Watching Liam Finn perform at Lee's Palace last night I thought:

When you're most fragile is when you can really open up to art.
--

Yes Boss, right away Boss, just let me read these two other books Boss and...

If you're going to take literature far too seriously be sure to select a boss with great taste in fiction.

My boss, or program coordinator if we're really getting hung up on titles, Marjatta (pronounced Mar-ee-ata; she's from Finland originally), who has read book shelves more than me, from a far wider selection of countries, and who can read fluently in at least two languages, gets it with Jhumpa Lahiri (I won't say it); and now, as per my recommendation, she's become a Murakami fan.

Because she reads so widely and well, Marjatta has convinced me to tackle Salman Rushdie's supposed masterpiece, "Midnight's Children," a book so Booker worthy it was awarded the Booker of Bookers (best Booker winner of the award's first 25 years).

I'm not familiar with a great many Finnish-Canadians, but this Finnish-Canadian, who happens to be one of the University of Toronto's truly expert grammarians of English (she teaches a course on the subject), is a patient one too; or, at least, she is a patient reader. She warned me I'd have to wait till page 250 (of 645) - that the book was a rather incomprehensible drag for her until then. But that if I could stick out through those 249 pages, that it would all be worth it after that.

Well, Marjatta, this Jewish, Edinburgh-born to South African parents Canadian is 220 pages in and hurting. He's hurting in that 'I think I'm just not smart enough to get this' sort of way. So much so he's put down the Rushdie for a while and picked up not one but two other works of fiction in the meantime (Stephen King's "Duma Key" and Paul Bowles' "The Sheltering Sky").

Still, Big M (I dare, I dare - she reads this blog), because of you I will return to "Midnight's Children" and slog through another 30 pages. But if a magic carpet doesn't transport me elsewhere by then I'm filing a grievance.

You've been warned.

Ryan Gosling in "Half Nelson" - This Flick's Smart and It's Got Heart

I used to think I would be an actor until I realized how unrealistic that was, which was when I decided I'd make my millions writing literary fiction. The point, though, is that I've acted in a few plays in my time, high school stuff and a bit in uni and then even a play in Japan.

Thus like a fellow whose played a few seasons of somewhat serious softball and so gets how hard it really might be to hit a major league fastball, my acting experience has allowed me to be a mad lover of a great performance on screen (or stage).

And some movies are all about the great performance. "Half Nelson" (2006) is one of those. The teen-aged girl (Shareeka Epps) in it is amazing. The film's lead, Ryan Gosling ("The Notebook," "The Believer"), makes me want to climb up on a stage again. He is sincerity on a big screen (or small). If authenticity is the heart of a certain kind of great acting, Gosling, who isn't yet 30, is all heart. Raw would probably be the best word to describe his performance.

That's all I really want to say about it.

Ok, I'll also say that Gosling plays a junior high school teacher, and you believe him as a teacher (having spent the better part of a decade in some form of a classroom as the one who gets to/has to hold the chalk, I feel like I've got some fair shakes at an assessment of that one), a teacher who has much passion and cares, he cares about his kids. Also, he's a crack addict. You believe that too. So it's not exactly a light movie. But it's a very very good movie.

When Blue, I Don't Reach for Something New

The other day I plugged my iPod into my computer and happened to catch the stat that tells you how many times you've listened to each song.

Is it odd that (in two years) I've listened to Radiohead's 'Weird Fishes' 94 times?

That I've read Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood" at least five times?

Watched Patrick Swayze (RIP) in "Roadhouse" 26 times?

I'm kidding, though I've probably seen that classic thrice (not including countless scenes re-watched on TV).

But the fact that if the movie is good enough, an "Inglorious Basterds" or a "Happy-Go-Lucky" that I'll watch those movies three times in the theatre? IN THE THEATRE? This during an age when most kids won't pay to rent a movie.

And the first two in theatre viewings often occur on consecutive days.

This is weird. I know.

In my defence,
1. The arts are my comfort food (when blue, I don't reach for something new);
2. With movies,
a) The first time it's experience, the second it's seeing how they did it;
b) The first time I like to go alone; the second I like to share with Ai or a friend. That pointing out the sunset thing again.
3. I'm an oddball.

Pointing at Sunsets

The simple math of a densely populated nation with a first world budget means that a country like Japan gets some of the best (ie. costliest) art exhibits coming through its major cities.

My wife and I were at one such exhibit of mostly impressionist stuff in Kobe a few years back when I had an 'aha' moment - like discovering "The Catcher in the Rye" when I was fifteen and never needing a Hardy Boys adventure (love them as I did) again.

By luck of what had seemed like bad-timing on account of not particularly organized living, we wound up at the museum on the very last hour and a half of the very last day of the exhibit. The luck being that the place was pleasantly peopled, rather than cattle-prod packed, a not minor miracle in Kansai, Japan.

We walked our way round the square of a long rectangular shaped room, following the walls, stopping careful-interested at each painting.

We saw Pissaros and Cezannes and all the big name players you come to see and so much ooh and ahh and eye pleasure, each one more mouth-dropping than the next; this was a big money, big culture, exciting event. We were as floaty buoyed up by the quality of work as anyone, that intensity of colour and light, and the beauty. So much beauty. And the quiet calm that just looking at some paint can do to you. Even the biggest crowds settle down at a decent art gallery.

We were most of the way across the last wall when we reached the single Van Gogh at the show. His 'Room at Arles' [see 'Writerly Advice' post below, or just click it]. And I'm sorry, but Van Gogh, Van Shmo. It's a painting of a room. I mean really. Who gives a shit? [Impossibly vague reference to a line Jennifer Lopez gives in "Out of Sight."]

Who gave a shit? Oh, I don't know - me, Ai, and I'm guessing just about everyone else at the show because that painting, it was like it was glowing it had so much power, so much power it erased all the paintings that came before it, every big money, big name Renoir and Manet and Degas, all these lovely famous, hard-working, enormously talented legends I had minutes earlier been so overjoyed to see, suddenly it was like they didn't even exist, like, I imagine, the terrific excitement of seeing Matt Damon and, say, Edward Norton on stage (if they were stage actors) and then having a 1970s in his prime Serpico, Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon Al Pacino step up onto that stage. That kind of glaring difference.

It wasn't the last painting in the room but I have no memory of a single painting after. That's how good it was.

And like the sunset pointer-outer on a dusk time walk with a friend, I'll not try and explain why the sunset is beautiful. I'll just point and say, 'There! There! Did you see that?'

Writerly Advice

A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?
-Albert Einstein

Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan" - A Great Documentary

Just because you're a Jew doesn't mean you love Woody Allen. It's not even required that you love Bob Dylan, believe it or not. But then, even for the rules Moses passed on down, I always found it hard to follow along; I'm sorry, but sunny side eggs grow lonely without a few rashers of bacon. Crispy.

So it is that I did not like Bob Dylan as a kid, despite my being a Jew, an art lover, and the son of a father who loved folk music above all else.

Truth told, I think I downright hated Dylan as a kid. Hated him the way kids hate anything that isn't pretty, the way boys only want the blond girl in the class no matter how bitchy or unkind or dumb. Pretty people with pretty voices was all I ever fell for back then. Pop, in other words. To take it that muddy step deeper, I couldn't handle how Jewish Bob Dylan (nee Zimmerman) looked. Ah the self hate of the Jew.

Even into my twenties, when I was starting to get that maybe the kindness of the girl, or her ability to hold a conversation might, alongside the colour of her eyes, length of hair, size of boobs, matter, even then, and with so many musically cleverer friends than I being such Dylan fans, I still refused. It was that voice. It just did nothing for me.

That is until a few years back when I caught "No Direction Home," Martin Scorsese's masterful documentary of Bob Dylan on TV (PBS - where it first aired), and how it made me [sic - thank you Sonia] need to get the accompanying CD.

This two-part, over three hour documentary has as much footage of young Dylan performing (acoustic and electric songs in their entirety) as it does have interviews with Bob himself and all those Greenwich village characters he grew up with. Getting to be there, watching the young boy from Minnesota up on a modest stage, barely twenty, trying still to be Woody Guthrie, I became an audience member as transfixed as how many million fans before me; that aha, I get it, moment. From a documentary.

That's what this movie can do. It can actually make you whoa at the talent of Bob Dylan, not to mention marvel (or sigh, or cry) at the stark difference in the era he came of age in as compared with the cynical now.

"No Direction Home" (which I just rented over the long weekend - and even I don't usually revisit documentaries) is a movie about a legend, about the making of an artist, about a charlatan, a scammer, a true stealing, lying bastard (at times), who is also so clearly a genius, a poet, a musician, a chameleon. It is, at the same time, a meditation on the nature of fame, the love and the hate that can come so close together and so easily tear a person apart. Enough that I wondered how Dylan made his way through the 60s without taking his own life.

At one point in the movie, Dylan says that when he was getting started there was the folk that was commerical, and the folk that was intellectual. He said his music was neither.

So it is with this film. And with so much of the art that grabs hold of me, and a few other million people around the globe.

Grown Tired

There's a scene in the documentary "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan" when Joan Baez is singing her protest songs to a gathering of university-aged kids, all of them sitting cross-legged on ground looking up, singing along with her. Baez is young and not rich, as artists probably should be. The crowd is young and emotional, as crowds probably should be. And there is no service charge been taxed on any of it, as there duh-blatantly well never should be.

I want to clarify: I never wanted to be at Woodstock. Not a big crowd lover, I probably would have hated Woodstock or the folk festival at Newport or the espresso beat rush of any of it. And truth told I probably would have found hippies pretentious even if I did once have, love and over-wear a purple tie-dyed Hendrix t-shirt in high school (though "Purple Haze" never did a thing for me).

And yet I catch that glimpse of a moment and it is this young man in thick dark glasses (like my father used to wear) sitting near the mike, near Baez, and he is singing along with her, looking up at her, singing back at her like as if, if he could just be heard that racism could end, that war could end. Singing this most earnest song. This song of hope, of anger, of change in the air. And all I can think watching this is: how much longer do we - us, our gym generation - have to be ironic sarcastic dry and clever and above everything that's happening to us. When can sincerity become cool again. I'm waiting for that, cross-leggged in my thick dark glasses. Saying please. Please can we just have passion for things we care about.

Bright Star? Dull star. Jane Campion's Pretty Picture is Pretty Boring

I rely on critics for my movie choices, I admit. Without them I'd never have even gone to Tarantino's latest, which as time passes, I'm coming to consider the best movie I've seen in ten years. Thanks to A.O. Scott and others I never paid a red cent to see any Michael Bay orchestrated machine transform, and then of course explode, on screen. I didn't watch some stinky Matrix sequel either (not 2 or 3).

That said, sometimes critics don't have a clue (and that goes for this critiquey critter too, I'm sure).

96% of the 'Top Critics' at Rottentomatoes.com gave the red tomato (ie. the thumbs up) to Jane Campion's ("The Piano") latest film, "Bright Star." My trusted mate at the NY times loved it, calling it "romantic in every possible sense of the word" and for a hopeless romantic of a movie watcher like me, you'd think that would signal the movie of the year alert.

Instead I find myself saying, wtf!

It's pretty, I'll grant you. Very, very pretty. And I suddenly gained an interest in seeing "The Piano" because my ever-perceptive wife LOVED it and my painterly friend Rosette LOVED it and because visually Campion is clearly masterful, and because I'm assuming her earlier film had something resembling a compelling story. "Bright Star," unfortunately, does not.

A love story needs tension for it to work. The riveting tension, say, of that first meeting (no such scene in this film) or the unbearable tension of not being able to be together, which this film doesn't have nearly enough of.

It had some beautiful readings of John Keats' poetry, though. Got me interested in picking up a book or two. So I guess it can't be all bad then, can it?

Previously Published: Passports, Pears and Gatekeepers Pt. III

[continued from Part II]

I was taken into a large room,
left behind a large yellow curtain. She returned a few minutes later and by gesture and grunt indicated that I was to follow round to the other side of the curtain. Standing there, at a computer, was a broad, fat man in his manager’s uniform. He waited for the girl to leave.

He started softly. Asked me what had happened. I was given about twenty seconds of talk-time – my feeble attempt to express my innocence – before he started to yell at me. I was not to EVER disrespect one of his officers. DID I UNDERSTAND? And suddenly I was in every bad American army movie I had ever seen, head down, hands clasped together before me getting all yes sir, no sir, three bags that I packed myself sir. And before you imagine yourself doing differently, know that he spent much effort yelling about how easily he could stop me from ever entering the United States again. I was now the crown king of deferential.

Was I American, he asked? I said no. I said I was Canadian. He corrected me. I was a foreigner. Did I understand? Yes, sir. The supervisor left. The girl returned.

She went through my bags. In my knapsack she found a pear. Underneath a Mack truck of rage from the fact that I had no recourse in any of this, I was still
pretty nervous, the way so many people must feel who cross the border with the “wrong” coloured skin. I quickly apologized, said I was planning to eat it before boarding the plane.

Instead of just confiscating it, the woman said she'd have to check it with agriculture. Off she went. More minutes ticked by. She returned. The pear was set aside. Another national American crisis diverted.

She clicked away at her computer after telling me to zip up my bags. Am I free to go? I asked tepidly. Still looking at her screen she said a flat “ba-bye” in response.

Furious and pearless I boarded the plane en route to Manhattan. Welcome to George Bush's* America.


Jonathan Mendelsohn is [sic**] a writer who splits his time between living in Canada and Japan.


* No more! Thank God!
**No more! Boo hoo! But may well be visiting over o-shogatsu. Woohoo! Sat school folks (Cass you don't teach at Sat school but I group you with that crowd cause your a cool cat Kansai gaijin), I'd love to see you guys.

Previously Published: Passports, Pears, etc. Pt. II

[continued from Pt I]

YOU CANNOT ENTER WITHOUT AN ADDRESS, DO YOU UNDERSTAND? I said I did and she directed me to a pay phone.

It was only because it was a childhood friend that I remembered his parents’
phone number by heart and so could call and get the address.

On my return I was permitted to bypass the line. The director of traffic, the man in the blue blazer, held me back when the next available customs officer came free. It seemed I was to be sent back to the lady at booth five. Only she wasn’t freeing up. She was harassing some other traveler.

Eventually I was sent to booth number four, adjacent to the woman’s. She had her back to me and there was bullet-proof glass to muffle the sound.

The young male officer at booth four politely asked me where I was going. The Bronx, I said, address in hand, ready. He didn’t ask for it and was already stamping my boarding pass. And that was that.

Until, that is, the lady officer behind him turned around and saw me. Through the bullet-proof glass she asked the officer, DID HE GIVE YOU AN ADDRESS?

The officer said no and I frantically raised up the paper the address had been written on to show her I had it. I told her that he hadn’t asked for it.

You have to understand. It doesn’t matter that I hadn’t done anything wrong. The important thing was that to this point I had been deferential, obliging and relatively subservient. Then I got stupid. I mean how many times have you been told to never ever get angry or snippy or anything but obscenely obsequious to customs officers? The woman started yelling about something or other and, truth is, I’d had enough so I just gently turned away from her and looked back at the more personable young man. He gave me my stamped boarding pass and passport and I was sent on my way.

I had what I needed and had only to pass one more person, a young woman who had been standing near booth five the whole time. She took my passport from me and said I had to accompany her. I asked, in my most Disney-innocent manner, if I had done something wrong? Sorry sir. That was all she said and kept marching. I was to follow.

Tomorrow: Pt. III of III

Previously Published*: Passports, Pears and Gatekeepers Pt. I

You don’t have to fit a racial profile to run afoul of U.S. customs officials, Jonathan Mendelsohn discovered

To some this may be passé. But to white Canadian boys, it’s still new. So bear with me.

I was at Pearson International recently en route to New York city. I had my passport, aware that soon enough we would no longer be permitted to enter the country without one. I waited in the snaking line of U.S. customs control the requisite forty minutes.

The director of traffic, the man in a blue blazer at the front of the line, sent me to booth number five when it became free. It was manned by a woman no older than thirty. I thought this would be to my advantage. I figured it would be better than dealing with a man. Angry men are generally less susceptible to male charm, you see.

Unfortunately, my customs officer was a woman who’d been angry many years before she met me. There was no charming her. I was doomed before I started.

She didn’t yell but almost yelled. Where was I going? New York city. My purpose? Vacation. Where was I staying? The Bronx. I was staying with a friend I told her. What’s the address? I'm sorry? The ADDRESS? She was yelling now. I don't know it, I stammered. The friend I’m staying with is going to pick me up.

I’d been to America countless times before and had never once been asked for an address. You need an address, she said. I'm really sorry, I don't know it. What am I supposed to do? Her arms were crossed. You're gonna have to find it out. How, I asked? You'll have to call your friend. But he works in a hospital. He won't answer his phone. She hadn't uncrossed her arms. Listen, you want to come in to the United States, you need an address.

How is the government supposed to keep track of you without an address? I dared not ask why they needed to keep track of me. But I did say, pleading: if he doesn't answer his phone what can I do? (I'm now truly hating myself for not having made one up.)

YOU CANNOT ENTER WITHOUT AN ADDRESS, DO YOU UNDERSTAND? I said I did and she directed me to a pay phone.

Pt. II

*Published a few years back in "The Toronto Star."

Bleu

I'm more inclined to write a story about a sad eyed girl gazing out a window on a rainy day than I am to explain why that can be beautiful.

But not on long, hard Sundays, when I'm too tired to wind my spring, to quote my favourite living writer (three guesses). This night I won't write fiction; I'll refill the well by renting just the the right movie.

It's odd to most people where I go to heal my soul. With each passing year I learn to what extent that's true. I love human drama in movies. If it's portrayed honestly, if it's portrayed beautifully.

Were this a university essay I would now be expected to define those words for you. Thankfully, it isn't and I don't have to. Not out of laziness, but because I don't want to try and define beauty or honesty in art (or life, for that matter), not in a discursive way. If that can even be done in an academic, rational way, it's certainly beyond my abilities. I can only speak to that gut feeling you get when you've seen something that touched your soul, that made you feel less sad, less alone. The way you can live with the Corleones of "The Godfather" or the women in "Fried Green Tomatoes" and feel part of a family, a life.

To get at the depth of human drama, the highs and lows, if portrayed beautifully, it matters not if they are tragic films (like Kimberly Peirce's "Boys Don't Cry," Kieslowski's "Bleu" or Hirokazu Koreeda's stunningly difficult "Nobody Knows") or seemingly rather light ones ("About a Boy" or "Wonder Boys") the result is the same. Imagining myself into the heightened lives of the onscreen I don't feel worse. If I'm blue a sad movie doesn't make me more sad. It makes me feel better; it gives me solace, reminds me that I'm not alone in this big universe, the one computers are supposedly connecting and yet somehow just as quickly dividing.

I need the humanity of a story not afraid to take on the darker sides of life so I can brave another grey day.

Last Train to Takarazka

Oops! She's being workshopped just now. But she'll be back. Promise! Unless I can actually sell her somewhere that will pay me. Pay me? But I do it for love. Love! Love love me do. I'm being silly too. K. Enough. But the story is being workshopped, honestly. Trying to clean it up and get it right. Then she'll be back. Don't you worry your pretty little head about it.

10 Albums That Are Entire Albums

1. Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks"
2. Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue"
3. Radiohead's "In Rainbows," ("Ok Computer," "Kid A")
4. Dave Matthews, Tim Reynolds' "Live at Luther College" ("Crash")
5. Sarah Harmer's "You Were Here"
6. CSNY's "Deja Vu"
7. George Michael's "Listen Without Prejudice"
8. Norah Jones' "Come Away With Me"
9. Broken Social Scene's "You Forgot It In People"
10. R.E.M.'s "Automatic For The People"

Great Book Openings: Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none.