The Change in Times

From LIFE Magazine, September 15th, 1941

Eternal Summer

I suspect I will walk the seawall every day this week. 

"Artist." It is such a weird word. I tell my students never to use it because it is meaningless when used alone. When a student whom I know self-identifies as a visual artist tells me she is an artist, I like to say, "Are you a choreographer?" I say that because I love the provocative tense.

But it is a meaningless word and to use it is an insult. If someone cares enough about you to ask what you do, why would one answer with a vague and meaningless word? I tell my students to say, "I am a painter." Or whatever is appropriate, more specific and meaningful. 

But it's a title many covet. So is being a writer, and these are titles people love to give themselves. And as I matured, I saw so many artist and writer wannabes with loud self-congratulating voices, I never used either word to describe myself. In fact, I have never given myself a title. 

I have had titles. I've been a Managing Director and an Artistic Director and a Marketing Manager and teacher, but never any of those things for very long. Creating design and writing were tools for me, not titles and I was entirely mercenary in my practice, far more the entrepreneur than an artist.

In my mind there is an altar with a banner bearing the phrase "A place at the table." It is where I have always strived to be.  I use the phrase to express my satisfaction with a project. With Knock Knock, for example, its greatest outcome for me was the feeling it moved me closer to the most important table of all — where actors eat. 

But now, with Presentation House producing my script, HoMe, and the partnership I that Warren (an actor about whom, I am passionate) and I have formed to create Uncle Gus' Monkey, I feel not only at the table, but in the light. It changes my every day because I am an artist and a writer. I know it because  the titles are coming from others, not from me. 

Every day now, I feel fulfilled and proud and satisfied. This is so new a different for someone who felt "outside" and without a table all his life.

Self Abuse

Above: "The Annex" of Inglewood Junior High School (that later became part of West Vancouver Secondary School). This building, and the room with all the grilled windows, was a classroom of mine whilst in school there and my homeroom for my first year of teaching in 1970.

Renunions
I went to the West Van High class of '74 reunion on Friday night. (Two months ago, I went to the class of '73 reunion because the accelerated students of that class of '74 graduated a year early).  And just as at the first reunion,  I could not last too long. It is so incredibly intense seeing faces from forty years ago; many of them trigger massive emotional rushes of intense affection.

These people are 58/59 years old now and so the age difference between us is almost invisible. Perhaps that is one reason for the intensity of these reunions. I feel far freer to express my affection now and not at all guilty about liking some of these people so much.

I faced a couple of challenges that night. One was seeing a young woman whose family moved away when she was about to enter grade twelve. She wanted to stay and graduate with her friends, so she was billeted by a couple who were friends of the family and I and some other teachers at school were assigned to liaise with her. A decade later the man who billeted her came to where I was working to carry out 400 hours of community service. He has been jailed for sexual offences against young people.  She is fine and we had a great reunion, but her host during that year was the first thing we talked about.

The other challenge was being greeted by a guy I'll call I.M. He put several tabs of acid in the coffee pot in the teacher's staff room and a lot of teachers had quite the afternoon—one a horrid, horrid afternoon. I don't like I.M. at all because of what he did and did not know how to handle talking with him—all I wanted to do was get away from him as soon as I could.

But seeing everyone else was a treat. Especially those with whom I did plays extra-curricularly.

Mystery
When I was really young, I thought I was going crazy because I would see the walls of my bedroom receding. I was about twelve when this started happening and I somehow discovered that in the bathroom, where we left the lights on at night, the walls would not move. So I would sleep in the bathtub. That is how I learned to sleep in light which I still do easily.

I never told anyone because I thought I was crazy. But when I was in my forties and enamoured by the mind and writing of Oliver Sacks, I read his book about migraine headaches and discovered that the moving walls were actually a hallucination that is part of having migraines. The condition is called Todd's Syndrome or Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. I mean, if you are going to have a mental health issue, wouldn't you want something called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome?

Well now another weird thing is happening to me. About two weeks ago, I woke up and there was blood on my duvet—on the outside. I freaked out and checked out Leon but there were no signs of any problems.  Then I discovered scrapes on both my arms that DEFINITELY were not there when I went to bed. And they were scrapes, not scratches from Leon. Well, this morning I have awakened with a bump on my forehead that is now turning a lovely deep blue. It is the size of a nickel.

I have a history of sleep walking and falling out of bed. I have had spells over my life,  of nocturnal activity and I suspect I am in another phase of this and I am doing things at night (that I see no evidence of) and somehow hurting myself.

Once, when I lived with my parents, in my sleep during the night one night, I emptied two boxes of papers and hid the papers all through the house. We found them in clothes pockets in closets, in bowls in the kitchen, in the toilet, in the laundry basket, in the freezer and in every cupboard in the kitchen.

The Unethical Photographer

I unethically snapped this photo on the Skytrain. The colour of his turban matches the print on his shirt and a line in his shoes. The  pants are tapered and a lovely brushed cotton. The guy reeks of style!

The kitchen progresses; where once there was melamine, there is now Maple.

I am going mad without someone pushing me to write. Presentation House: no answer to my emails. Never heard back from David at McGraw Hill and not a word from Warren about the screenplay (which is fine because he is aptly focused on his family holiday). Still, mornings are hard without homework to do.

A FIlm in 30 Seconds

Some commercials nail small film-making.

Promart calls this "film" The Perfect Daughter.

Edward St. Aubyn

From the "I am not alone" department: A profile called Inheritance by Ian Parker, about Edward St. Aubyn, in the New Yorker.

As everyone who knows me knows, my mother suffered from mental ill health and paralysis. She would tell lies about me to get my father to punch me and my Dad's punishment sometimes got out of hand. It scarred me.

In the New Yorker Article (June 2, 2014; page 45) Parker describes a scene wherein Patrick (a fictional but heavily autobiographical version of St. Aubyn), at age three, is picked up by his father and thrown into a swimming pool. Patrick struggles to make it to safety at the edge of the pool and sees his father "in his dark glasses smoking a cigar, angled away from  [him], a jaundiced cloud of pastis on the table in front of him." St. Aubyn writes:

"The deeper truth that he has been a toy in the sadomasochistic relationship between his parents was not, until now, something he could bear to contemplate."

Canada Day

Whoa it was hot yesterday. It was 28° and walking was nasty. I kept having to stop in the shade on my way to Queen Elizabeth Park where Deb Williams and her friends and family have their annual Canada Day picnic. When I found them, I found a bench in the shade and sat down to cool down before I joined everyone and then I spent about an hour talking with people I knew.

Walking home, I was struck by how much I enjoyed sitting apart and watching everybody more than being part of everything. I preferred being an observer to being a participant, but when Deborah is involved, participating is irresistible.

The photo above is taken from the bench from whence I watched the picnic. I had watched a documentary about Frederick Law Olmstead the night before. He, like Luther Burbank, is a personal hero. Both men were profound humanists who expressed their humanism in botany; Burbank by "inventing" individual crops to serve man (he genetically bred potatoes that matured in half the time of all previous tubers following Ireland's potato famine) and Olmstead by creating the concept of urban parks and championing the science of landscape design.

The picnic above is on the edge of a pond. You can barely see it through the trees, and the girls you can see running are in a massive field that extends further to the left. It felt like part of Olmstead's legacy to be there.

I am writing this at 6:00am. I have been up for an hour. In this heat, this is the time to walk. Today is predicted to be hotter than yesterday.

Yesterday began with James here to begin the conversion of my kitchen cabinets. Finally! That gaping empty hole is where the dish washer used to  be. I had it removed. I have lived here for five years and used the dish washer perhaps four times so now the rubber is rotten. Now, I will have even more shelves.