When I first encountered Guilermo Verdecchia’s name I took the approach of a typical Saxon and avoided saying it out loud. So as I watched the film Crucero/Crossroads (Mongrel Media) I sympathized with Verdecchia’s grade one teacher, a wholesome young woman named Miss Wiseman, who, as the camera zooms in on her mouth, struggles to pronounce those intimidating syllables.
The best $4.50 that you can spend this year will be on a copy of David Colliers’s Surviving Saskatoon, a comic book account of the wrongful persecution and conviction of David Milgaard in Saskatoon in 1971 (when Milgaard was declared innocent in 1999 he was Canada’s longest serving prisoner). Collier lived in Saskatoon at the time of murder that Milgaard went to jail for, and this is a story of Saskatoon and the inertial forces of civic culture as much as it is the story of David Milgaard (Collier’s subtitle is “Milgaard and Me”).
I went to see Hotel Porter, a musical revue showcasing the songs of Cole Porter, with my father, who could actually afford the tickets. The characters’ lives played like a Hollywood movie—all passion and crisis—and the renditions of “You’re the Top,” “Anything Goes” and “C’est Magnifique” got my toes tapping and my heart racing.
Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Pandora) is a fast-paced and hilarious coming-of-age story about Jess, who is the adopted daughter of a religious fanatic mother and a totally silent father. Jess grows up helping her mother fight the devil, but when her blossoming sexuality focusses on women, she is ostracized by both the church and her parents.
The first time I tried to watch Louis the 19th: King of the Air Waves, my television caught on fire. The second time I tried to watch Louis the 19th (on a new TV) it was without subtitles.
The Labradorians: Voices from the Land of Cain (Breakwater) is another big compilation (500 pages), this one made by Lynne Fitzhugh from the pages of Them Days, a quarterly journal of oral history that has been published in Happy Valley, near Goose Bay in Labrador, since 1975. Most of the stories in this book are told by people of many cultures born between 1880 and 1930, and the range of personal history given is enormous.
Sometime in the future, historians will look back amazed at how little attention North American media paid to African issues in this time in history. In Scott Peterson’s memoir Me Against my Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda (Routledge), he describes the wars, famines and destruction—all of which he witnessed—with careful and terrible thoroughness.
Louis the 19th: King of the Air Waves (Malofilm) is a Quebec film that’s all about TV-land. When Louis wins a contest that puts him on TV twenty-four hours a day, both he and his mother are over the moon.
Canadians have not yet produced enough mysteries to define “the Canadian mystery,” but Brad Smith’s book One-Eyed Jacks (Doubleday) is a welcome addition to this evolving genre. Set in the Toronto of a much earlier era, the story clips along at a fine pace.
