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Archive for November, 2010

My date with a ghost

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, death, grief, La Rustica, mourning, New Westminster, Patricia Louise Williams, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 12, 2010| 3 Comments »

Yesterday, I had a date with a ghost.

You see, November 11 was the anniversary of Trish and I as a couple. It was not our wedding anniversary; that was for the public. November 11 was the private one, the day we kept for ourselves. Whenever we could, we took the day off, and at the very least we tried to go out to dinner, although once or twice in the last few years, she hadn’t been well enough for us to celebrate on the exact date.

This being the first anniversary since her death, I debated with myself all day if I would keep the date. Perhaps it was too sentimental? Too much giving in to grief? But in the end I decided I was observing the day in my own mind anyway, so I might as well indulge myself. I dressed in my best – a black Dorothy Grant shirt, my gold ring, my copper bracelet, and the Lyle Wilson pendant that Trish had won at a raffle at the West Vancouver Museum – and wore all black, one of the colors that Trish had liked best on me, and solemnly descended on the restaurant.

I had chosen La Rustica, an Italian restaurant we had known at its height when we were living in New Westminster. We hadn’t been there for years, but we had talked about returning there to see what it was like. Now, I would have to see for myself.

The restaurant had been extensively renovated at least once since we used to frequent it, so I couldn’t sit at the table in the back where a photographer had taken a picture of us on our fourth anniversary years ago. Instead, I was shown to a table for two on the edge of the vacant dance floor. On nights when the band played, I imagine it would have been a bad seat, the sort that single diners usually get unless they complain. But that night, I didn’t care; it was well away from the large party from the assisted living home who were the only other diners in the restaurant, so they wouldn’t notice my odd behavior.

My date, I imagined, was in a green turquoise dress with flowing sleeves, one of the few that I kept when I gave her clothes away. Her hair was long, and dyed auburn.

I ordered two glasses of white wine, and at first the server got it wrong, giving me two glasses of wine in a carafe. “If it’s not too odd, could I have another glass?” I asked. The server looked askance, but she did as I requested, not quite daring to ask what I was doing.

I poured our wine, then clinked the glasses together. Not daring to speak out loud because I knew I would end up sobbing in that horrible breathless way I have had during my mourning, I delivered the ritual Scottish toast and response that Trish had always loved since she first read it in George Macdonald Fraser’s The General Danced at Dawn:

“Here’s to us.”

“Wha’s like us?”

“Damn few, and they’re all deid.”

I followed that with the question that one or the other of us had always asked, “Has it really been __ years?”

“It doesn’t seem possible,” I whispered to myself, finishing the ritual. By then I was daubing at my eyes with the linen napkin.

My tastes have changed tremendously since I had last eaten at La Rustica, but I chose what had been my favorite meal: onion soup, followed by veal in a capers and wine sauce, and an amaretto gelato. The restaurant was dimly lit, but I knew my date was eating the shrimp, something I never prepare at home because it might trigger an allergic reaction for me, but which she always enjoyed when we ate out.

At the end of the meal, I asked if I could go into the back. But the years and the renovations defeated me, and I could not decide where our favorite table had been.

Maybe that was just as well. Wherever the table was, it would have sat hundreds since we had been at it, and we could have left no impression that would have remained.

The server was looking at me strangely, so I explained the occasion, and left a large tip before I left.

Ordinarily, I would have hardly felt two glasses of wine, but that night I did. I decided that I couldn’t bear the bus, so I walked down the hill to the Skytrain to sober myself up. By the time I boarded, the cold had cleared my head. I didn’t say goodbye to the ghost, of course; she followed me home.

People talk of melancholy although it were a form of depression, and should be avoided. If you believe that, you will never understand, but I enjoyed my company that night, although the encounter left me feeling drained.

I don’t know if I will be returning to La Rustica, which proved only adequate (the sauce had too much lemon, and the restaurant was no longer growing its own herbs on the roof). But I already know that my companion and I will be going out again on our wedding anniversary, as well as next next November 11th.

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Remembrance Day ambiguities

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Canada, Personal, propaganda, Remembrance Day, Uncategorized, World War One, tagged , , , , , , , on November 11, 2010| 2 Comments »

Remembrance Day is a holiday that always leaves me feeling ambiguous – to say nothing of slightly guilty about my ambiguity.

On the one hand, I have no trouble extending my respect to soldiers. They do a dirty and dangerous job that is often essential. The fact that, in Canada, they do it with inadequate equipment and wages that hover around the poverty line only makes them more worthy of recognition. For some, desperation might play a part in enlistment, but considering the conditions, I figure that a sense of obligation and loyalty must frequently play a large part in their career choices.

Nor do I have any trouble remembering history. If alternate worlds exist, there are a good many in which I am a historian, and, in this world, history forms a large chunk of my reading. I am constantly exasperated at how little sense of history the average person has, so an event that encourage people look back at the last ninety years seems worthwhile to me. I only wish more holidays encouraged such backward gazes.

On the other hand, the emphasis of Remembrance Day has changed greatly since I was a child. When I was growing up, the point of the holiday could have been summarized as “Never again!” I’m not sure of the intention of that message, but I took that to mean that we should do everything possible not only to avoid global conflicts like the one that originally inspired the holiday, but also to avoid wars altogether. I was proud that I lived in a country that focused on peace-keeping, because that seemed to be the enlightened, modern view.

However, in the last couple of decades, respect for soldiers seems too frequently to have become respect for the policies that send them abroad. The message I hear is that if you support the troops, you must also support the Canadian presence in Afghanistan, and that, if you don’t, you are some sort of hypocrite. That seems a false dichotomy to me, and I regret that the day has stopped being a reminder of what we want to avoid and has become instead an extension of government policy.

Along with this new propaganda has come the sort of rhetoric that I have always despised. The rhetoric uses words like “sacrifice” and “honor.” Soldiers do not die; they “fall.” To hear this new propaganda, you would think that soldiers did not simply accept the risk of death, but rush to it with the eagerness of Monty Python’s Kamikaze Scotsmen, eager to show their patriotism by making the supreme sacrifice. Personally, I suspect that they are just unlucky, and no matter how great their idealism, would probably prefer to still be alive.

Such rhetoric seems false at the best of times. Far from being a way to express respect, it seems a way to avoid really thinking about the gory details to which you are alluding. However, it seems even more false when applied to the subject of war

.Read the war poetry of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, or Wilfred Owen – people who had fought in the front lines, and knew what they were talking about – and you quickly find that this is exactly the sort of rhetoric that they railed against. It is the rhetoric that lured the generation of men who were young during World War One to be butchered by the incompetence of their generals. Now, though, “Lest We Forget” no longer seems to include remembering the danger of such rhetoric. But I do not forget, and I greatly resent the fact that it is creeping back into fashion.

I am sure that some readers will damn me for these sentiments, and doubt my sincerity. But, despite the tendency of mainstream media to reduce everything to an either-or question, I’d like to think that a mixed perception is still possible.

Respect for the average soldier is not synonymous with jingoism, and the sooner we separate them, the better. Until we do, Remembrance Day remains a holiday that I can only partly support.

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Gary Minaker Russ, “Haida Sharkwoman”

Posted in aboriginal art, art, art appreciation, British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, First Nations art, Gary Minaker Russ, Haida, Haida art, indian art, Northwest Coast Art, Personal, Sharkwoman, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 3, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I never buy art unless it catches the eye or intrigues me in some other way. However, some purchases loom larger than others , and Gary Minaker Russ’ “Haida Sharkwoman” is one of them. I am not talking about price (although “Haida Sharkwoman” is one of the more expensive pieces that I’ve bought), nor size (although at fifty-three pounds, it is one of the heaviest), but about artistic integrity and excellence, both of which the piece has to spare.

Minaker is best-known as an argillite carver. Working with hand tools and preferring natural finishes, he has a tendency to go his his own way that some gallery owners think has hurt his career, but that keeps his work original. In the last few years, he has been resisting the pressure to carve for the market and produce copies of Bill Reid’s “Raven and First Men” or endless variations on Raven stealing the light. He has also been chafing at the growing tendency for inlays of precious and semi-precious stones and metals on argillite, which drives up the prices while rarely improving the actual lines of carvings.

Consequently, he has been branching out and trying to create a new market in Brazilian soapstone in the hopes of finding greater artistic freedom. He has had mixed success, he tells me: private collectors have no trouble accepting his new direction, but many galleries do. Still, he perseveres, partly because it is easier to find large pieces of soapstone than of argillite to produce such pieces as “Haida Sharkwoman.”

Forty-five centimeters long and thirty-five wide, “Haida Sharkwoman” is carved on one side and flat on the back. The asymmetrical curve on the right, Minaker says, was in the raw block, and only required refining.

Sharkwoman (not to be confused with Dogfish Woman, whom Charles Edenshaw and Bill Reid made famous) is a subject that Minaker has returned to many times in his work, just as Beau Dick keeps returning to the Bukwis and Tsonoqua. He suggests, only half-jokingly, that the subject reflects the difficulties he has had with the women in his life, adding that he tries to restrict himself to no more than one return to the subject each year.

The sculpture shows a woman half-way through a transformation into a shark. In modern northwest coast art, such a transformation is often depicted as a twisting of a person’s existing limbs, rather like the werewolf transformations seen in modern computer-generated special effects. That approach is unquestionably dramatic, but Minaker has chosen to depict the new shape as a blanket draped over the figure, as in the old stories. Here, you have the shark’s fins falling over the woman’s head like a hood, as her face, still showing her labret, is slowly transformed by the gills and flat snout of the shark.

The sculpture is dominated by the abstract carving style of the face and the fins. However, at the bottom right is a more realistic set of fingers half-covered by hair. This contrast emphasizes the transformation; it is only when your glance falls on the realistic hand that you realize that the transformation is taking place.

Notice, too, that the position of the hand suggests that the woman is propping herself up on her stomach against a rock, waiting for the transformation to complete so that she can begin to breathe the water.

The carving is further enhanced by one of the most sinuous and three-dimensional formlines that I have ever seen, beginning at the lower right of the fin, and twisting up to the eyebrows. From there, it continues around the face and jawbone to rejoin the right fin again, keeping the viewers’ eye in constant motion. And, should you detour down the nose or around the lip, the gills are on both cheeks to force your gaze back to the main formline. As a result, you soon tend to attribute the movement of your own eyes to the sculpture itself, and start imagining that its eyes are moving to watch you – not necessarily in a menacing way, but definitely an alert one.

I say “necessarily,” because the impression that “Haida Sharkwoman” makes can vary wildly. The combination of the formline and the reflective quality of the soapstone makes the sculpture look dramatically different in various lights. I have seen it a pale beige in bright sunlight, looking serene; golden in the reflected light of a flash, looking otherworldly, and dark in the shadows, looking sinister. The piece is so varied that I can get a different perspective on it simply by moving it to a different location.

One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that it tends to dominate a room, no matter where it’s put. After several experiments, I’ve given in and placed it on top of the TV cabinet, which most of the living room centers on anyway. As a major piece of art, it seems to belong there.

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