Hoping to go back and rewatch the documentary/ video installation Colony (2007) by Cinema Suitcase Colony at Western Front about the shoe factory (Bata shoe company) that I wrote about a good few weeks ago (p’haps 2 months). I am revisited by the idea of work and place being interdependent. The way that farming and fishing are. The recent family death prompts it. Considering how interdependent small farmers can be to drive cows and how they need neighbours to come out and help turn them. (Driving and turning the cows= farming vernacular, not poor english) These are changing relationships. There’s some mirroring tho’ in our relationship to technology (telecommuting: place and work co-exist, internet as railway line that brings us to work etc)
There’s one woman, who spoke in the piece from Scotland, she talked about the bell ringing calling them to work.
Show closes today, hope I can still nip in.
To continue along the theme of hypocrisy when it comes to perceptions of middle/aged older women: just watched this documentary on older mothers via CBC and there’s an astonishing amount of interest, hysterical opinion on older women giving birth. It would appear we’re all experts on women, whose medical history and daily lives, we know absolutely nothing about.
“No, no, no, no” one man was yelling on the radio. Was he talking of war, injustice, oppression? Honestly he sounded like a dinosaur was coming through the window heading for his throat. Main non, he was declaring at the prospect of a woman, he does not know, who WANTS to have a child. OK she was 60 or 72, but the operative word in the childbirth experience is wants. Because if you don’t want to have a child, there’s no sense in having one.
It’s common currency now is to indict mothers and motherhood at every bend in the road. Society’s perception is mothers are never doing enough, or they’re doing too much, or their wish to do x must be thwarted, or they are responsible for the worst social problems and on and on. And women are now indicting other women with alarming ease.
Honestly if I reflect on my life from age 5 onwards I have a plethora of stored phrases, summaries, tags, cooked up around me, applied to fallen women en route to motherhood, and mothers. There was the “she’s away Nursing in England” unmarried mother whisked off to give birth to then return slender and childless from this “nursing” (not to be confused with breastfeeding). Then there’s came the pregnant teen, the pregnant teen who gets herself pregnant for a council flat, along with the wanton woman, who tricks her boyfriend into impregnating her so she too can get a council flat, then there’s the young woman (usually) who tricks her boyfriend to impregnate her, who doesn’t want a council flat (phew the run on flats by round tummies !) but wants to “keep” the boyfriend. Then there’s the ticking biological clock suspect (this can begin with a simple look across the street at a changing traffic light around age 25), then there’s the she’s stuck on the shelf and desperate and tick-tock and take pity on her, but hang on a minute she doesn’t want a baby — hell what’s wrong with her?!
Moving along to the she’s left it too late tags. Followed by the burdening what’s she thinking tags…And this is before any of these children actually arrive in the world? Then commences an entirely new theatre of condemnation.
I am thinking I don’t know what the state of any of woman’s health — whether she 20 or 72– is going into pregnancy. I think women and men need to want to have a child. Or at least be committed to embracing, adjusting what parenthood hurls at them. I cannot dictate ideal circumstances in which children should be born. Many of the 70 year olds I know have four times the energy I have.
What I am wondering is why the female body remains this bastion of fear. It’s almost becoming militaristic. This wailing fear of what this body is about to dump upon the world. People cowering from it like there are bullets coming from it they need to duck! What we really need to do is get out of security guarding the ovaries because if we are in the ovaries, why aren’t we in the testicles?
ding a ling
Woman phones. You phoned me, she says. I see your # on call display. I don’t know who she is.
I didn’t phone you.
Yes you did. I can see it on my call display.
Which number phoned you? I don’t know, she says. Hold on I’ll call you back.
Woman phones again. This number she says saying the wrong number aloud. That’s not my number I say.
You phoned me, she repeats.
Is it poss someone is using my number to cover up their number I say.
No that’s not possible, she replies.
I say I did not phone her because I don’t know who she is.
I don’t know who you are either, she says.
Yes well I promise you I did not phone you.
I don’t what your excuse is, she says, but you phoned me
#
Iris
Still pondering the Iris Robinson story out of Belfast this week. There are a few things that confuse me. The first: why because she has a sexuality, she’s mentally ill and second: why wasn’t she cautioned for incite to hatred over her radio interview during which she expressed extremely hateful views towards homosexuals.
According to the details disclosed by BBC Spotlight she was pretty clear headed when it came to inveigling 50 grand from two property developers for investment in her young lover’s business and even more ruthless when she deemed it time for the money to be returned by him.
Initially I objected to the way the media inferred she, by virtue of the age gap, had taken advantage of this man, since it suggests no young man is attracted to a woman in her sixties which I find foolish. The double standard was obvious.
But what’s curious is when a male politician (or president) falls from grace it is never suggested he’s mentally ill. Ever. Yet she’s now pegged as in “acute psychiatric care”, incapacitated to the point where she’s not able to answer the real question around what she did taking money etc.
old faithful
Our faithful, reliable, rain water.
Interesting to watch the Olympic pack leaping the gap over the daily blight. I love this about the weather. No matter how much we control, no matter how much we decide, no matter who we nominate or choose, the weather will not be instructed, she won’t be told what to do.
I enjoy the way she arches her back in this manner. And sometimes when she’s laying into me, or leaving someone with no heat, no water, no roof I wish she was a bit less stubborn. Right now she’s having a laugh…at machines moving piles of snow under tarpaulin for heat. You think she can’t lift that tarpaulin? She can even turn off the power point presentations and its illuminated promises.
Agnes Varda
I have completed my recuperation with Agnes Varda’s work — I am not recuperated but that has nowt to do with Agnes films and everything to do with a poxy set of lungs.
La Pointe Courte invigorated me despite the pleura protest. So much so it’s difficult to know where to begin so I shall simply commence en pointe and jeter around the harbour. The timbre/tone of the voice is exquisite in this film, the sequences between the couple rely on a flat delivery, especially by the male, which is exceptionally effective. If the voice is devoid of emotion, suddenly the visual carries all the more significance. The faces, the movements of the body, the objects they move around all become heightened. And the curious thing is the entire exchange is dialogue, a wandering conversation where the couple try to dissect their relative positions and points of view on their relationship.
The parallel narrative has more of a documentary feel: the story of a fishing village (through which the couple weave, but the two stories are ultimately separate). The actors, who were local people, are sometimes aware they are being filmed and they carry these knowing smiles that add to what they are doing because the viewer is immersed in a documentary sense of these peoples lives, along with a dramatic narrative they are participating in. I think this melding of documentary and fiction is a perfect weave: one enriches the other in both directions.
It’s something that interests me greatly in books: how to incorporate the documentary into fiction. I believe it’s possible. I say this because when I read anthropology and sociology I am as engrossed as when I read fiction. I suspect it’s like tuning instruments together where each retains a distinct sound.
Agnes makes me curious and I love to feel curious. It’s a good, strong feeling.
Just been gandering the Vancouver Regional Growth Strategy draft — a slightly surreal publication that appears to have confused itself with an ad for tourism rather than the “habitable” city. These odd lush photos of bright blue days, and people milling in these bright blue lives. Everything is just a bit too darn good-looking.
The illustrations designed to draw you away from the text, which provides little insight into how any of this growth will be actualized or strategized. Item 4.1 a single page dedicated to Affordable Housing strategy is basically a bunch of paragraphs that tell us nothing, other than reminded me a unit or two of housing could have been built off the proceeds of this graphic design pamphlet budget. But the part that seemed plain bonkers was on the next page (so essentially the same viewing page if you’re looking online or close enough to confuse…) is a photograph of are brand new million dollar houses beside 16th and Cambie! It seemed to infer by its proximity the kind of delusion that is the very reason we have so little affordable housing.
The marvelous thing about affordable housing is sustaining it once you’ve built it and there’s never any strategy on that. Housing Co-ops increasingly cannot house the people they are intended for and who have barriers to housing due to onerous policies from CHMC, so in essence they’ve become a place where double income people go and live, to save for an astonishing down payment on an astonishing mortgage. The theory of mixed housing works well, until you’re in a room with people saving for a mortgage who have very little invested in where they are and will vote to increase rents for the most vulnerable residents who will actually be there once the others have exited to astonishing mortgage and barbecue land.
You could say there are two types of barriers now: barriers to housing full stop and barriers to a down payment. Unfortunately one has higher needs over the other and tends to last a great deal longer and leaves people on the street. The other is a pain of its own, but you don’t die from exposure as a result of it.
mots II
It strikes me that when a person dies their whole lexicon dies with them. If they have a particular dialect say or inventive relationship to language it’s gone.
That makes me very sad.