do it — convince women to go to bed with you — the more manly you’re seen as being. So if you don’t use your personality or your wit or your whatever to get women — if you’re just paying for it — you’re seen as cheating, somehow.” Brown didn’t care about “cheating” anymore. He’d had girlfriends in the past, and knew he could get another girlfriend if he wanted. It’s that he didn’t want to. “I just found myself not wanting that type of relationship anymore,” he explains. “It wasn’t a matter of not wanting to make the effort. It was I didn’t like being a boyfriend. I didn’t like how I felt when I was a boyfriend. So that left me with fewer options. If I wanted to have sex, it was going to have to be a different way.”

And while he admits there “definitely is a difference between what you might call girlfriend sex and prostitute sex, to me it was close enough to what I wanted. Yes, the most passionate sex I’ve had was with girlfriends as opposed to prostitutes. But, I don’t know, the best sex with prostitutes is still pretty close to the best sex I’ve had.”

Paying For It ends with a twist, one which I’ll now spoil: Brown falls in love with a prostitute. Although “Denise” no longer works as a call girl, Brown still sees her every two weeks; they’ve been together for eight years. He laughs when asked what to call her. He isn’t sure. Call girl? Escort? Girlfriend? Special friend? It’s a peculiar relationship, where money still changes hands, but each has feelings for the other.

“I don’t quite understand why she’s decided she prefers being in this relationship with me to being in a more conventional, romantic relationship when she could be in one,” he admits. “We kind of talk about it, and she says she likes our relationship. Whatever. I don’t want to try and talk her out of it — I like being in this relationship.”

So does that mean he’s changed his stance on romantic love?

“In our culture, we’re always having this discussion about what romantic love is. So I guess I leave it open for that reason. I don’t think anyone’s really sure what we mean by romantic love or love in general. We know it when we feel it.”

The back pages of Paying For It are filled with notes and appendices on a variety of topics, from human trafficking to the taxation of prostitution to sexual rights to violence against women — subjects he felt necessary to address. Brown supports the decriminalization of the trade, something that may happen thanks to last September’s ruling by Justice Susan Himel; the Ontario Superior Court of Justice struck down several laws relating to prostitution, such as operating a bawdy house, communicating for the purposes of prostitution, and living on “the avails of the trade.” The laws were to stay in place until April 29, awaiting the outcome of an appeal from the federal government. Surprisingly, Brown isn’t in favour of legalization, as that would likely mean regulation, and government involvement, and Brown is an ardent libertarian — in fact, he’s currently running for a second time against NDP incumbent Olivia Chow in the riding of Trinity-Spadina, which he lost in 2008.

Brown, who finished drawing Paying For It last July, hasn’t had any second-thoughts about publishing such a personal book. All his friends and family already know about this part of his life — many of them appear in the book — except for one person: his stepmother.

“I still haven’t really told her,” he says. When they were talking on the phone a few months ago, he described it to her as “another autobiographical book, but this one’s about my sex life.” She probably wouldn’t be interested in reading it, he said. “Then I was talking to her last month, or relatively recently. She said ‘What’s that new book about again?’ So I just repeated the same thing:

“‘It’s about my sex life.’”
• Paying For It by Chester Brown is published by Drawn & Quarterly ($24.95). He launches the book Sunday at 7 p.m. at Goodhandy’s (120 Church St., Toronto) and will appear at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, May 6-8.


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Monday, July 18, 2016

"Review: Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm"/ "Cinderella and the power of kindness"


Dec. 23, 2015 "Review: Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm": I cut out this article by Catherine Bush in the Globe and Mail on Nov. 17, 2012.  I really like the TV show Once Upon a Time.  Here's the whole article:  

Philip Pullman puts the Grimm back into fairy tales
Catherine Bush
Special to The Globe and Mail
Last updated Friday, Nov. 16 2012, 10:37 AM EST
Philip Pullman (Handout)
Title: Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm A New English VersionAuthor: Philip Pullman
Genre: fiction
Publisher: Viking
Pages: 406
Price: $29.50

Why read fairy tales? We hardly need books any more to know the outlines of the most familiar ones. They are continually returned to us in new forms, often aimed at adults: a Red Riding Hood movie last year, two Snow White movies this year, not to mention Grimm, the TV series with a fairy-tale twist. Still, we think of fairy tales as reading for children, or we read them to children, even the often violent and bloodthirsty tales gathered by the Brothers Grimm in Children’s and Household Tales, first published 200 years ago this year.

These tales, with their origins in folk culture, weren’t originally intended just for children. They speak to appetites and fears that begin for us in childhood and never leave us, most powerfully the fear of what can happen to the body, the way bodies can be caught up, damaged and destroyed by forces utterly beyond our control: car accidents, superstorms, illness, death.

Terrible things happen to bodies in the Grimms’ tales. In The Juniper Tree, a stepmother lops off the head of her stepson, then serves him in a stew to his father. In The Robber Bridegroom, a girl, hidden behind a barrel in the house of her husband-to-be, watches as he and his followers drag in another girl, drug her, rip off her clothes, lay her on a table, chop her up and sprinkle her with salt. Nor does a kiss transform a frog into prince in the Grimms’ version of this tale: Instead, the princess, in anger, hurls the frog at a wall – only to have him turn into a young man.

The Grimms’ tales operate in a different register than the authored fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen or Oscar Wilde, whose stories allow us to enter the subjective space of character, and it’s their characters we remember. Like many, I was haunted as a child by Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, burning her matches one by one, then freezing to death anyway; there’s pathos here and a hint of realism. In Wilde’s tales, we’re in the realm of troubled and thwarted yearning: of the dwarf for the Infanta in The Birthday of the Infanta. The late English fabulist Angela Carter uses first-person female narrators to take charge of her complex psychological reimaginings of Bluebeard and Beauty and the Beast. Contemporary writers continue to reinvigorate the form, as in the recent American anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited by Kate Bernheimer.

Philip Pullman, in his introduction to Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version, published to coincide with their 200th anniversary, writes of the flat characters we encounter in the Grimms’ tales. But they’re not flat, any more than our bodies are. In a sense, these aren’t stories about characters at all; they’re stories about bodies, beautiful and deformed, and they return us as readers to the life of the body and life lived in a body. In The Boy Who Wanted to Feel the Shivers, a fearless and feckless young man desperate to be made to shiver survives nightmarish perils, marries a princess and finally shivers when she dumps a bucket of water and minnows over him in bed. When he shivers, we shiver at this weirdly potent gesture.

Pullman, who retells 50 of the 210 tales, is an apt match for the Grimms. He’s the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy for children, the first volume of which, The Golden Compass, has been adapted to film. The books combine fantastical elements with a narrative vitality and intelligence that reward adult reading. Pullman has given a lot of thought to how narrative works, and has lectured on its roots in gestures of the body. In his introduction, he states his desire to render versions of the tales that are “as clear as water” and that capture the tales’ vigour.

While the tales gathered by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have their roots in oral culture, they weren’t scribbling them down as they poured from the mouths of old peasant women. Most of their sources were middle-class acquaintances; Wilhelm Grimm even married one of them. Some stories, such as The Juniper Tree and The Fisherman and His Wife, came to them in written form, the work of a single author. Most of their tales, while rooted in German culture, have resemblances to folk tales from other cultures, and the Grimms drew on such written antecedents as Charles Perrault’s end-of-the-17th-century Mother Goose stories and his versions of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty. In the Grimms’ first edition, some of the tales were overt in their sexual content; this was expurgated in later editions, while their violence was amplified, the revisions largely the work of Wilhelm Grimm.

Pullman picks through the Grimms’ various versions with an ear for what will compel contemporary readers. He restores the sexual innuendo of early Grimm while keeping the intensified violence of later editions. In his version of The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich, the frog-turned-prince, fresh from being tossed at the wall, falls back into the bed of the princess. Rapunzel reveals to the old witch who imprisons her in the tower that she has been entertaining a visitor by innocently declaring that her clothes are getting tight (she’s pregnant). When his name is discovered, Rumpelstiltskin rips himself in half.

Pullman’s sense of clarity is most keenly felt in his attention to narrative vividness: He’s ready to tweak the tales to tighten them or overcome gaps in logic so that at the end of Little Brother and Little Sister, the duped king no longer fails to notice for weeks that a one-eyed hag lies in his marital bed in place of his murdered wife.

Why choose Pullman’s over other versions of Grimm? There are translations of the complete stories by Ralph Manheim, also by noted fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes, not to mention the beautiful illustrated and annotated version of 40-odd tales retold by American fairy-tale expert Maria Tatar.

Pullman’s versions bear the mark of Pullman: His narrative deftness offsets a looseness of rhythm and diction. In his words: “My guiding question has been, ‘How would I tell this story myself if I’d heard it told by someone else and wanted to pass it on?’” He offers notes after each story, which allow readers to encounter the stories unencumbered, then learn of their relation to other tales, Pullman’s alterations and his sometimes opinionated responses. He calls The Girl with No Hands disgusting for its piety while admiring its narrative, and it’s hard to forget the moment when the girl, hands chopped off by her father, wanders by moonlight into an orchard and eats a pear with her mouth from a tree whose fruit the king has numbered so that no one will steal it.

We don’t need to understand fairy tales, we need to experience them and collaborate in their telling. Reading them, or speaking them aloud, we recreate them inside us and allow their wild aliveness to enter our bodies. They bear traces of their origins in oral culture, but, in the best of them, their speed and juxtaposition of strange events radiate the charged, associative energy of poetry. The Grimms’ tales, like the bodies within them, can be hacked at and dismembered and still come back to life. Their coiled vitality demands release in the form of retelling. And Pullman encourages readers to take possession of the stories by continuing to alter their details, as he has done: “You have a positive duty to make them your own.”


Dec. 28, 2015 "Cinderella and the power of kindness": I cut out this article in the Edmonton Journal on Mar. 20, 2015:


The Cinderella story has so often seemed ripe for feminist criticism and revisionism because of the ways in which the story’s advocacy of goodness and niceness can shade into passivity, even encouraging a woman to become the architect of her own subservience. As Stephen Sondheim’s Cinderella put it in the song “I Wish” from the musical “Into The Woods,” “Mother said be good, / Father said be nice, / That was always their advice. / So be nice, Cinderella, / Good, Cinderella, / Nice good good nice-…What’s the good of being good / If everyone is blind / And you’re always left behind? / Never mind, Cinderella, / Kind Cinderella- / Nice good nice kind good nice.”

Fetishizing these qualities can have nasty results, convincing the person who wants to embody them not to rebel against wildly unjust treatment for fear of jeopardizing a reward that always seems to be just over the horizon. Director Kenneth Branagh and writer Chris Weitz’s “Cinderella,” the latest in Disney’s efforts to move its brand forward with live action remakes of its animated classics, has a slightly different credo — “Have courage and be kind” — laid out by Cinderella’s dying mother (Hayley Atwell). And while the movie focuses more on kindness than on courage, the two ideas interact in interesting ways that the filmmakers might have used to greater advantage, especially given the revisionist Cinderellas who have come before this particular Ella (Lily James).

Ella’s efforts to be kind give her Stepmother (Cate Blanchett) and stepsisters (Sophie McShera and Holliday Grainger) an opening to begin treating her like a servant. And for much of the movie, Ella lacks the courage to insist that they share their hardships.

She volunteers to switch bedrooms with her stepsisters to give them more space, but doesn’t protest when her Stepmother responds to this offer by taking the outrageous step of banishing Ella to the unfurnished and unheated attic. Ella is quick to step in after what she assumes are accidents, but slow to pick up on deliberate provocations, like a moment when her Stepmother knocks a plate of cookies to the floor to test Ella’s willingness to do her cleaning.
Like in “Ever After,” a 1998 revisionist Cinderella story starring Drew Barrymore as Danielle, “Cinderella” makes some effort to parse out the ways in which kindness to one person can be cruel to another. In “Ever After,” Danielle’s father Auguste (Jeroen Krabbé) dedicates his dying words to his daughter, slighting his new wife (Anjelica Huston). “Cinderella” takes a slightly different tack: Stepmother overhears her new husband (Ben Chapin) reassuring Ella just how much he loves her and loved her mother, and recognizes that her hopes for a happy second marriage will forever be haunted by a ghost.

“Cinderella” doesn’t really have the courage to explore Stepmother’s psyche, outside of a monologue detailing her disappointments, Blanchett delivers with exquisite coldness and control towards the end of the movie. The movie needs Ella’s father to be a saint, so Branagh and Weitz can’t broach the possibility that he married her stepmother out of self-interest, hoping to succeed her husband’s position or just to fill up his empty-seeming house, or even that he might have deluded himself about his affections for her. To do so would have made “Cinderella” a much more interesting movie, but a much more significant departure from Disney’s animated rendition.

Instead, after much gazing and sighing, we’re left with a rather more attenuated use of courage and kindness. When the Captain (“Game of Thrones” veteran Nonso Anozie) finally discovers Ella confined in the attic and offers her an opportunity to try on the shoe she left behind at the ball, Ella must defy Stepmother’s orders to stay hidden. After an hour and a half of self-abasement, Ella at least has the courage to firmly reject the idea that Stepmother was any sort of mother to her. And she shows a measure of kindness in offering Stepmother her forgiveness.
It’s all rather weak tea, compared to the more interesting emotions “Cinderella” might have explored.

In forgiving Stepmother, Ella isn’t really doing much to ease the older woman’s anguish about her debt and the more comfortable life that has finally slipped beyond her grasp. Instead, she’s liberating herself not merely from a dreadful situation, but from the need to feel any guilt or anxiety about the people she’s leaving behind or the way she conducted herself during her time with them. That’s one of the radical things about kindness: it can bind you from acting in your own self-defense, but it can also help you build up an unassailable moral high ground, leaving you with confidence and certainty, and the ability to move forward unencumbered.

And even more than that, kindness can leave you with an army of people who are ready to help you when you’re ready to make a decisive break. “Ever After,” with its more assertive Cinderella, made this point repeatedly: Danielle may not always have been good, but her basic decency wins her friends who are willing to free her from imprisonment, make her beautiful things and even risk the anger of their own families to repay her kindness and to live by her example.

Ella is, unfortunately, a more passive and isolated figure. There are animals who are willing to be transformed for her sake, and who open up a window at a fateful moment to help her. But this is a childish vision of the radical power of kindness, bound and circumscribed by the need for life to imitate animation.


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