Hannah and Her Brethren

I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen so much smoking in a single film. Maybe it was about having returned from a recent trip to Bucharest, where smoking is everywhere, and still being shocked by its omnipresence, but this woman could barely utter three words without lighting up. Hardly the point of the movie, but I just wanted to put it out there. Oh, and did I mention yet again that I had recently been to Bucharest? ;-)

It had to have been a rather shrewd decision of the publisher of the New Yorker to choose to send a political theorist/philosopher to provide reflective coverage of a war crimes trial, instead of going with the obvious journalist approach. I suppose that is in the nature of the particular publication and the time…not news as quickly as you can get it, but more analysis of what the events in the world mean in a larger sense. I think this is probably something that we have lost, perhaps forever, in the immediacy of our means of communications. We still get opinions, but they seem to be the products of little reflection and even less thought.

It was fascinating to watch a group of German intellectuals in New York at the beginning of the sixties arguing about the significance of events and the meanings behind them. There are slight references to the political struggles of the time (the Nixon-Kennedy election), but so slight that it was clear that these lacked the weight of matters more in the forefront. The struggle between the intellectual and the emotional is interesting as well — the legal basis of kidnapping such a war criminal and trying him in a country that didn’t even exist at the time of the crimes, let alone have specific laws addressing the situation pitted against the horror of the holocaust and the need for justice of those who had managed to survive it.

I have never read Eichmann in Jerusalem, but I am sorely tempted to undertake that task now. If that is the measure of the success of the film, then it worked. The analysis that ended in her coining the term “the banality of evil” is brilliant (I’m sure she was waiting for my assessment of that) and worthy of consideration in the context of our own current governance issues. Hiding behind procedure as a means to avoid having to think and analyze seems even more widespread now.

I am particularly interested in the controversial part of the work that I hadn’t heard of in my previous peripheral awareness of it. She criticized the actions of some of the leadership of the Jewish community in Europe and how their actions or inactions may have led to more death — not a very popular analysis less than a generation after the end of the war, and probably no more popular now. I would like to wrap my head around that one, and the lessons it might afford to oppressed peoples today.

In the film, we see the strong negative reactions to that very short criticism: stacks of hate mail, lost friends, threatening colleagues. But we also see the steadfastness of the publisher and the loyalty of other friends to a brilliant woman applying a dispassionate analysis to a highly emotional subject. Very much worth seeing.

Dining Out in Bucharest

Not my usual restaurant review. Do I have a "usual" restaurant review? The best I usually do is to be seen on my tumblr, particularly here and here.

Yesterday, we went out to find a restaurant where we might be able to find some typical Romanian food. Restaurants are not necessarily all that easy to find here, apart from the really obvious ones or the omnipresent fast food places that look the same everywhere you go. (One exception to that: I saw KFC here, while this is staunchly PFK in Montréal!) We started with a taxi ride (price range affirmed fist, which is always a good thing to do) to the neighbourhood of a concert hall. The concert being earlier than we thought it was, we decided to just find a restaurant instead and wandered around the near vicinity.

It was raining, so we opted for the interior rather than the extensive outdoor spaces, especially after getting some assurance that we would be in a non-smoking section. (It's rather difficult to get used to the smell of smoke indoors, especially after years without it at home and years after quitting smoking.)

The decor was fabulous. We felt like we had wandered into an extremely chic establishment, but chic in that old world luxury way, not the modern hipster way. Giant chandeliers, high ceilings, long fussy curtains, lovely tablecloths and napkins and such. And it was almost empty. The whole time we were there, I believe we saw two other tables occupied, and they were in the adjoining room. I regret that I only took a couple of photos, which you'll see below, and none of the ambiance.

So we started by staring at the menu. Entirely in Romanian, which was kind of fun. There were parts of it that I could sort of understand, as it seems to be close-ish to Italian (and as I found out this evening, actually closer to Latin than is modern Italian, and kind of similar to Portuguese). We asked for explanations of certain items, because we wanted to order from the Romanian section of the menu, not just have the predictable pasta, pizza or steak.

Speaking of which, I know that several of my friends and colleagues will be thrilled to know that Hawaiian pizza (ham and pineapple) IS available here. The other curiosity that I photographed was the Cowboy Steak. Now that seems rather ordinary or not quite so exotic, until you read in the explanation that it has been frenched. I almost ordered it just for that!

I started with a cocktail that turned out to be a little sweeter than I might have liked. With my penchant for the cocktail, however, I would probably have been able to down several of them in a vain attempt to quench my thirst. Good thing we switched to wine!

I actually ordered an entrée (no, this is not the name for a main dish!) from the antipasti section, opting for salmon bruschetta, which were quite nice. We stuck more closely to our Romanian theme in choosing the wine, an entirely drinkable Cabernet-Sauvignon. As I am no wine expert, we will take that for what it's worth, but I quite liked it and we didn't leave any of it behind, so that's a testimonial.

For my main dish, I ordered strips of lamb with polenta, which has a much more exotic name in Romanian that I cannot conjure up, even with Google Translate! I was a little surprised that there weren't a lot of vegetables or other elements on the plate, but we made up for that by my companion's eating a salad as her main course. Maybe the vitamins will rub off on me. Now polenta is one of the only forms of corn that I am willing to eat, so I quite liked it, and the lamb strips were quite nice, too.

Of course, I was the only one to have dessert! (After having eaten a salad for dinner, you can understand how my companion would have no room for more…) I have a very lovely mint-chocolate gelato and an allongé (a long espresso) with milk. Very tasty gelato, and very inexpensive, too. I am noticing that there is gelato everywhere here, so that alone should bring you stampeding to the country.

At the end, the whole production cost me the equivalent of about $35 Canadian, which should give you another reason to come stampeding here.

*****

As a post script, I have just returned from the groups dinner at another restaurant featuring typical Romanian food. This time, in addition to being seated next to colleagues from Burundi (who were delightful dinner companions) I had the pleasure of the company of some locals, one of whom is a member of the Board of the host organization, and some friends. What a lovely time it was to chat and joke with them. Always nice to know that gay is gay everywhere and we can fall right into camp and casting aspersions on each other's characters with – what else can we call it – gay abandon.

The occasion, apart from our meeting, of course, was the gay pride parade. Embassy officials from many countries take part in the parade, partly as insurance against violence, and apparently the counter-demonstrators were well outnumbered by the revellers. Glad to hear that. (I didn't witness it directly because I was overnapping in my hotel room!) It's interesting to come with all the blasé attitudes we have a tendency to develop with respect to our own pride activities to a place where it's still clearly a political act to have our silly fin in public. The serious parts are not that far in the past here, even a little present around the edges. I should really have made myself go.

The Incidental Hotness

I have spent the last couple of weeks anticipating seeing this film and mixing the title up in my head with The Accidental Tourist, and often coming up with The Accidental Terrorist, which is a horrible testimonial to our North American mass media and how it has infiltrated my thoughts. I’m trying to recover with the title of this post, but that, too, is somewhat misleading. There was nothing incidental about the hotness. It was right there, out front, in almost every scene and answers to the name Riz Ahmed (Changez when answering on the set).

The story starts out like a classic American tale. Brilliant foreign student shines his way through an ivy league school into a corporate job in New York City. He is unfortunately good at his work, which is pretty much about downsizing the labour force of companies to squeeze out every ounce of value for the “investors” (read vultures). He’s off on a field trip with colleagues to eliminate an entire section of an auto plant in the Phillipines when the planes fly into the World Trade Centre in New York.

It doesn’t take long for the American dream to start turning into a nightmare. Returning to New York, pulled out of the arriving passengers and strip searched by customs. Another arrest on the street emerging from work after another man, either mentally ill or driven to ranting by his own treatment, says scary things to passersby and then runs into the subway, leaving our hero to be arrested by the zealous cops arriving on the scene.

Given his corporate role, I was unwilling to chalk up the slashing of his car tires outside the plant he was actively downsizing to anything other than appropriate class warfare, until the redneck in a pickup fired up his engine and took time to drive by, call him “Osama” and spit. There were also brief references to attacks on others across the US, especially Sikhs targeted by people who didn’t understand the difference between Islam and Sikkhism.

Our hero finds solace in the arms of the niece of his boss. A chance encounter at a skateboarder photo shoot, a second at a cocktail party at the boss’ house, and a long journey to overcome her own past loss. She’s an artist, and eventually working on an exhibit that will take away his last feeling of belonging in a strange land.

But wait! We’re not there yet! Against the backdrop of the xenophobic hostility in his adopted home, a crisis of conscience on the job. A Turkish publisher, important in the history of making the literature of the region available to the world, is assessed as valueless. The son of a poet (yes, our hero) can’t bring himself to do the deed and quits on the spot. His mentor is not gracious about it and he gets the “security guard escort out of the building with a box of your personal effects” treatment in New York. It’s that evening that he manages to push himself back out the door to attend the opening of his lover’s exhibit.

The installation is a regurgitation of their relationship. Images and phrases, taken out of their original context and put into a form that he sees as an objectification of his identity. Not good for a relationship. It doesn’t take long for him to be packing for a return to Pakistan — a foreigner with a work visa and no job doesn’t get to stay for long, a Pakistani one in the hysteria post 9-11 even less.

We see him as a professor in Lahore, sought out and pressured to talk by a writer turned CIA agent (Liev Schreiber) after the kidnapping of a fellow professor, also a CIA agent, as it turns out. The story is actually his recounting of his history in this meeting, with flashes back and forth to the interview and his American dream life. We get to see the misinterpretation of facts and events that cast our hero as a radical and a terrorist and his unwillingness to dignify those accusations with a rebuttal.

Let’s just say that the situation doesn’t end well for the kidnapped professor or for our hero’s brother. But this latter casualty gives our hero the chance to speak poetically at the gravesite. His speech and he are both rather beautiful in this scene.

Two other aspects of the film I would like to laud. The title sequence pictured above was really quite interesting (all those tiny squares of colour are actually head shots of individuals), and the traditional folk song at the beginning of the film was truly lovely. I think I’m going to have to track it down and listen to it again and again. Kangna, it was called, and I could only find a version removed from the images of the muscians performing it. UPDATE! I found a better version of the song with the musicians in studio:

 

Star Trek: Into Predictability

Don’t get me wrong here: I love the whole Star Trek franchise (and I’m disgusted that I am using the word franchise for something that I like). I generally love science fiction and who could go wrong casting Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, not to mention Zoe Saldana as a much more assertive and independent-feeling Uhura. So maybe I should have said “Into Delightful Predictability.”

There was some fun to be had with the references to the past. A balk (and some laughter from those in the audience with enough Star Trek history under their belts) when someone is asked to put on a red tunic. (In case you don’t know, the nameless guys in the red uniforms were always the ones who died in the original series.) There were some expected lines and affectations from the more familiar minor characters, including Chekov and his endearing inability to pronounce the letter “v”. (I’ll drink a wodka to that!) What I’ll really drink to is the range of uniforms and other outfits that the main characters get to wear — gotta love that form hugging underwater suit from the beginning, no girdle required!

Sometimes, though, those nods to the past erode what could be the originality of the new take on the story. Chekov’s accent is only cute for a limited time and don’t we all think that it might be a good idea to have the part of the Sikh superhuman Khan played by someone whose origins might be traced back to a part of the world a little closer to where a Sikh superhuman might come from? (As an aside, you did manage to sign Harold, why not Kumar, too?) And please, if you really believed in the Prime Directive you wouldn’t play so fast and loose with it.

Of course, the special effects are light years ahead of that ancient TV program. One of my favourite little touches was the displaceable hole in the brig forcefield that allowed them to take a blood sample from their prisoner without actually lowering the forcefield. Fabulous! The slight changes in some of the characters’ behaviour was also welcome: Spock and Uhuru hooking up! Kirk — that notoriously randy starship captain — roused from a bed he was sharing with two females of a humanoid species with prehensile tails. This last one might have been more surprising against the backdrop of current American moral norms.

It’s also the first time I have seen Star Trek characters wearing military-like hats. That scares me a little against the backdrop of our own government’s attempts to glorify the military and military history, but a good hat can definitely hide some pointy ears, if you need it to. I suppose I should be a little less sensitive on that issue for a science fiction show that has always involved a lot of shooting.

After all of that, I did enjoy it, but I also saw lots of ways it could be better. And UltraAVX 3D? Good, but I’m not sure that the reserved seating (and consequent ability to arrive late and still have the seat you chose) is work the $17 it costs.

Can’t wait to see the next one.

Astounding Sphinx

My opera evening didn’t start as it usually does. I had forgotten that this was the night, so I ended up not being able to remind my companions in time and taking the world’s fastest shower and taxi ride to get there on time. That I made it was a miracle; that I had the world’s most expensive coat chair next to me — with a spare on the other side — was just a shame.

Panting, I was in my seat in enough time to read the synopsis before the lights went down and the curtain went up. I was still shaken enough, however, that the name of the substitute tenor did not register with me. I’m left wondering how the bed scene with a shirtless des Grieux might have been with Portuguese tenor Bruno Ribeiro (below) who couldn’t make it. As an aside, the substitute, who was apparently filling in on a mere three days’ notice, was excellent. It’s only too bad I can’t seem to find his name on the Opéra de Montréal website!

The other thing I will comment on before getting to the performance itself is the promotion. You might remember the uproar I wrote about in a previous post about using models versus using the actual singers for the promotion. At the top of this post is the actual soprano of this production, Marianne Fiset, and below is the model photo. It seems that the Opéra de Montréal has learned from the controversy and is using the images in parallel, but with somewhat more prominent use of a better thought-out photo of the star. I actually prefer the star’s photo, wearing something other than one of the costumes used, but conveying the feel of the promotional model photo quite well. We will see if next year is parallel imagery or a focus on the stars, but this one was very well done and the Opéra de Montréal deserves kudos for it.

I always enjoy the plots of operas. This one — Manon by Massenet — is no exception. “A litany of poor choices and regrets,” I tweeted during the first intermission. And indeed it was, from leaving your sixteen-year-old cousin waiting at the equivalent of the bus station while you go to drink and gamble with your friends, to running off with a stranger you just met, to throwing yourself at your ex-lover when he is about to take his vows as a priest to the real kicker: telling your penniless lover that if he really loves you he will gamble to win a fortune for you both. Let’s just say that the character of Manon might inspire admiration for her beauty, but she will not encourage feelings of empathy. Not from me, anyway. (My title is a name she gets called in the libretto.)

So by the time we get to the end everyone is quite unhappy, except Manon, who is dying in her lover’s arms, so as usual you can’t really be happy and live. But that’s why opera is such a refreshing form of storytelling that compares favourably to our usual Hollywood movie fare.

The music was lovely — many catchy tunes to draw you in — and the singing was good (this coming from a non-expert, so don’t take my adjective as a slap in the face or a kudo too far). I especially liked Marianne Fiset in the role of the detestable Manon, and Gordon Bintner in the role of Lescaut (cousin who leaves her outside while he gambles.). Bintner, pictured above, has been singled out by Barihunks as “opera’s new Golden Boy” and his voice is a joy to listen to.

They seem to paying a good deal of attention to the acting aspects of productions, too, and the comic timing in certain parts of this was most excellent. We had some good laughs and they were intended!

I usually remark, too, how much I want to appropriate the sets of the Opéra de Montréal productions as apartments for myself to live in. This set didn’t so much make me want to live in it, but I started out a little skeptical about the visibly flat trees in many layers that appeared in a number of the acts, but they really grew on me and left me feeling the depth and lushness of the foliage. A lot of the other parts of the sets had a similar “flat, but grew on me” feel, and then the mist at the end was quite good. It must have been a real feat to keep such a good layer of fog around the feet of the singers throughout the last part of Act 5.

Oh, and one other touch that kept amusing me: blowing bubbles in the crowd scene in Act 3. They weren’t intrusive, just little hints of bubbles floating up from various parts of the back of the crowd…and I didn’t see them being blown! It definitely added to ambiance of the chaotic outdoor scene with vendors hawking wares and such. It somehow felt summery.

One last aside with respect to the Opéra de Montréal. When I got to my seat(s), there were stickers on the backs reminding me to renew for the next season. I do find that they tend to go into renewal overdrive rather early (got the form in the mail weeks ago!), but I had to admire the extra effort involved in putting the stickers on my seat(s) so that I would see them upon my arrival. Well played.

Now I have to decide if I will renew (probably, and probably soon, so stop calling me!) and if I will expand my little zone by also buying the seat that my friend has decided not to buy for next year. His reason is one that merits some attention, too: there is an inexcusable dearth of women in important positions in these productions. We’re not talking about the performing parts, but roles like Director and Conductor. Far too rarely are these roles filled by women and that ought to be fixed.

Methinks

Let me paraphrase Shakespeare to explain my lovely creation above: Methinks the government doth profess too much.

I have to say that I have been extremely annoyed with the sales pitch at feverish levels for quite some time. Endless TV ads, the giant signs that go up (and stay up for a long time) at sites where there has been some government investment. At times – most times – it seems that there is more trumpeting of action than actual action.

I suppose it's reasonable that they would want to really sell their budget bill. After all, they have rolled all the other legislation into the budget bill for each of the last two years, so they really have nothing else to sell. Curious, though, that they aren't gleefully announcing the gutting of environmental review mechanisms or out-of-control military procurement programs as being the way of the future for the economy. Oh, that's right, they do believe that.

I don't know why the general population seems to operate under the impression that the right wing party will be the best manager of the economy when they are proving themselves again and again to be rather challenged on that score.

It must be the advertising that makes us feel that way.

To be fair (or to crow about my creativity), here's the original government logo that is pasted on anything that doesn't move these days:

Challenges of Prevention

My editor over at Positive Lite asked me to write about the future of prevention. In taking up that challenge, I am discovering that I probably have more questions than answers, but I do have some ideas of the challenges we must meet if we are really going to stop HIV transmission.

Motivation.

Scary "death" and "doom" messages will not motivate people to take measures to avoid contracting HIV. Fright messages sometimes have short-term effects, but these truly lack credibility in a context where a lot of people (particularly in the gay community) know someone living with HIV and living quite well with treatment. We need to be realistic talking about what it means to live with HIV today. I personally don't look like I'm about to die (not of HIV/AIDS anyway!) and I have a fairly active life, but I wouldn't wish my HIV infection on anyone else. We need to learn how to share our experiences of living with HIV in straightforward, honest ways if we want people to understand why they might not want this virus.

Risk Assessment.

In all health issues, the quantification of risk is problematic. I have a friend who, in the course of his internship, was sometimes called upon to deliver a prognosis to an ailing patient. "How much time do I have left?" rivalled "What are the chances of the operation not working?" for tops of the unpopularity contest. He was reticent to tell the elderly patient that there was a 4% risk of death in an operation because it was so unlikely to occur and so likely to panic the patient to hear and try to interpret the words.

How then do we explain that a single act of condomless anal sex with a person with a high viral load might have a transmission rate somewhat less than 1%, but that people still get infected with HIV? I know there has been some degree of reticence to share those percentages of risk because they are so very difficult to wrap our heads around, but that is an attitude that smacks of paternalism. If it is difficult to understand, then our challenge on this point is clear: learn to explain risk in a way that helps people to make informed decisions about their actions.

A Full Toolbox.

There are many approaches to prevention these days, ranging from motivational counselling all the way to pharmaceutical intervention. We need to figure out which tools work best for which people in which situations. Then we need to be able to make sure that those people have access to the tools they need, understand the strengths and limits of those tools, and know how to use them. With budgets for prevention stagnant and some new approaches taking up a lot of virtual space, those who make decisions about what to fund might be tempted to put all their eggs in one basket. We have to continue to recognize that there isn't a single approach that will work for all and fight to preserve the diversity of the available tools even as we work to understand them better and to improve them.

The Pleasure Principle.

Most of the time – if we're lucky – sex is about pleasure. When our prevention messages are peppered with words like "safe" and "secure" or "protection" it shouldn't surprise us that not everyone wants to hear them, or even listen to them. We need to talk more about what to do, and not as much about what not to do. This goes beyond how our messages look (we've learned to make them sexy) right to the core of what they say.

Since I am given to wild and sometimes inappropriate metaphors, let me just charge headlong into this one: Waterskiing is not all about the life jacket. That life jacket might be an essential tool in the end, depending on how you go about the sport, but the waterskiing is about hanging onto the rope, getting up on the skis (and staying there!), and it's even more about the sun on your face, the wind in your hair and the pure exhilaration of skimming across the water behind a powerboat. We need to focus on that approach when we talk about sex.

Autonomy.

We need to trust people to make choices for themselves. That means sharing all of the information in the best way to ensure that it is truly understood and letting people determine how they will act on it in their own lives. I would hasten to add that one person's autonomy doesn't trump another's. I'm trying (and probably failing) to make this point not be about disclosure, but if we lived in a world where people wouldn't face unreasonable discrimination after disclosure I would be happy to include it. And when I talk about discrimination, I'm not talking about getting turned down by a potential partner, but about losing a job or not getting one, or about losing all semblance of privacy when the person trusted with the information decides it needs to be shared.

Back to the autonomy part. People will not necessarily make logical or sensible decisions when it comes to sex and pleasure. We wouldn't be human if we always acted logically and based on the best available evidence. Humans have issues like self-esteem, desires, fears, urges…these all push logic out the nearest window from time to time. Sometimes we make bad choices for ourselves and sometimes we make good ones. Sometimes good and bad are a little difficult to sort out. That doesn't mean that someone else gets a licence to tell me what to do with a willing partner; it means that the prevention challenge is to try to ensure that I have all the information and tools I need to make the right decision for myself, and that my partner has those too.

I don't know if we'll find the ideal approach to prevention or the means to make sure that the multiple approaches that work the best for now are fully available. I only know that we can't stop trying. One new infection is one too many.

Check out this article at Positive Lite here (with its own set of comments, if there are any).