Blog 4 October 16th by Noah Richler
A full moon on 9th Avenue lights the way to the Vertigo theatre and its WordFest marquee, Wednesday night.
In the lobby of the Palliser, the venerable CP hotel where the WordFest is based, there was Neve Fischmann, the film producer, on his cell phone pacing the lobby—and still there after returning from the Avenue Diner on the Stephen Avenue Mall, one of my favorite Calgary haunts as it offers possibly the best breakfasts in the west. Even by oil country standards, Calgary being the city where Blackberry pouches have replaced gun holsters on upstanding citizens’ belts (where, I wonder, do the women put them—will garter belts, adjusted for this new communications age, make a comeback?), Fischman’s call was a long one. An hour, maybe?
And there since the early morning: bystanders watch the file of authors at WordFest hoping for rush tickets.
Of course he could have been pretending, posturing for a little importance as Nigerians used to do when I was in that country years ago, every businessman-wannabe toting a cell phone (and they were big in those days) even though the country had no networks yet. Amusingly, Fischmann, along with actor Paul Gross, who is to the Canadian film industry biz as Patrick Lane boasts of being to the world of Canadian novels—undoubtedly talented, if unusually old for the part—was in town for Passchendaele, the First World War movie that only afterwards became a book. And that’s amusing because the truth of the matter is that yesterday, Wednesday October 15th, the most interesting movie showing, by a long shot, was the quite astonishing showcase, “Moving Stories,” of about fifteen short films inspired by novels and short stories.
Take, for instance, Calgarian Corey Lee’s short film, “Perfection of the Moment,” based on the short story from John Gould’s 2003 Giller-nominated collection of short stories, Kilter: 55 Fictions.
Chapters and Indigo are making a fortune these days, and someone should nudge book queen Heather Reisman and have her badger hubby Gerry Schwartz into putting book movie shorts like this into his Cineplex chain of cinemas as a nod to the money book sales have brought Canada’s wealthy couple. They’d stand their own, certainly, and prove just what an amazing array of talent the country produces in all spheres.
Or Newfoundlander Justin Simm’s film, Night Work, based on the poem from Randall Maggs’s collection of poetry, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems. What is it about Newfoundland, that whether the book or the film or the poem or the painting is lyrical or wistful or painful and brutal (Kenneth J. Harvey’s coming to town), you so emphatically know exactly where you are? I was wary of this event because I dread literal transformations of literature into radio, or television, where the narrated writer’s mention of, say, a baby washed up on to shore or a ginger-haired kid shooting a fawn is visually represented by, say, a baby washed up on to shore or a kid shooting a fawn. But even the short films that approached this sort of film-making, didn’t. Pavane, Paul Quarrington’s kernel encapsulation of the injury at the heart of his novel The Ravine, was great too. Well performed and punctuated by graphic illustration (i.e. drawn—in that other sense, the film and the novel deliberately avoid being “graphic”) of traumatic childhood memory.
Amazing night. Congratulations, WordFest and Judith Keenan, the producer of BookShorts who organized the program.
It’s not always easy, this WordFest thing. Plenty of events, often competing (a way of getting you back in future years), and a logical street plan of numbered streets and avenues that tends to confuse out-of-towners like myself who rely on their highly developed urban jungle sense to get themselves around plainer grids like Montreal’s, or Toronto’s, where streets have names and bend and criss-cross and climb up hills and down them, dammit. “Calgary has an illogical grid but it’s really well organized,” my driver said to me. You think so? That go two blocks east on 9th Avenue down under the bridge and to Second Street really got the better of me. I had no idea where I was, and so I did not find the Alliance Française and missed Kinne Starr’s performance, which I’d really wanted to see.
But odd things happen when you hand yourself over to circumstance without getting spooked, and so last night I stumbled upon one of the most mind-boggling Canadian multicultural experiences that I have possibly come across, leaving even this practiced defender of this great national idea wide-eyed and fascinated. You can’t make this country up, I tell you—though it might have been an early Lee Henderson scene I was looking at. (Have to take him there, come to think of it, he arrives today.)
Under the bridge behind the Palliser, at the corner of 10th Avenue and 1st Street, is Brava Sheesha. The corner restaurant looks like it might have started life as a soda bar and coffee shop, then been a bistro maybe. Now it’s a falafel joint, but with a difference, the light red and at the top of one wall, the flat screen TV that had drawn me in. I stepped into a room that was lit red as a bordello, and as if the habit was Western and learned early on, all the patrons were sitting at the tables along the walls and me, the newcomer, well I had to sit in the centre. But they weren’t cowboys, this lot. They were teenagers, some of them still carrying those big ridiculous paddles for feet. They were white and Filipino and Somalian and Nepali and Chinese, and not just boys but tables of young women, too. And what were they doing? Smoking hookahs and watching the hockey game. Montreal against Boston, and with a minute and a half to go Carey Price gives up one of the stupidest goals I have ever seen, having chased a puck behind the net that took a bounce off an uneven seam in the boards right to the front of the net and the Boston player there, and the score is 3-3 and there’s a tremendous trilly whoop of screams of disappointment from the table of Filipino girls, thought the white and the Chinese lads in front of me are too busy drawing smoke off the apple wood and filling their glasses with it.
“What kind of a restaurant is this?” I ask the Chinese waitress and her Arab-looking colleague at the cash.
“Middle Eastern,” she says.
“And what part of the Middle East are you from?” I ask the Arab other.
“I’m not,” she says, “I’m Albanian,” thrilled that I know something about the place because I’d actually been there.
Tanguay scores on the shootout. Now the Somalis are joining in the cheers.
So, let me recap: a Middle Eastern Shwarma joint in oil-rich Calgary, where the girl working the floor is Albanian and Somali and Chinese and Filipino kids with their baseball caps turned sideways are sharing the snaking mouthpieces of smoking hookahs with white kids rooting (to their inestimable credit) for les glorieux.
Which brings me back to Kinnie Starr, who’d performed before her afternoon session’s crowd the day before a piece that she said she’d written the previous night in her hotel room. So you’ll excuse me if, before missing her show at the Alliance Française, I’d taken the liberty of giving her a call and visiting Kinnie in her hotel-room cum studio where she read her new piece for me as she was in her routine of warming up. Her Canada is your Canada is mine—a place where you ask yourself where else but in this brilliant here could you possibly be.
