Take It Away!

The Sunshine Coast is about 50 miles north of Point Roberts but today it seemed a lot further. We awakened this morning to snow, again, but gathered our wits and belongings and set off for Point Roberts now that the first of the month has come. And lo, by the time we crossed the border (a crossing so fast today that we barely had to slow down), there was no snow. There was as much snow down here as there was up there over the past two weeks, but it has been just enough warmer (just above freezing instead of just below) that the snow was all made to go away.

And that seems like a good enough way to start the new year: without snow, without sub-0 C. temperatures, and without a crowd at the International Market, all hoped for harbingers of good times ahead.

The photos are in the ferry terminal parking lot on the Sunshine Coast (Langdale) and from the ferry toward the shore at Langdale. Way too much snow, even for the seagull.

And the Best Movies Are...

When we moved to Point Roberts these 15 years ago, there was a movie theater in Tsawwassen, just across the border. It had, as I recall, $4 tickets on Tuesday nights, and we saw many a movie there, even on $5 nights. But there weren’t all that many other people who were seeing those movies, and within a few years of our arrival, the theater went the way of small movie theaters and it was replaced by a shopping mall parking lot.

We are Los Angeles people by history and heritage, so we care about movies and about seeing them on the big screen. The next closest movie place turned out to be in Steveston, about a half-hour drive in the direction of the Vancouver airport. And we went there for a few years, but they definitely didn’t have a $4 night, and by the end of our attendance, it was more like an $11 or $12 night, even for seniors like us. But it wasn’t the price that dissuaded me. It was the environment. That theater has about 18 screens, and an entry hall that is like a concentrated Disney ride. In the actual film rooms, the screens were huge, the sound was enormous, the seating was steeply banked, and the whole experience was—instead of the loss of self in the movie world—more like an attack on the self by the movie world. The current vogue for endless quick cuts up close on a huge screen with loud sound seems like punishment, not entertainment. And to pay for punishment is just masochistic. So we gave up seeing movies in theaters.

Fortunately, Netflix arrived about the same time to rescue us and I have adjusted to a smaller screen, welcomed less volume, and reveled in the excellence of my couch as a proper place to sit while watching. It’s not the Orpheum in downtown L.A., I know, but it’s okay; I’m prepared to settle. On the other hand, new movies are not all that great, but Netflix has most of the old ones that I want to see (why not The African Queen???), and I don’t mind waiting a few months to see the rare new one that has me anticipating a fine movie experience.

It turns out that almost half of the movies I most liked last year were made several decades ago, and that I first saw them when they were new. I don’t know quite why it is that we often re-read favorite books, and we listen to CDs over and over, but re-watching a movie is a rare event. “Oh, I already saw that,” one hears, as if the previous viewing was so perfectly engraved in one’s memory that it could be called up with no need for the original source. Lots of movies are worth seeing lots of times. And in that spirit, here’s the list of the Ten Best Movies I Saw Last Year, all on DVD:

• Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Even on a small screen, gorgeous.
• The Ruling Class (1972). Peter O’Toole again, and a classic 60’s British film from the early 70’s. A much darker version of the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night.
• Oblomov (1979). I loved re-reading the book, and the movie is equally fine. Russian.
  
• Withnail and I (1987). Another fine (British) comedy; in some ways, it’s The Ruling Class but re-conceptualized with fifteen years more perspective. What were we thinking of???

And moving on to the more modern films, a couple even from 2008:

• My Kid Could Paint That. A documentary about the work and the marketing of a very young child artist. The film raises unanswerable but extremely interesting questions about how we understand art, creativity, and commerce.
• Manufactured Landscapes. Another documentary about art and about the nature of seeing. (Canadian)
  
• Taxi to the Dark Side. A documentary on how the U.S. got involved in torture. What have we been doing these past seven years? And how will we ever live with our knowledge of it?
• Persepolis. An animated/graphic film about a girl growing up in Iran under the Shah and also after the revolution. A coming-of-age film, of a sort.
• Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days. The most compelling film I’ve ever seen about abortion, with an ending that stays. Romanian.
• The Wire. It’s not a film, it’s a TV series, but it’s great and there are five seasons of it, and they are all great and funny and provocative and heart-breaking. It’s not even possible to say exactly what this series is about in the way that you could say what The Sopranos was about. It’s about drugs, and the police, and the projects, and the schools, and politics, and journalism, and kids and business and unions and modern urban life and people and their dilemmas, all infused with the kind of knowledgeable detail that we usually are encouraged to do without. At the heart of the mid-section of the series is a legal drug zone in Baltimore named ‘Hamsterdam’ (by the kids who do the selling) which is set up by a police commander who needs to establish some control over the drug problem. It’s beyond inspired. Just see it.

And a better New Year we sincerely hope for us all.

Living in Darkness

Life in a small town is opened up by the radio. When I was a kid, in Idaho, late at night I’d listen to radio stations from far away, even Los Angeles, and those programs really were like lights shining on me from the outer world. They were in some sense alive, unlike the static newspapers with their paper pictures and paper stories. It’s like that now, living in a small place, with the radio via the Internet.

The whole world is available to me; what I lack is the ability to understand foreign languages, so I am restricted to English language speakers, but there is plenty of that. This week there was a Christmas pantomime with John Cleese and Peter Cook from the BBC; Jonathan Schwartz and his 4-hour Saturday show of Broadway music (WNYC-FM, 9-1 PST); and reports from Gaza by people who are in Gaza as they report, not pontificating from Washington, D.C. There’s so much stuff available that I have to discipline myself not to keep my headphones on all the time, because if I allow that, I end up kind of dazed, wondering where I’ve been: certainly not in the Pacific Northwest. And also, with headphones, I'm not very good company.

Anyway, the other day, I was listening to some Brit discussing our general inability to understand the numbers that we are fed constantly in the news. That’s been a big issue with me for years with respect to health policy and health research information. People ought to know, e.g., what per capita healthcare spending is in the U.S. just to get a sense of proportion before they start talking about healthcare and its costs. But this guy was talking about numbers more broadly: everything, he said, gets talked about in bigger and bigger numbers and it isn’t that people don’t know enough but that they can’t do anything with those kinds of numbers. Better to get them into some kind of accessible form: otherwise, we’re just living in darkness.

Seemed like good advice, so I put together a few per capita numbers of expenditures that might cast some light. These are all yearly per capita figures (NOT household figures), based upon a U.S. population of 300 million, and total expenditures during 2007 or 2008.

• U.S. Government expenditures, 2007: $9,000 per capita.; 2009, est.: $10,000.
• Total health care spending in the U.S.: $7,000 per capita (Canada, by comparison, is $5,000).
• Health care spending by the U.S. Government: $3,500 per capita.
• U.S. Defense Department budget: $2,200 per capita.
• Social Security: $1,900 per capita.
• Interest on the National Debt: $1,400 per capita.
• Iraq War (average year): $570 per capita.
• Federal aid to education: $200 per capita.
• U.S. Congress: $33 per capita
• Earmarks: $14 per capita
• U.S. Gov’t Military Aid to Israel: $10 per capita.

The news this last year suggested that earmarks were one of the two or three most important problems in our political life. At least they are inexpensive.

The Brit who was being interviewed pointed out that if every American put $1/week in the pot for a year, the pot would hold $15 billion dollars at the end of a year. Thus, anything that cost $15 billion or less was essentially a trivial amount and not really worth worrying about as to cost in the face of much bigger expenditures. Earmarks or military aid to Israel, e.g., could still be an issue of concern, but because of their inherent nature not because of their costs, was his argument. We are transfixed by these small cost items because we can comprehend the amounts.

All this math made me think: If every permanent resident of Point Roberts put $1 each week in that pot, at the end of the year we’d have $78,000. That would go a long ways to funding the Food Bank and Dollars for Scholars and Paws and the Lutheran Church’s emergency generator for its emergency shelter status and some arts and sports projects for kids in the summer. A big gift to the community and a very small donation per capita.

And one other number not in the news today: Gaza is a territory of 25 square miles; it has a population of about 1.5 million people. If Point Roberts were five times bigger and had 1.5 million people instead of 1,500 people, what would life be like if bombs were aimed only at the bad people?

There's a very accessible graph of U.S. Government Agency expenditures here.

Read a Good Book Recently?

Living away from the excited states, I find that books are ever more important. That may not be true; I’ve always found books to be absolutely essential, regardless of where I lived. My father would come home and find me, as a teenager, on the couch on a summer Saturday, exactly where he had last seen me when he left for work that morning, and say, ‘Are you still reading?’ He kept on saying that to me, all his long life.

So, it’s probably not true that books are more important up here on the fringes of contemporary living, but it feels like it anyway. I read two or three books a week and mostly they are books provided for me by the Point Roberts Library, via its mother institution, the Whatcom County Library. Bless you all at this insufficiently honored civic institution. On Fridays, I order up the books I want via the internet, and on Wednesday at noon (the library is open only three days a week, and the delivery of books only on Wednesday), I see what they have sent me to read next.

This has been my pattern for years here, but there is now a big change, I guess as a result of the financial chaos we are experiencing. I used to put a book on my list and see that I was maybe number 2 or 3 on the list if it was a very recent and very popular book. Nowadays, when I put a book on my list, I am more likely to be number 13 or even number 48, as I was the other day. I guess a lot of book buying is discretionary. Of course, I’ve considered it that for years, so I can’t complain that others have figured it out as well. So next year, I may be working on reading older books for which there is less demand.

In honor of books, here, in no particular order, is my list of ‘Best Books I Read in 2008.’ Very few of them were published in 2008, but I don’t see why that should matter. A good book is worth knowing about any year.

1. Calamities of Exile, by Lawrence Weschler. This is a non-fiction work, in which Weschler introduces the reader to (as I recall) five people who have lived in exile and explores what it has meant to them. The thing about this book that is most important is that it is by Lawrence Weschler. Everything he writes is terrific, so I’d recommend not only this book, but anything else you run into by him. (I started to write, I also really liked ‘Vermeer in Bosnia,’ but then I thought about ‘Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders,’ and there was no going back. Just read anything by Weschler and you’ll be smarter than you were before you read it.)
2. Kristin Lavransdattar, by Sigrid Undset. I first read this novel when I was about 14, and I’ve read it probably four more times since then. Undset received the Nobel Prize for Literature in the 30’s, I think, and re-reading it this time is part of my off-and-on attempt to read at least one work by everyone who has ever gotten the Nobel Literature award. I don’t plan to re-read Faulkner, though.
3. Those Troublesome Young Men, by Lynn Olson. The ‘young men’ in question were those who supported Winston Churchill’s re-rise to power in the U.K. in 1939. It’s interesting to read about all the political finagling that got him to head the war effort and the country.
4. Oblomov, by Ivan Goncharov. Another re-read (but the first time) of an old novel. I first read it in grad school, and I liked it even more this time. About a man who can’t stay awake long enough to get engaged in life, and the friends who try to pull him into it. If you’ve occasionally imagined spending much of your life in bed, this is the book for you.
5. Lush Life, by Richard Price. Nobody writes contemporary urban crime stuff better than Price. I first ran into him with a novel called Clockers, later made into a less successful film. His ability to write dialogue is amazing; he also wrote some of the scripts for the later seasons of The Wire, and it showed.
6. The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Oscar Wao has some things in common with Oblomov, except he’s a guy who would sort of like to become engaged but is repeatedly pushed away. Diaz is a terrific, relatively new writer from the Carribean.
7. Hotel de Dream, by Edmund White. I’m not normally a big Edmund White fan, but I liked this a lot; perhaps because it is an imagined novel starring Stephen Crane, whose writing I do like a lot. Strange, exotic book.
8. Moth smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both by Mohsin Hamid. A new Pakistani/U.S. educated novelist, Hamid tells strange and compelling stories. I think what I particularly like about these is the way his familiarity with American sensibilities is interwoven with his understanding of Pakistani sensibilities. The novels appear in a midground, unlike a lot of English-language novels by immigrants, which are often very here or very there. This one's there, but you read it through here.
9. A Free Life, by Ha Jin. Another immigrant writer, all of whose work I like a lot. His novels are more typically very there, but this one is very here.
10. Common Carriers, by John McPhee. McPhee, like Weschler, a New Yorker writer, tells me just exactly all the things I wanted to know about the things I didn’t even know I wanted to know about. This book is about how things get places: ships, barges, trains, trucks, common carriers of all sorts.
11. Game Control, by Lionel Shriver. Shriver is perhaps an acquired taste, but I’ve acquired it. This novel is about academics and NGO do-gooders in Africa, and is smart and funny and painful, as I might equally describe any of her novels.
12. Angel of Grozny, by Asne Sierstad. Sierstad wrote The Bookseller of Kabul several years ago, about Afghanistan under the Taliban, a very revelatory book. In this next outing, she writes of her experiences as a journalist during the Chechen war. It’s grim reading, but it certainly gives one some insight into how much we don’t know about what’s going on around the world.
13. The Muses Are Heard, by Truman Capote. In 1961, I assigned this book as the text for my Comp classes at UCLA, and I thought it was time to see whether it held up. It does: Capote was a careful observer and terrific writer. You want to know how to describe something, read this book. This was also Capote’s first entry into journalism, accompanying a touring company of Porgy and Bess in its non-State Department sponsored performances in Russia at the height of the Cold War (the early 1950’s), when both the Russians and the American performers were highly concerned about what to say about the U.S.’s ‘Negro Problem.’

Twelve Days of Christmas

It’s been twelve days now since I’ve left the property, which is two acres (mostly woods, but with the house and one open field), and I haven’t even been much outside because it’s cold and because the snow is pretty deep and I don’t have much in the way of winter boots. In any case, it has been pretty much a white landscape which has an aesthetic appeal with respect to purity and cleanliness, of course, but lacks much in differentiation, at least it lacks much that I am used to looking at and differentiating about. I walked down to see the fishpond, but the fishpond was covered with ice and the ice was covered with snow, and that was that.

The snow remains abundant, even though the temperatures have risen (today, it is 2 degrees C./about 38 F.—I only do rough equivalents from C. to F. or F. to C., but before I came to Canada, I’d couldn’t do anything but 32 F.= 0 C.). The trees boughs have all given their snow up, but the ground is more accommodating. It is of course going to be very wet when this all melts, but unlike Whatcom County, the entire Sunshine Coast is on a fairly steep incline to the ocean, so the water goes away very quickly without flooding us. We live on a part of that steepness: steep road down off the highway and a driveway steeply down from the road. Christmas week is not proving to show much work ethic among the road clearers. They’ve got the highway tidied up, but we are on a road less traveled and, as Robert Frost warned, ‘that has made all the difference.’

Nevertheless, because we were really running out of all the things that we choose to consider necessities (milk, onions, garlic, apples, bananas, fresh vegetables of any kind), we got into the car to see whether it would succeed in the driveway and then succeed again in making a left turn onto the road in order to get us up the two blocks to the highway. The car is a 4-wheel drive Subaru Forester, but it doesn’t have snow tires and we don’t own chains, so it has to do what it can. It could, although it was having a little trouble in the driveway snow if Ed was urging it to take anything but the path of least resistance. Then it didn’t make the turn up the road to the highway. Instead, it wanted to take the turn down the road to the minor highway. The alternative was straight ahead into the big ditch. Down the hill: better choice.

Then, the next problem. This road has maybe 20 houses off it, but the steepest part of the road is at the bottom, and down at this part there are only us and one neighbor house. All the neighbors above us were going up the road, so not much traffic had made it as far down as our driveway. Thus, on the last downhill stretch, which we were on, the snow was still pretty well gathered where it had fallen. We made our way down that 600 yards an inch at a time, the car insisting all the way that there was actually plenty of stuff to slide around in. Then, at the bottom, there was the absolutely cleaned up minor highway. Having achieved that, I returned to breathing, and there we were, speeding to the world.

A few groceries, an audio splitter for the computer in order to use my new Bluetooth headphones in the most flexible way, and a 15-minute entertainment walk around the local Liquidation World, and I was more than ready to get back in the car and go home. Amazing number of people out there at the mall, with as many shopping bags in their hands as I imagine they had in all the days before Christmas. And lots of goods still to buy. Really, way too much to look at. No nice white cleanliness and purity.

Even in just twelve days in forced hibernation, I felt like I’d kind of lost contact with the world as it really is, the world of too much that I both long for when I don’t have access to it and am put off by when I do. I wonder if the bear, now in his hibernation, is dreaming about his ambivalent relationship to the world of human food scraps that he loves to mess with and the sight of the owners of those food scraps, the humans he could happily do without.

Birds in the Hand

We don’t much feed birds in the summer because (a) they can find their own food; and (b) since we come and go, we’d just as soon they not get used to our providing their food; and (c) the bear is perfectly crazy about bird food in the form of seeds, not birds. In the winter, it’s another matter, but only if a lot of snow or very low temperatures are involved. Then we feed them on an emergency basis, figuring they won't get entirely used to the idea that they aren’t going to have to do their own foraging the rest of the time.

This past ten days, now, it has been steady snow and very low temperatures, so it’s bird feeding time. Of course, because we don’t usually feed them, they don’t know to come to our house for food and we don't get very many of them. On the first morning of the snow storm, we put out sunflower seed under the carport, which was protected from snow, but saw nary a bird for at least 48 hours. Then a single song sparrow showed up, although it didn’t exactly look like one: much bigger because his feathers were so puffed up to prevent heat loss. He didn’t mind us watching him from behind the door or even talking to one another (normally, they move away even if they’re not eating the second they’re aware of us). I guess that’s a situation in which concentrating on food seems like a very good idea.

By the fourth day, a second song sparrow had joined in the eatery work and the next day a rufous-sided towhee (perhaps literally) blew in. They all looked so cold and so needy. It made me feel like I ought to at least open the door and invite them into the front hall to stay. But opening the door would indeed cause them to fly away.

Birds eat and eat and eat. And they kept it up. Yesterday, day nine, a second towhee arrived. And today, day 10, all four were here for continued Boxing Day eating. The snow was back, too. We all six of us (counting Ed) spent the day at home, sort of. Food being available here, but no Boxing Day shopping at all.
(The photo is the song sparrow, taken through the window and in very dim light.)

Quiet Night

The presents are opened, the turkey is cooked and eaten, the walnut rocca is made and half consumed, the snow is beginning its retreat--with an overnight icing interval--and the sky is black and star-studded. Another Christmas done gone, oh, lordy, another Christmas done gone.

And tomorrow brings us Canada's shopping mania day, Boxing Day, when all the stores put everything they still have left on sale. I've never gone out to see this phenomenon, but maybe tomorrow is the day to try it on! Good wishes to all for the rest of the year.