Berkinhead and Back

I have learned a few more things about effective blogging on the internet since my last entry from a grumply old man who has always kept me in stitches: Wes Wesling! He is a very insightful and avant-garde kind of guy, who makes it his business to know everything. We had a long conversation about how to write, and not to write blogs, including key words as well as interesting ways of making money with the internet - a whole whack of it too, check out http://milliondollarhomepage.com/.
Wes was so inspired by my blog that he has started his own - I am just proud that I was the motivation that inspired him to start sharing his thoughs - some people are inspired by greatness others by mediocrity! Whichever it is, I can't wait to read the blogs...look for his instructions on the best ways to eat a banana.

Early Sunday morning (and I mean early! not quite the grace matinale that your humble narrator is used to on the eight day of the week) my good friend and confidente Carolina and her pack (that's her mom Judith in the pic) went to visit Berkinhead by Squamish to watch the Bald Eagles. Many tourist flock to the region to count the majestic birds feeding their young. In september, there are so many spawning Salmon in there that the river turns red! Sometimes hundreds of Eagles nest on the trees along the shores feasting on the salmon. We saw a few baby eagles that had perched on the branches... See how small their tail feathers are - cool huh?

It was a beautiful ride with many photo opportunities - just wish I had mastered the digital cameras I was borrowing. It's a great getaway from the city and a wonderful way to commune with nature. Just a few words of advice:

1. Go early! The birds do much of their feeding right at dawn before the place is filled with hikers and rafters. So leave Vancouver around 6 AM to make it there by 7 ish.
2. Make sure you have good directions on how to get there cause there are no clear directional signs in sight. http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=12749 The entrance to the park is righ through a half-descent residential area that looks only semi-friendly... so don't be stubborn, ask for directions before you get there - don't be stubborn now!
3. Bring something to eat, cause you will be getting back to civilization at the same time that most civilized people are thinking about brunch. Which means you will have to drive around a few places before you can find one spot without a huge lineup.
4. Don't ride backward on the Sea to Sky highway or West Vancouver, specially when you haven't had any food for 6 hours- even if the conversation in the backseats is enthralling. Nausea can really be a conversation killer.

That was my Sunday folks - oh and I swam 2.2KM in one hour.

an eastern addition

Hi folks,

I should thank someone very special in my acceptance speech of your award of gratitude: my old friend - the one who will never grow old (as opposed to the ones who look younger every day - you know who you are!) and most endearing confident: Mounir (aka Mark, Manou, Minou...) of Montreal/Montmartre/Marash . I am very proud to call him my friend for over 15 years now. We met at Concordia studying French Cinema under Serge Lozic. I learned more from my chats over coffee with Mounir and his unbelievable regime of watching every foreign film that came to Montreal, than I did from the Great Lozic. I am only sorry that I can't do coffee with him every Sunday and enjoy his eastern ways in the in Jewel of the St-Lawrence: Montreal... missing you much manou, j'oublirais jamais ``La Pomme`` MT

Mark has been doing his yearly "best of list" for ages, it is something I look forward to reading every new year, and I would like to pass on a sampling of his reviews.

Folks, you should do what Mounir says (he told me to say this BTW)!

your humble midwife,

viken

A new year...and a new list!!!!

AMONGST THE 71 MOVIES THAT I SAW AT THE CINEMA THIS PAST YEAR ... THIS IS THE 10 OR 12 CHOSEN ONES ...
10. MILLION DOLLAR BABY
9. TIE: CAPOTE & CRASH
8. HEAD ON
7. PARADISE NOW
6. 2046
5. ME AND YOU & EVERYONE WE KNOW
4. HAPPY ENDINGS
3. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
2. TIE: LA MALA EDUCACION & MYSTERIOUS SKIN
1. C.R.A.Z.Y

HONOURABLE MENTIONS GOES TO... (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER)

THE SEA INSIDE// DOWNFALL// PALINDROMES// SARABANDE//
LA NEUVAINE// WHERE THE TRUTH LIES// 5X2// SIN CITY//
HOTEL RWANDA// LE ROLE DE SA VIE//STAY//
KING KONG// VIPERE AU POING// BROKEN FLOWERS//
ILS SE MARIERENT ET EURENT BEAUCOUP D'ENFANTS// SYRIANA

PURE PLEASURE(S)...

VISUAL FEAST: LA MARCHE DE L'EMEREUR
CHARLIE & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

MUSICAL FEAST:
MESDAMES & MESSIEURS

GUILTY PLEASURE...

CORPSE BRIDE, CRUSTACES & COQUILLAGES,
PODIUM

PURELY BAD...
BE COOL

PLAYS ...

ENLEVEMENT, SEQUESTRATION ET MISE A MORT D'UN HUMORISTE

CONCERTS ...
FAIROUZ (PLACE DES ARTS)
OMARA PORTUANDO (PLACE DES ARTS)
LHASA (CORONA)

SPECTACLES...
FEMMES D'ORIENT ( PDA)
LADY BUNNY @ JELLO BAR

ART SHOWS . ..
PINAKOTHEK DER MODERNE -MUNICH
GELLERT HOTEL & SPA IN BUDAPEST
AND ... 90% OF THE CITY OF PRAGUE!!!

VOILA...

2006 BISOUS ...

MK

Next installment ...Brokeback Mountain et al

So here I am once again trying to put my thoughs on paper, or should I say in lights!
Thought I would follow up with some of the Arts & Culture stuff that I get so see. Sort of a diary of the good, the bad and the tearful... don't know if many of you are aware of my Multi-Teared Rating System where I rate the films I see based on how much they make me cry. Well I get to cry a lot in movies - but not just when the violins swell...But it's a reaction to the intensity of the emotions, and the complexity of the scenario: other people's brilliance brings me to tears. Putting aside the psychological implication of this reaction as it reflects on my own successes, I do find it's a consistent way of separating the good movies from the great ones: the boys from the men so-to-speak!

Speaking of self indulgent man-boys...Breakfast on Pulto by Neil Jordan with Cillian Murphy playing a whoop-di-do tranny in the 60's in Ireland is a rant of a movie. Chronicling the life of a down and out catholic boy whose mother abandoned him at the footsteps of the local church in the watchful care of the myoptic Liam Neeson and some chirpy sparrows as she leaves her home town for the anonymity of the big city - London. Patrick, who quickly crowns himself Kitten, grows up in the backwaters of Irish Catholicism in the hey day of Irish seperatism... The following narrative, supplied by Cillian with a wispy monotone ineffectualism that not a single drag queen I know would dare to get away with - goes along the daily task of surviving as an orphaned tranny with IRA ties. Well you see where this is going Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) once again shows his penchant for drag queens and explosions.
Tears? No, I couldn't shed a single one except tears of boredom! And to think I opted to see this film instead of a re-viewing of Brokeback Mountain. But a review of Brokeback I do have, and so will you my kittens.

What can I say... I was speechless like Ang Lee was at his acceptance speech on the Golden Globes (now don't get me started on that scham of an award show...But I heard the champagne is free flowing... Like rivers made of whiskey which in a cowboy's dream). Set in the wide and majestic rocky mountains of Alberta - standing in for Wyoming - Brokeback Mountain is is a real masterpiece. Dense and intense, a contradiction of realities that only love dares to reconcile. And love it is...the two men are so in love with each other that they live and die by the love. They come from similar farm backgrounds but they are very different in outlook from each other. Kind of archetypes of two kinds of cowboys: the stoic man of few words with good manners and a violent streak that has made saloon brawls such a staple of frontier flicks, played to a roaringly reticent perfection by Heath Ledger (everything you heard about his performance is true - he is the Hollywood bad boy of Brando and J Dean and J Wayne). His sidekick is the loud and gregarious rodeo cowboy Jack Swift whose Yee haw dazzles the ladies to a swooning . Beaten but optomistic Gyllenhaal plays the obnoxious cowboy to a sad second fiddle. They meet during a summer job as sheep herders, but what they share in the rough wilderness of the mountainsides one night as they are sheltering from the cold (guess counting sheep wasn't doing it) is a passion that burns in them for decades.
For the next 15 years, they stumble along with their lives along only to fall back into each other's arms. Both of them are the product of the harsh realities of cowboy life, but Jack, the showman and the one with more confidence in possibilities, keeps wanting to try a different kind of life, only to be stumped by the wall that is Ennis, whose childhood memory of the his dad's bashing of a gay cowboy keeps him in check with a reality that Jack is desperately trying to escape. Whence comes the great line:
"You are too much for me Ennis, you sonofawhoreson bitch! I wish I knew how to quit you." - Jack
"if you can't fix it, you got to stand it" - Ennis.

The supporting cast is as well kick ass! From the soft murmurrings of Anne Hathaway, the bleached blond heiress of a Texas farm industrialist ... to the impassioned martyrdom of the always pregnant Michelle Williams, the wives share the same frustrations with the men as the lovers do - just goes to show how in life the things that make us happy and the things that makes us miserable are often the one and the same. The one thing you can't run away from is the thing that always catches up to you: yourself. Really powerful and mastefully executed.
...so how many tears did this film gets? well it was beyond tears. When the last scene rolled around, I felt like throwing up. The emotion was so intense that I was having a visceral response like the one you feel when you are in love - you know that overpowering unease at the pit of your stomach - (like the one Ennis had after he leaves Jack for the first time).... so yeah, this films gets a good review from viken.

There is one more thing that I would like to plug shamelessly if I may - 'cause Bloggin is rarely shamless!

It's the latest play by Boca de Lupo called The Perfectionist http://www.bocadellupo.com/ . I have seen many plays in the last little while and have often left the theatre mid-way or wish I had. But it seems everything I have seen from this troupe has been nothing short of amazing. It's an experimental, multi-media story of a couple coming to terms with a turning point in their relationship/lives. The innovations that they intergrate so successfuly in the production is, well, ingenious. The use of light and shadows, repetition and renewal and all the elements of fire, earth, water smacks of Carl Jung's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung theories of symbolism and metamorphoses. Now you can take and leave Carl Jung, cause really everything in the world can be seen in Jungian terms, but there is a striking familiarity with the themes being explored here, about the two characters dealing with depression, the end of their relationship and the beginning of the rest of their lives. He becomes a compulsive cleaner trying to force neetness in the mess of his life and work, where he is a call centre agent working out of a cubicle, while she resigns herself to a sloppy existance of days filled with nothing to do but sipping large quantities of coffe while reminescing about her mother in Korea. The play is told as much with short dialogues as it is with dance, animation and acrobatics! it's a minimalist modernist play that is packed with moments of brilliance, great delivery and timing!
Cause "timing is everything" - Jay.
...specially if you are using wires and harnesses for a two person ballet on a stage which is already crowded with a back-projection screen in the already cozy proportions of the Waterfront Theatre. It's only running for a few more days, so all of you wanting to see something really special - go check them out quick, cause their last two performances had sold out!

enough said for now...more later. Tomorrow is the federal election in our lovely country and I hope all of you Canadians get to vote!

viken