burns the fire

Montreal is climaxing culture these days. The loudest shout-out of the moment is the star-studded Festival International de Jazz de Montreal that scorches the already red-hot streets of our downtown core with its worldbeat blowouts. Teeming with tourists (like ants on a farm), you can yell out my name in the crowd, but you won’t find me.

I- am swinging my hips at the air-conditioned Montreal Jewish General Hospital, at the in-house JGH JAZZ; a yearly jazzbo hat-tip to the mother of all fests. Run by irrepressible music therapist Bryan Highbloom (who invites both Montreal and international artists to play), the festival banner reads: music is healing. It sure is. Two years ago, my husband, and music composer Ned Bouhalassa spent the duration of our big-city blowout at the hospital; horizontal- save for the joy of Bryan’s concerts in the cafeteria. In a time of need, these musical moments brought us such comfort and inspiration, words alone cannot express. If I was a musician, then I would play, and send you soaring through the wilds of your limitless soul, with the symphony of my gratitude.

Ned and Bryan have since cooked up the ace pilot project ‘Hospital Soundscapes’- using ‘original ambient music and soundscapes’ to help reduce the noise and stress of hospital life. Indeed. Check it out, and help heal what ails you.  

GOOD NEWS FLASH: My friend (and yours, if you met him on the dance floor) Rawi Hage has recently won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (the world’s richest literary prize), for his beautiful,  incendiary novel: De Niro’s Game. Mazel tov, Rawi!

SHAMELESS SELF-FLOGGING: While advertising for others, it strikes me that I should publicize the existence of this blog. I signed up with Problogger.net and get all kinds of good advice, but have yet to focus on building up my readership. Any suggestions? Pretty please help spread the word.

Forgive me for the unimaginative (a.k.a. highly effective) titillation, but it is rare for me to want to share something so badly, I will use any cheap trick in the book to catch the eye.

I am obliquely referring to the singular eye of renowned editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who wrote a book about the final months of his life after suffering a massive stroke and waking up physically paralyzed from head to toe, literally locked inside his body, with one ogling eye as the only part that worked. The other orb in question is artist Julian Schnabel’s, and his visceral, visionary film, based on Bauby’s memoir and Ronald Harwood’s screenplay; ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ (‘Le Scaphandre et le Papillon’).

In the aftermath of the stroke, and a shockingly non-neurotic period of self-pity, Bauby comes to understand that although imprisoned in his body, he cannot live like a prisoner, and so he turns to his imagination and memory to keep him alive. When he cannot bear his physical reality, he dives inside his mind, travels through his past, and lives out his dreams. Humor, beauty and pathos reign; the stuff of an inextinguishable life.

The ever lusty Bauby learns to communicate by blinking his eyelid as heavenly therapists recite the alphabet. This is a feat of will and a force of life that can pump fresh blood into every dying heart. His memoir (olympian for a paralyzed man), took about 200,000 blinks to write, and each word- about 120 seconds. 

Go see the film. If you have already, see it again (I’ve been knocked out twice), and let me know how it makes you feel. My heartfelt thanks to Julian Schnabel (and his inspired team), for taking this seemingly un-filmable story and making it into a soaring film. A gift of life in a timeless work of art that celebrates eternity. He said that he did it to calm his dying father’s fear of death, and in the process, he calms ours. 

Director Julian Schnabel, Director of Photography Janusz Kaminski and their crew

ON A SADLY RELATED NOTE: R.I.P.  Bill Vince; passionate, prophetic Canadian film producer died this past weekend, at the age of 44. My heart goes out to his family and friends.

GOOD NEWS FLASH (I’m going to make this a habit): Raving about ‘The Diving Bell’ last night at our dear friends’  home-fundraiser for Vidya (check out the life-altering project for women and children in a New Delhi slum), I met an occupational therapist who told me about a friend of hers in Montreal who had suffered the same brain stem stroke as Bauby, and its ensuing locked-in syndrome. One day, when his wife was visiting, she moved in closely to his face and he blinked out the words ‘bad breath.’ Ha! In other words, his sense of smell came back. Soon after, everything else did, and he experienced a full recovery. Celebrate!! I love a good miracle.

Since a certain Mr. Sagdiyev (Borat- to his friends, fans and foes) blasted his way into the mainstream lexicon and my heart, I have been aching for more of his fearless, merciless tackling of the elephant in the room. When I saw my first Borat clip from the Ali G Show (‘What is the best way to defend from a Jew?’), I went a little wild. I howled, I screamed, I shot up like a bolt of lightning as it cracks in the sky. Only the light never went out, it’s still there, stoking the flames of the fire of my soul, my urge to create.

You may ask why, you may understand, or you may not care, but the beloved and despised character of Borat played so nobly (and sexily, I might add) by the Jew-Brit wit-bitch Sacha Baron Cohen (has he been knighted yet?), rips the band-aid off the stinking wounds of our battered but not beaten collective psyche, spraying the noxious odor of intolerance everywhere. Discrimination is our common denominator. There’s a lot of hate and ignorance to dissipate (not decimate, as in ‘revenge’), and when ‘Bo’ (rhymes with shmo) points his long, hairy finger; the laughs are on us all.

Borat and his sister (4^th best prostitute in Kazakhstan) wannabes last Halloween (Christ, I’m wearing the same shirt as in my profile!)

GOOD NEWS FLASH for the future: Sacha Baron Cohen’s ‘Bruno’- the gay, Austrian fashion journalist- will be unleashed on the big screens on May 15, 2009. Wait for it! According to some reports, it may be titled: ‘Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt’. Be still my beating heart.

My oatmeal and banana this morning was bloodied by global injustice and crimes against humanity in the news. I chewed on one atrocity after the other (Woman; wakes from a coma, locked in a cellar for 25 years by her father for whom she bore 7 children), and (State-sponsored terror; Zimbabwe self-destructs) to name just two. How I managed to swallow the lump in my throat is a mystery. Finishing up, I washed my bowl, folded the paper in the recycling bin, and started my day.

Guilt is a black hole.

When my late grandmother’s brother was sick and they wouldn’t let her sleep overnight in his hospital room, she slept on the cold, hard floor of her flat, because if Moe couldn’t sleep in his own bed, neither could she.

Guilt, as Mordechai Richler would say, is a sure-fire way to raise money. I believe it was in Barney’s Version- he pointed out that as soon as vandals (terrorists?) deface a Jewish cemetery or wreck a Jewish library, the requests for pledges for Israel pour in. The pressure is on.

Guilt is my birthright.

I, who generally (and apologetically) shun the headlines, am amazed that not only do I live a remarkably privileged life in a tolerant society, I can read the bad news and get on with my life.

Christopher Hitchens demands that Nelson Mandela speak out against the tortuous reign of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Check it out in Slate.com.

to your incredible dreams 

(Kim in Lac Patrix)

I just read, or should I say, gobbled the book ‘Heat’ by Bill Buford. This A-list wordsmith left an editing post at the New Yorker to fulfill his fantasy of learning to cook at NYC’s Babbo; the 3-star Italian restaurant of culinary maharishi, Mario Batali. The inside kitchen poop was fun and sharply written (I’m a sucker for a well-braised phrase), but it was the ‘Tuscan Butcher’ section near the end that boiled my blood. Here, Buford dissects his apprenticeship with legendary butcher diva Dario Cecchini (he has a blog!) in all its bloody glory. Suffice it to say, the descriptions of how to slaughter and eviscerate a cow (while singing opera at the top of your lungs), will not leave you unmoved. Indeed, with the deadliest of blades, a few gory chapters shaved the overcooked meat off the shivering bones of my lofty musings about life and death.

That same day, my husband and I went to see some of his family. Over a fine feast on their kitchen island, idle chit-chat turned to butchery and blood, when an Algerian cousin revealed her secret passion and fave animal side-dish (rolling sagely inside its head like two shiny marbles): the dewy brown eyes of a lamb. Boiled. In hot water, with herbs and a little oil. Before you drop the (bulging and terrified, I imagine) eyeballs in the pot, you yank out their inky black pupils- just too bitter on the tongue.

Fortified by my new philosophy of life (look it squarely in the eye), I ask for details. The texture is gelatinous, mmm. My imagination ignites as the word sinks in; jelly-like, gummy, gluey, sticky, viscous. Popping eyeballs in the mouth like candy. Now, chew on that.

For a recipe for Bouzelouf (lamb’s head), click here. The preparing and the devouring of the Lamb’s head (not for vegetarians or the squeamish). 

I just read an article in the NY Times by Brooklyn blogger Emily Gould about the extreme pitfalls of exposing your personal life on the web. I have rarely gotten into that kind of trouble. I was born a fiction writer, a dramatist, I spend the vast majority of my time making things up, but, a blog’s lure to chew on ‘reality’ is irresistible, especially if it is my own.

It ain’t hard. My mother just called. She is an unending source of inspiration and crack lines. In fifteen minutes, our power-chat covers my cousin Sara’s 80th birthday, calcium, constipation, and our deepest feelings (and I mean- bottom of the ocean floor deep). Based on itch in my fingers, I could weave our verbal thread into solid gold, or at least- a guffaw, but would my very private mom mind if I got into the nitty-gritty about, say, her intestinal tract? What about mine? Do you want to know the unfiltered truth??

In the masterwork AMERICAN PASTORAL, Philip Roth’s fictional writer Nathan Zuckerman advises its main character not to befriend a writer if he doesn’t want his confessions to show up in a book. Lenny Bruce said the question of his influences is absurd- he was influenced by his every waking hour. And to prove it- his real-life crew was shmeared all over his art. In the name of Chris Rock’s latest show- “No Apologies.”

Emily Gould blogged about everything and everyone, no holds barred, with no fictional veil to protect the innocent, let alone the guilty. She stood in front of the firing squad and they shot her down. One could call it a suicide. While I am rattled by her cautionary tale, I can’t help but think, nay, know that simply put: life is grist for the mill. In the name of inspiration, provocation and transformation (put that on your mirror and sniff it): nothing and no one is ever really safe.

(Sabah) Now you see her, now you don’t

For some fun and games, check out the following pseudo-memoirs: Lenny Bruce’s “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People” and Philip Roth’s “The Facts.”

On my hands and knees in the backyard, planting seeds in the earth, I realize I am not alone. There is a small cluster of idiosyncratic people with names like Cookie, Fritz, Fanny and Dio milling about the weedy grass, seemingly aware of the budding plants and my burgeoning skills, but mostly just in awe of each other.

The sexual tension is palpable. The sun glints off wet lips. Coy talk and throaty laughter ring in my ears as high heels slide in and out of the damp earth. A woman’s tongue tastes the tip of a lilac. Butterflies circle my head. I hear music. Soft and shimmering, and then louder.

I am unashamed of my backwoods fashion; the oversized, sweating shirt, fuzz-ball hair in the humid air, because I am frankly ahead of the game. This is my party. I know what these people are going to say before they say it. I know what they are thinking, what they wish for, and how they feel. These are my people.

Welcome to the life of a writer. A writer who became a filmmaker so she could bring her characters to life. I am never lonely in my backyard. 

Let me tell you about the righteous, raw female funk of Fantasia Barrino- whose body, soul and voice of god obliterated mediocrity for a few heart-pounding moments on American Idol last night. Fantasia was crowned another year, but was on last night to remind mainstream America (and me) what fearless artistry is, and how music can lift us higher. Who cares if she already won, she should win again. If only to wake us up out of our middlebrow stupor, and I mean, up.

At this point in the competition (the finals), the cream doesn’t always rise to the top. Sure, the two little birds left standing can sing (yada yad), but can they remind us of the sheer joy and sorrow of being alive?

Fantasia let us have it. There was the requisite shock shot of judge Simon Cowell, and the three startled finalists barely swinging their meat-less hips to her eye-busting boogie as Fantasia ripped the stage. Rasping, shouting, crying out, she ramped up the power. Our power, people. This particular percussive tune and its frantic ferocity called, yes, ‘Bore Me’, is not for all tastes, but just tell me: can you feel it?

James Brown,  Janis Joplin, Tina Turner, Jack White, Mick Jagger.. meet Fantasia 

I was a spinning top Saturday night at the Portuguese on St-Urbain. My husband Ned and I are learning how to ‘couple dance’, which is not as ball and chain as it sounds. Holding hands, we follow the steps as best as we can, and promptly forget them. My favorite (un-mastered) move was when he let go of me, and I swirled around in space, unfettered by human concerns, until our sweat mingled and our hands re-joined (mine on top of his, natch, as per the rules). Maybe it was the scotch (one shot, I’m a cheap date), but I felt something happen to me as I whirled like a dervish on stage. Laughter, as I spun, propelled me to ecstasy. Big-mouthed guffaws that rang like bells in my ears as I spiraled around the revolving floor. I danced with my teacher. His hands were clammy, but his face (on to which I fixed my gaze) smiled beatifically, not at me per se, but at some higher power that fueled the lightness of his hands as they bent my flying limbs to his will.

I don’t like to be led but I’m learning to let go. 

Sufi Whirling as a path leading to our higher ourselves 

Join us next time if you dare!