Outrageous Fortunes

Slings & Arrows is charming and complex and lovely. Canadians: how do they do it? (Virginia Hefferan, NY Times, 5 Aug 2005)

I had been wanting to write about this wonderful 3-season TV series from Canadian writer Susan Coyne for some time. While it originally aired on the Sundance Channel in 2003, I just saw it on DVD last year. It may have been just as well. The episodes were addictively watchable, despite the fact that the series was about the fortunes of a Shakespearean Festival in fictional New Burbage. What!?! Aren’t there enough unsavory crimes in Canada to warrant a CSI or Law And Order spin-off? This apparently distinguishes Canadian (vs. American) cinema/television, i.e., the ability to turn the ordinary into the offbeat, the everyday into the eccentric.

If Americans are in your face, Canadians are more reticent. If a lot of American movies are about wackos who turn out to share conventional values at the core, Canadian characters tend to be normal and pleasant on the surface, and keep their darker thoughts to themselves. I don’t know which I prefer, but I know the Canadians usually supply more surprises. (Roger Ebert, review of The Hanging Garden, 29 May 1998)

Everyone who reads Alice Munro already knows this. Just check out her short story Away From Her, adapted into film by Sarah Polley (who incidentally played Cordelia in season three!).

Anyway, it also doesn’t hurt that The Bard himself supplies the backbone material for the stories, as the characters’ predicaments mirror the plays in production. There are ghosts, madness, and incapacity in season one’s Hamlet; bad luck, usurpation, and more ghosts in season two’s Macbeth; delusional has-been and downsizing in season three’s King Lear. This mix of fantastic elements of Renaissance theater with the modern everyday makes for magic realism TV. Canadians: how do they do it?

 

Entry/Exit

The US Embassy in Ottawa was a formidable structure, the only building on its block along Sussex Street, its stone-grey façade emerging like a dead-end wall in a Kafkan parable from the road where we approached it. This was the nearest consulate I could book an interview with to renew my entry visa–nearest, that is, to Montreal, 2 hours away, where I was staying with my aunt. Despite the dreadful inconvienience and expense of having to leave the country for this purpose, this was, in a way, a holiday; other foreign students I know of from Houston would risk limb and liver to get theirs renewed in the seedy border towns of Mexico. All the same, this business always made me nervous, even in the paperwork–declarations of income and net worth, proofs of family ties, clean bill of health, spotless criminal record. What else should I have made manifest? I felt already found-out, like Josef K., guilty even before he had made his case.

 

Purok Côte-des-Neiges

Without a doubt, Côte-des-Neiges, can surely be called the Filipino ghetto of Montreal. It is not uncommon, walking around Avenues Victoria and Van Horne, to overhear not only conversation in Tagalog, but also in other minor Filipino dialects. The sari-sari store–the stock family-owned business–is very much at home here in the form of the dépanneur. Drop in anytime at Tim Horton’s, and there you’ll always find a wall-to-wall row of Filipinos along its glass window, congregating like the steady coming and going of grackles on high tension lines. When the next-door Pharma Prix goes on sale, its shelves all but empty into Balikbayan boxes (24″ x 18″ x 20″), where soap, shampoo, and toothpaste, with formulations in French, find their way efficiently to a village (purok) half-way around the world. Somehow, it would not surprise me to see some hawker frying fishballs around a corner, or teenagers dribbling basketball on a makeshift court in the middle of an alley.

My aunt lives on Avenue Bourret, three blocks from Van Horne where she holds office. She recruits caregivers back home and places them in affluent French and Jewish neighborhoods surrounding Côte-des-Neiges. She also provides them financial services, teaching them how to invest their money, and, during summers, organizes tours to Quebec City and Niagara Falls. “We are at the center, toto” she tells me, with Cosa Nostra savvy, like a pint-sized Sicilian immigrant just landed in Little Italy. That Sunday, I had brunch with her at Blanche Neige with her gaggle of “girls”–thirtysomethings still wearing coy T-shirts like “Sweet Girl” or “All the good ones are gay.” It was on Chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges, the quickest way there being through the wards of the Jewish hospital at the end of Bourret. For $1.99, you get two eggs, bacon, potato, toast, and coffee, along with the charms of a lanky French-Canadian, winning us with her efforts at Tagalog. “Okey. Anong gusto ‘nyo?,” she asked, taking out pencil and paper from her apron pocket. The gaggle giggled.

 

Montreal/Toronto

From Christmas 2005:

My aunt, whom I am staying with, has laid out a rather busy schedule for me: Montreal, Quebuec City, Mont Tremblant, Ottawa, Niagara Falls, Kingston, Toronto… I think have become a jaded traveller, losing that sense of wonder and surprise at entering a new city; sightseeing has become a wearisome parade of old churches, swanky monuments, and kitschy souvenir shops. Even Niagara Falls was lackluster, not so much from the grey winter light, but from the five-star hotel/casino perched beside it. The city has completely incorporated Nature, drained it of any sense of the Kantian sublime, and transposed it into an urban spectacle worthy of Las Vegas.