The geographics

Posted on September 5, 2009 | 1 comment

Post #2

In the past couple of years, thanks to my involvement with on-line writers’ forums including the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Competition and Authonomy, I have been fortunate to acquire writing buddies all over the world. While most of them know pretty much where Canada is, their knowledge of specific cities and provinces can be kind of fuzzy. So I made a map with Saskatoon and Toronto on it. I also added Edmonton to it so you could see where I will be flying from on November 15. (Edmonton is where I lived for many many years and where my elderly aunt, who I visit regularly, is in continuing care.) I also put Vancouver on the map, because that’s where the winter Olympics will be next February! (Okay. Idiomatically speaking, it was not I who “put Vancouver on the map.” It did that for itself.)

If you click on the image, you will go to the original where you can zoom in and stuff.

If you click on the image, you will go to the original where you can zoom in and stuff.

FYI: It is 2700 km or 1684 miles from Edmonton to Toronto. From Saskatoon to Toronto, it is 2227 km, or 1384 miles.

The response to this blog has already been so positive and supportive — I have such great friends! Thank you! In addition to a great deal of cheering and moral support, one person in Toronto went to all the trouble to go downstairs and talk to a neighbour about whether her apartment might be available to me while she is snowbirding this winter (thanks, Gordon!) and another has offered me a “granny suite” to stay in while I am looking for a place to live (thank you Pat!).  So I am grateful and overwhelmed.

What else I have done toward getting moved so far? I have stopped replacing things like Mrs. Dash when I run out of them because I don’t want to have to pack and store any more than I need to. I am not freezing too much fruit this year, or buying any more cans than I can use up in the immediate future.

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Why Toronto? Why now? Why not?

Posted on August 29, 2009 | 13 comments

The Back Story

As my fifties draw to a close, I find myself with the opportunity to choose where I want to live. My two (fantastic, interesting) adult sons are well established with careers, families and communities of their own – one on the east coast of the USA, the other in western Canada. I can’t live near both of them, and if I lived close to one and not the other, charges of favouritism might occur. (“How come she has to live in the same city as me? How come you get all the breaks?”)

I am currently living in Saskatoon, which is a city with a truly lovely river valley, a beautiful university campus and lots of fascinating people. But it’s a small city and very home- and family-focussed. There’s just not enough for me to do here: especially in winter when, since I do not own a car, I am mainly trapped indoors by icy sidewalks that whip my feet out from under me on a regular basis, and blisteringly cold winds that turn minus 20 (tolerable and even pleasant) into minus 40 or worse (intolerable).

Due to a recent escalation in the cost of rental units in Saskatchewan, I cannot afford to live in Saskatoon any more than I can afford to live anywhere else. I live mostly hand-to-mouth because since I was about 30, I have stupidly put fiction-writing ahead of earning income on my priority list. But I do have a non-fiction book coming out this fall that will allow me to offer workshops and do consulting work almost anywhere in North America, the U.K., or even Australia and New Zealand. Maybe even Mexico and India, if I’m lucky.

Where to go?

So, I asked myself, if I am free to scrabble (and scribble) for a living in the city of my choice, where do I want to be? The only thing I knew for sure was that for now at least I wanted to be in Canada.

Prior to coming to Saskatchewan in the early 2000s, I spent about four decades in Edmonton, Alberta. I have many wonderful long-time friends there who open their arms (and homes) to me whenever I go back to visit. They do not suffer from their geographical location quite as badly as I make it sound—the long sunny days of summer in Edmonton and across the prairies, not to mention what can be a beautiful, extended blue-gold autumn, make it almost worth living through the cold, dark months between. Edmonton in particular is increasingly well equipped to be a winter city, with heated walkways, indoor parking, lots of theatre and music and an outstanding transit system. But in spite of all of that, for many of the same reasons that I’m disinclined to stay in Saskatoon, I’m not interested in returning to Edmonton.

Unlike many prairie residents, I have never had the urge to move to the west coast.  The west coast is beautiful (beautiful!) but Vancouver, Victoria and most of the other cities I have visited there are just too Zen and laid back for my tastes. And the politics are weird.

Montreal is a fabulous city, too. If I didn’t need to earn my living in English, I’d welcome the idea of living there, but my French is only passable.

Ottawa…? Nope.

From the beginning, there was only one real choice. Therefore, I am moving to Toronto.

An appealing option

Although it appears I arrived at the decision to move to Toronto through a process of elimination, I could just have easily arrived at it by creating a top-10 all-time favourite list of Canadian cities. Toronto would have emerged the destination-of-choice that way as well. I grew up in Ontario, and I welcome the thought of going back. I have missed the terrain of southern Ontario since I left in 1964, and a lot of my memories are grounded in the region.

As for Toronto itself, since childhood I’ve enjoyed my visits there. I have never shared the alternating feelings of resentment and schadenfreude toward that city and its residents that characterize the attitudes of most prairie-dwellers of my age, many of whom are still bristling from the national energy policies that Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his minions visited upon the West in 1980. For them, Toronto The Bad is an appropriate nickname. In fact, Toronto is a cosmopolitan, global city, with nearly 3 million residents (half of whom were born outside Canada) in the City proper, and at least 2 million more in the immediate vicinity. There is lots to do and see there, and that is what I want. (I do know that Toronto also has a winter, but I am actually more concerned about its hot and sticky summers, which I also remember well.)

The first step

So far I’ve taken only one concrete step towards moving to Toronto, and that is to buy a one-way plane ticket there from Edmonton on November 15. Everything else I need still to think about and plan.

I need to figure out, for example, where I am going to live when I get to Toronto, while I am looking for a permanent place to live. I need to decide what I will take with me to get myself through the looking-around period, and how I will get the rest of my stuff there once I’ve found a place to rent.

On the “surface” of my thinking, I am both frightened and excited about this new adventure. But deeper in, I feel quite calm and optimistic. I have hopes for Toronto in terms of my career that I’ll explain more clearly in another post, but I also feel a bit as though I’m going back to a very familiar place, and that I will be very comfortable in that setting.

I have not lived in Toronto since I was two, and even then it was only for six months or so, which gave me little opportunity to learn the layout of the city and its traffic routes. I have no clear plan regarding where I intend to live (although I have located on a map where the preponderance of violent crimes take place, and I plan to avoid those areas). It’s a bit like stepping off a cliff in some ways. But those who know me know that I like to step off cliffs fairly regularly. (I just don’t like to fall off them.)

I may be resolutely independent, and eagerly looking forward to figuring this thing out on my own, but I don’t feel as though I am alone. I do know several fellow writers in the Toronto region, and many many of my friends are regular visitors there. I also still have some friends from childhood living in southern Ontario, and even a few relatives. I’m happy to know that I can ask current and former Torontonians for advice when I need it—and that they will probably give me advice even if I don’t ask. (Fine by me as long as they don’t expect that I will necessarily do what they suggest—although I promise I will listen!)

This blog

When my good friend Larry Anderson suggested that I blog about the move, I immediately welcomed the idea. And already it feels good to have stated my intention publicly—it makes it real, and motivates me to start getting organized. But there is more to the appeal of writing here than that.  I have found great comfort and companionship in various on-line communities in the past few years, and I am sure that the one that forms around this blog will ultimately make me feel as though I may be moving to a new, big city on my own, but that I am utterly supported. So I thank you in advance for that support. (BTW, if you aren’t supportive, I just won’t publish your comments. So there. The naysayers among you can write in to my Militant Writer blog instead, where I happily take on all comers.)

I intend to blog not only before and during the move but also for several months afterward—until I’m actually settled. I’ve lived in enough places to know that a person doesn’t just move to a new place physically. It takes a lot longer than that to achieve the emotional, social, and even administrative transfer—it takes at least a year to settle in even when you’re just moving down the street.

And as far as being accepted by and accepting a new community, making it a home—well, that can take much much longer. That part can take decades. But finding a home is not my goal. As I get older, I realize that I prefer to be a visitor no matter where I am. My writing is my home, enriched by my community of relatives and friends who live around the world. Thanks mainly to the Internet, I can take the most important people in my life with me everywhere I go.

So now I have begun. If you are interested in following me on my new adventure here, you are most welcome. There’s a “Subscribe” button at the top of the right-hand column. Just click on it and follow the instructions to receive my (irregular) updates. (If all the options for subscribing boggle your mind, just click here to get the email option, and fill out the form that comes up.) I’ll try to keep the posts shorter than this in future!

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Ghost Town

Posted on January 4, 2009 | Leave a comment

Ricky Gervais has attracted a lot of fans and probably innumerable detractors in the past ten years or so. One of the originators (with Stephen Merchant) of the U.K. version of The Office (from which the U.S. series starring Steve Carrel derived), he went on to launch another British TV series (Extras, which he also co-wrote and starred in) and an ad lib podcast program (The Ricky Gervais Show) that some saw as going right over the top—both in taste and political incorrectness.

I have always thought Ricky Gervais was great—hilarious and fearless—and I’ve been quite willing to overlook his abrasiveness for the sake of the 75 percent of the time when I find him bang-on as a critic, a “small-p” political commentator, a wit and a stand-up comic. Still, knowing his penchant for going too far, I made no effort to catch him in his earlier movie appearances, which included A Night at the Museum and For Your Consideration, but after watching him in a couple of television interviews when his newest movie came out in the fall of 2008, I was encouraged to think that Gervais would finally be playing a role about as straight as was humanly possible for him. I therefore headed off with a certain amount of eagerness to see Ghost Town.

I was not disappointed. Ghost Town is a charming film with a plot that hangs together very well, and features note-perfect performances from its three major cast members (Téa Leoni and Greg Kinnear appear with Gervais). I was also happy to discover in it a movie with a life-after-death outcome that even an atheist can live with – not only for my own sake, but also because it meant that Gervais hadn’t needed to compromise his own much-articulated position of non-belief too much in order to take on this role.

Ghost Town is billed as a romantic comedy and it has no ambitions beyond that, nor does it need them. Gervais stars as Bertram Pincus, a Park-Avenue-type dentist who is a misanthrope to the very bottom of his heart—until he has a near-death experience during a colonoscopy. Unaware that anything untoward has happened during the procedure (the hospital doesn’t tell him about his brief demise because they don’t want him to sue, and they had him sign a waiver while he was still half-unconscious–although in fact they blame the incident on his insistence on a general anesthetic for a procedure which most people can handle without even a local), Pincus is dismayed to discover that he now has the ability to see people who have died but been unable to shake off this world because of some unfinished business. These individuals all want him to help them rest in peace by doing various kindnesses for them and their loved ones: him, Pincus, to whom kindness to his fellow man is near-anathema.

Pincus’s primary guide to the world of the unsettled dead is Frank Herlihy (played by Greg Kinnear) who was hit by a bus in the midst of trying to buy a love nest in Greenwich Village for himself and his mistress. Somehow Herlihy must make peace with his widow Gwen (Leoni) before he can shuffle off his mortal coil, and he mistakenly believes that the solution is to prevent her marriage to a kind and altruistic human-rights lawyer, whom Herlihy assumes must be a scoundrel. Pincus is the instrument with which he is determined to make this happen.

Predictably, Pincus falls in love with Gwen and must then try not only to dissuade her from marrying the lawyer but also from nurturing any lingering fond memories of Frank. He must also expand his own capacity for kindness, for Gwen is a kind and loving person. From this premise a great deal of humour can arise, and does—and a lot of the nastily funny dialogue has all the earmarks of having come straight out of Gervais’ wicked mind. But he also plays the part with control and finesse, and before too long we begin to genuinely care for Pincus and to root for his future happiness. He is human, not a caricature – as he could so easily have been – and the credit for that goes to Gervais.

The only two unresolved issues in relation to Ghost Town are 1) why Kinnear gets higher billing than Gervais (perhaps the former’s recent film successes, including Little Miss Sunshine and Fast Food Nation, have made him a stronger box-office attraction at least in North America than Gervais, but the latter is definitely the more compelling actor here, and is on-stage for a much longer time, and has—from everything I have read and heard—a much bigger ego. I’m amazed he didn’t fight to have his name on top) and 2) why the movie didn’t get more attention in the theatres: it was out on DVD within two months of its original release.

As a light comedy this movie totally worked for me and I recommend it. It will make you laugh—and cry, but in a nice way. Take a Kleenex, and enjoy.

Ghost Town is rated PG.

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JCVD

Posted on December 29, 2008 | Leave a comment

“Who knew he could act?”

That seems to have been the question the reviewers of JCVD have been asking themselves—as have, no doubt, the film’s enthusiastic viewers. The “he” to whom they are referring is none other than Jean-Claude Van Damme (JCVD)—the star of the movie and also its subject.

The acting question is, in fact, central to this funny and very moving film. Van Damme has traditionally starred in B-grade action movies where his physique, physical condition and skills at martial arts seem to have been the primary qualifications for his leading roles. That he can act—can give an authentic portrayal of an intelligent, sensitive actor nearly past his physical prime who is unable to dislodge himself from the muscle-man niche to which he has been assigned by the Hollywood machine—is a surprise, and the surprise is an essential component of the plot.

But other questions need to be asked as well, such as: Who wrote this fabulous script which considers its self-referential nature with such gentle irony, but also creates a compelling and sturdily freestanding story? And what genius gave the entire project its lovely film-noir feel, which contrary to what one might have expected, makes it feel not film-noirish, but rather entirely real? (The answer to these latter two questions seems to have a good deal to do with a French writer, actor and director named Mabrouk El Mechri, with whose work I was previously unacquainted, but for whom I will certainly watch in future.)

JCVD is set in Belgium, in the home town of the fictional Van Damme–to which he has returned owing large sums of money to the U.S. government and just having lost a custody battle in California. To his deep sorrow, and her apparent regret, his young daughter has chosen to live with her mother full-time, despite her love for him, because she can no longer stand the way her classmates tease her about his strong-man movie roles. When he gets a phone call (during a cab ride that can only be based on a real incident, it is so apt and funny and true) to say that his cheque to the tax department has bounced, he gets the driver to stop and goes in to the post office to wire money to his U.S. lawyer. There he walks into the middle of a robbery involving three gunmen and half a dozen hostages.

Implicated in the robbery due in part to the machinations of the villains and in part to his own reputation from the movies, Van Damme is also the hero of the tale to the townspeople who have come out in droves to watch the incident unfold–and even to one of the hostage-takers (who insists on a kick-boxing lesson from the film legend). To the locals, JCVD is the home-town boy who has made good. Even his mom and dad come by to argue his inherent virtue and obvious innocence to the police (whose tactical manouevres are based, in one of the film’s lovely ironic touches, in a video store).

By the end of the stand-off, and the movie, Van Damme has revealed how deeply wounded his eponymous character has been over the course of his career by his inability to move beyond stock figures and into more dignified, dramatic roles. JCVD gives him and/or his character the opportunity he has been missing, and the results on both real and fictional levels are impressive. In the showing I went to, the audience broke into spontaneous applause as the credits began to roll, and I felt like joining them.

I want to watch this funny, poignant movie again—although I think I may first have to suffer though some of Van Damme’s action thrillers so I get the in-jokes I missed the first time. My inclination to seek out examples of a cardboard representation based on respect for a three-dimensional performance may be the reverse response to what the film envisions, but I expect it is an outcome that Van Damme–both real and fictional–would appreciate.

(JCVD is in French with English subtitles, and is rated R.)

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