February 13th, 2009

Niceness

So, my “Family Day is Fascist” position is not winning many supporters (Family Day, right up there with eyebrows and butter on popcorn on the list of things everyone else finds benign but Rebecca despises). Which is fine, really, I probably need less arm-waving rants in my life, anyway. And since Family Day weekend coincides with Valentine’s Day weekend this year, and last year I finally came up with a suitable position on V-Day, I have extrapolated that to include Family Day, another day of dictated affection!

And the position is, of course, for many of us, families and romantic others are amazing presences and deserving of whatever they desire on any given holiday and also every other day of the year. And for some, that is not the case, temporarily or permanently, for whatever reason. Which might be fine with them, or not at all fine with them, but is certainly none of the government’s business! Sorry. Arm-waving.

*Anyway*, I think there a lot of important people in everyone’s life that don’t have a formal title like mother, sister, partner, second-cousin. I think that people who we interact with in small ways–the colleague that checks the printer and finds your lost invoices, the supermarket cashier with the really long fingernails who is still superfast, the woman who helped me scramble out of a snowbank a couple weeks ago–are also deserving of a good deal of niceness. Maybe we won’t be cooking dinner for them Saturday night (man, that cashier would be surprised), but maybe this weekend could just be a weekend of niceness to everyone.

I guess I don’t like the restrictions of these “days”–this is who you should be kind to, *exclusively*. But there’s nothing stopping me, someone pointed out, from expanding the definition of “family” to include everyone I like. Which I think the OED people would have something to say about, but in the interests of limited arm-waving, I’ll try it. And then I’m going to try expanding the day into the rest of the year.

I promise not to cook dinner for you unless you want me to.

I’ll dig a tunnel / from my window to yours
RR

January 11th, 2009

Credit

In the entry YouTube Revolution, I neglected to give credit to my brother, Ben, who introduced me to all the wonders that YouTube has to offer. He’s the one on the right:

Just live your life
RR

October 13th, 2008

Thanksgiving

It would baffling and onerous to try to make a list of all those things for which I am thankful–this is the burden of good things, I suppose, insufficient time in which to list them. But really, though Canadian Thanksgiving was originally conceived as a harvest holiday and it is supposed to have vague connotations for being appreciative of all good things, I believe most stereotypical images of Thanksgiving feature mainly a) family and b) nice things to eat. And I certainly am grateful for both, and will now attempt to encapsulate that emotion in the following transcription of a conversation held earlier today:

(my father and I rummaging through the coffin-sized deep-freeze in my parents’ basement)

Me: Green beans, green beans, oh, pizza! Green beans, green beans…

Dad: Beets, do you like beets? Do you want these?

Me: Sure. Thanks. Green beans, Broccolli…

Dad: Yellow beans, green beans…you know, I don’t really like vegetables anymore.

Me: What? You like vegetables. You’ve always liked vegetables.

Dad: Some of the thrill is gone, I think. I don’t even know what the hell this is.

Me: (peering intently at frozen green blog in his hand) Is it broccoli? It could be broccoli.

Dad: (speaking to the green lump like Hamlet spoke to the skull of Yorrick) That may be. That may well be.

RR

September 18th, 2008

Rumours of Asia

I have always had a pair of brass sculptures of Thai dancers. These are young women with high pointed headdresses and sinuously flailing arms. The arms are brassed in mid-motion pushing through the air–on each body, one hand high, one low. When you arrange them with the lowered hands touching, as I always do, they form a wave with their arms. Their faces are impassive, more impassive even than you’d imagine for being formed from metal. Their arrangement is also impassive to me, though you could put them together another way or even just have each on it’s own. But why would you, when you could the wave.

I have no idea how I ended up with these; their presence in my life predates memory. Almost certainly, they were given to me, as I was not shopping for objets d’art, or anything, in nursery school. Of course, a heavy pointed metal objet seems a spectacularly inappropriate gift for a nursery scholar, but it never occured to me to play with them in a way that could result in me or anyone getting hurt. I have always just kept them on shelves or tables, in the hands-touching arrangement. Until:

B (picking one up): This is an unusually weapon-like hat, isn’t it?

Me: Put it down.

B: You could kill some with this, probably. (gesturing Macbeth-like at me) Stab stab.

Me: Put it down put it down.

B: Fine (puts it down the wrong way, so that the wave is flawed)

Me: It goes on the other side of the first one.

B: (moving it) And do you want me to flick the lights on and off 25 times?

Me: With their hands touching!!!

B: That’s a complicated way of saying yes.

Me: ARGH!

B: (nudges them so that they are again perfectly arranged) You’re gonna miss me.

B. is in fact my brother, whose presence in my life also predates memory, and whom I will indeed miss when, tomorrow, he moves to Tokyo. For someone who likes things consistently arranged, it’s hard when a loved one flies off to the antipodes. But there is a bright side to this, of course (in addition to B. having a wonderful year abroad): watch this space in Spring 2009, when Rose-coloured reviews the Tokyo transit system. I can’t wait, can you?

I can barely stop
RR

September 5th, 2008

Love

Last night I sent out the following email to almost everyone I know. In the interests of overkill, I’ll put it here, too:

Dear Everybody,

This is just to say, in case I somehow didn’t mention it to you, or send you a Facebook invitation or an airmail letter about it, or show you the event listing, or grab you by your shirt and yell, “My book is launching on September 15!!!!!”

well, it is.

Here’s the official details for the launch of *Once*, my first
collection of short stories:

Time and Place: Monday, September 15, 2008 at 7:30pm (Doors at 7pm.)
Location: Gladstone Hotel, 2nd Floor Gallery (1214 Queen Street West)

To launch her first short story collection, “Once,” Rebecca Rosenblum will share the stage with John Metcalf and Leon Rooke. “Once,” a collection of stories, is the winner of the 2007 Metcalf-Rooke Award and the work of one of Canada’s most promising new writers. This event is part of Pages Books’ This Is Not A Reading Series.

The unofficial details are that the evening may consist at least partly of me twisting a wad of crumpled notes in my hands, failing to operate the microphone, and maybe tripping over something…but mainly I think it will be lots of fun, and there will be drinking afterwards. I’d love to see you there if you feel like it, are free
on Monday September 15, and, you know, dig that sort of thing.

No need to RSVP, unless you like RSVPing, in which case, please do!

Bestest,
Rebecca

Lots of people did in fact RSVP and send me nice notes, which is always lovely. This is my favourite so far, though:

Dear Becky:

We’ll be there! (Are you kidding?)

Love, Dad

I wanna talk to you
RR

May 11th, 2008

Mother’s Day…

is one of those occasions I feel politically opposed to, but personally fond of. I don’t like officially dictated emotion—love your mom in May, your Dad in June, and your significant other in February. It’s weird to celebrate only these traditional roles and not others, and certainly hard on those people who don’t have people, or people they want to celebrate, in those positions in their lives. I was fairly irrational on the subject of Family Day in a few months back–now they’re *legislating* our affections? But the fact is, I love my family 365 days a year, but it *was* fun to take a day to emphasize that. Similarly, I adore my Mother, and it’s nice to have an occasion to bake her a loaf of bread and spend the afternoon together.

So, it is with mixed but genuine feelings that I wish those of you who are a observant a very happy Mother’s Day.

This sentimental heart that beats / I don’t really mind
RR

April 25th, 2008

Rebecca Has a Bad Week

RR–I’m such a loser, I think I’ve called you every day this week.

Mom–That’s not true. I haven’t heard from you in ages. I’ve missed you.

RR–I called you on Sunday, and another day besides today…

Mom–So?

RR–And today is Thursday.

Mom–That leaves lots of days you didn’t call…well, several.

This weekend will be better, not least because I’m going to see my Mom (and Dad), because Kerry was wearing a spring skirt yesterday, because I am booked solid with frivolous things to do. So in case I don’t get a change to post before then, I just wanted to say that my brothers-and-sisters in educational trajectory, the masters in creative writing crew ’08, will be reading on Monday evening, and they are charming and I’ll be there and maybe you’d like to come, too?

Deets:

Monday, April 28
Bar Italia (582 College Street, between Manning and Clinton)
7:30pm
No cover

See you soon!

Don’t worry girl you weren’t around
RR

January 28th, 2008

No particular war

So last night I saw Charlie Wilson’s War and liked it very much. This was not a surprise, as it was written by Aaron Sorkin the writer of my most-loved tv shows. And indeed, the film did contain Sorkin’s much-beloved banter, walk’n’talks, long-shots and high-flown political wonkery. And, as with much of Sorkin’s work, he faltered on the ladies, who were condescendingly drawn on occasion, and also saddled with awkward religious hypocrisy, as if that were just the lot of he fairer sex.

But Julia Roberts fares better than most of Sorkin’s recent lady-stars, in part because he downplays his personal issues to give her some of the best lines in the flick, and in part because she’s Julia Roberts and, dammit, she can make the best of anything, even having her gorgeous hair bleached and sprayed in a seemingly desperate attempt to make it look like a wig. And she’s opposite Tom Hanks, which is such a wonderful pairing of easy charm that I don’t know why no one thought of it before. And how great, too, that a movie that concerns events of the twenty years ago would star people so seminal at that time. Big came out in 1988, one of the first films I saw in theatres, and it filled me with joy to see that maturity and the ability to feed and clothe oneself didn’t matter one whit if you had honesty and enthusiasm. There was hope for me, apparently, to take on the world, as soon as I could get myself to Manhattan.

Julia’s big break, in Pretty Woman didn’t come until a few years later, which is just as well, since even my oblivious parents noticed taglines like, “Who knew it was so much fun to be a hooker?” I did eventually see it, and love it. Even then, I knew there was something wrong with the conceit that the way to a man’s heart was to sell him your body and hope he noticed your soul, and something wrong with a country where a girl could really find herself forced by financial circumstances to do so. Still, even now, if you were to somehow break into the feminist enclave that is my apartment, fix the DVD player and put on *Pretty Woman*, I’d sit down and watch, and swoon. I’d feel dirty about it at first, but then I’d block out the real circumstances presented and just enjoy the banter.

As I did in *Charlie Wilson’s War.* With the office hijinx and even fairly serious arguments, the movie could’ve been about almost anything, because the conversations focused on strategic alliances, media, and money–the necessities of war, of course, but also the necessities of anything. Perhaps because of Sorkin’s history on the small-screen, coupled director Mike Nichols’ reputation as a “poet of the living room (I read that somewhere, possibly The New Yorker), they seemed to want to prove something with the battle scenes. I think they could’ve done the whole thing with radar-screen blips and intense conversations, as Sorkin did on West Wing, as I’ve seen in several deeply unsettling low-budget *Hamlet*s, but they had to show the guns, and that was pretty wretched, half video game, half propaganda film.

It was one thing to show refugee camps, and mangled children’s bodies–eliciting pity, showing the evil that must be stopped (who were those child actors, I wonder). But it could’ve been almost any war, or an informercial with Sally Struthers: the only political message of those scenes was: children good, people who hurt children bad. Then there was a scene, and I still don’t know what I was meant to feel during it, that showed young Russian soldiers piloting planes and strafing villages, killing women and children while talking in Russian over their walkie-talkies about their girlfriends. This is late in the movie, when the Afghan villagers had finally been given shoulder-mounted missile launchers. They are able to destroy the planes before they can do as much damage as they meant to. We get to see the panic on the Russian soldiers’ faces before they are engulfed in flames.

Of course, the villagers had no choice, if in fact it happened that way. I wasn’t rooting for the kids on the ground to die, but I wasn’t particularly rooting for the kids in the air to die, either. Is that a happy moment? Nichols and Sorkin play it as wild celebration for all the good guys.

The only militaristic footage that looked real was actually real–taken from news reports of the time period. And here’s where we get the third star of the period, and the first one of my youth. Before Julia, before Tom, pretty much concurrent with The Muppets, I loved Dan Rather and the CBS Evening News. Every evening at 6:30, since long before I was born, my parents watched “Rather”, and then they had dinner and talked about what they had seen. When I was small, and eagerly awaiting my spaghetti, I watched too, or at least sat around and listened to words I didn’t understand. Years later than excusable, I actually thought Dan Rather was President of the United States, and that every evening they wheeled the cameras into the Oval Office so he could bring anyone who was interested up to date.

Dan’s is one of the first faces we see in this film, and it set me right at ease. I probably haven’t heard his voice since I moved out of my folks’ place, and it was tremendously soothing. I probably actually sat through some of the news reports from the film, though I remembered nothing. And the movie didn’t explain much–the news was for exposition, but precious little of it. I had to come home and google to find out what was going on with the Russians in Afghanistan. Sorkin wasn’t going to explain, make the war weird and particular and complicated, and not just a generic Good v. Evil, with all that stuff. Not that the Russians were so far off the mark of evil in that war, as far as I can tell, but they had some motives, they weren’t just psycotic baby-bombers. For the purposes of the picture though, they could’ve been just any bad dudes in history, or James Bond films.

And it’s funny, because for a movie that so ignores and generalizes the history here, at the end there is an alarming about-face, as the final scenes set the movie up as the history of our present tense, showing the Americans as over-confident in victory and setting in motion the terrible events that are even now occuring in Afghanistan. This takes place a while after the worst of the battle scenes, after a lot more joyful triumph and Roberts-Hanks banter and silly smooches. I was enjoying myself again, I’d been lulled by the semi-facts, that good things had happened in some war somewhere, and that everything was now fine. The end of the film was astounding in that it pointed out the lie of it’s own Hollywood-ishness, and yet I wasn’t sure as I left the theatre that I had really wanted that. I was sort of happy, for a while, to go back to the days when the News wasn’t news of any particular war, it was just the noise in the background before you sat down to supper with the people you loved best.

The body says no
RR

October 9th, 2007

Gratitude

Thanksgiving is always a good time to be thankful for various sorts of food, and various forms of family, and believe me, I adore both, and spent a weekend rife with them. I also spent a lot of time absorbing bits of culture, which I have time right now only to ennumerate but not describe. Will it suffice to say that everything below is very very good?

When I Was Young and in My Primeby Alayna Munce — lyric novel

30 Rock — tv show

Across the Universe — film

Those are all worth experiencing, as are the other highlights of my weekend, but M and L’s house, my mother’s apple pie, and the experience of applying black lipstick in a housewares store while T holds up a pot lid to reflect your face, are sadly not linkable.

These are days you’ll remember
RR

October 6th, 2007

13 days, plus thanks!

Soon, the mystery will be solved as to whether I am a poor enunciator because of jaw deformity/orthodontia/surgical recovery, or simply sloppiness. Even if the latter, I imagine I can solve it somehow, possibly with a book or else elecution lessons in the manner of Anne Shirley and also my mother when, as a child, she developed a Brooklyn accent (due to growing up in Brooklyn) and her midwestern mother wouldn’t stand for it. My point is, once the braces are off, I’ll be able to get to work on this issue.

I am thankful for this possibility, and many other things, like how it is now Thanksgiving weekend and within the hour I am headed to the tiny town from whence I sprang. This evening I shall visit the house of my friend Mary, a house for which she and her husband have been hoping, pining, scrimping and saving for five years now. I have a vague idea what it looks like, but whatever it is, I know it’s a dream house, and I am thankful I get to see it tonight!

And lots of other things. More soon!

All the yellow roses on her wedding cake
RR