The insistent electronic beeping of my alarm clock jolts me from sleep.  Beep beep.  I see 4:30 in crimson digits.  Damn, it’s way too early.  I bang down the alarm button and soon the beep beep reawakens me.  What the hell.  I squint into the face of my lover, Larry, looking for some activity in his snoring stupor and then at the clock face.  Four-forty-five?  What’s going on?  I had set it for 9:00.  I fumble with the clock, adjust the alarm setting and fall back to sleep.  Beep beep.  I wake up and it’s now five o’clock in bright red.  What a bunch of crap I always seem to get from La Source, just like when it was Radio Shack.

I unplug the clock and then dismantle it.  Through the haze of my drowsiness, I realize it’s not the clock because…beep beep.  And the pitch of that beep makes it impossible to track the direction even though that sound that is somewhere in my house is traveling through the medium of my hallway to pierce my ear.

I can’t get back to sleep and I wish Larry was up with me for companionship, but that’s okay.  At least I won’t be late for my job interview at 11 am.

I get up, may as well get some work done, finish up those graphics that have been brewing on my computer.  As my expresso machine effervesces, I dress and beep beep.  I unplug the other three electric clocks and take out the emergency batteries in all four.  Coffee in hand, I ensconce myself before my computer, our modern deity, open up Photoshop and beep beep.  Where the hell is it coming from?  Sound travels out from a definite source shooting through space and that beep beep takes more energy than a mezzo-soprano.  In the kitchen I unplug the Danby microwave, the digital stove, the expresso machine, the dishwasher, the LG washing machine and Maytag dryer, I don’t have a set you see, the fridge and just in case, the electric kettle, the Cuisinart toaster and the can opener.

Back at the computer, ten minutes later, beep beep.  I turn off the hot water tank.  Moving down the hallway to the computer, beep beep.  This is unwarranted.  Aha, the smoke alarms.  Hauling out the step ladder, I take down the one in the hallway, another near the bedroom, a third in the shed and remove their batteries.

Beep beep.  I’m on the hunt.  I poise high on my ladder with my ear cocked.  Having an ear on each side of your head allows you to distinguish where the sound is coming from.  I cock both ears.  Sound coming from one direction will reach the ear furthest away approximately 1/500 of a second later than the closer ear.  And presumably, the brain can discern this time lag.  Beep beep.  Crouched on the top of the ladder looking for prey, I see my doorbell.  I remove the batteries and head down the ladder beep beep.

I disconnect my LCD Toshiba television, the Sony blue-ray, the Panasonic mini system, the Bose sound dock and for good measure my ’70′s ghetto blaster, Philips hair dryer, electric toothbrush and Miele vacuum.  I ponder disconnecting Larry who is inexplicably still sound asleep.  Beep beep.

My set of six cordless Viatek phones, supernumerary in a seven room flat.  Of course.  I unplug those telephone lines and electric cords and remove all the batteries from the handsets.

Beep beep.  This was beyond my brain’s capacity.  I could not tell where the sound was coming from.  Indications are that it is more difficult to tell direction with low frequencies.  Which was not the case of that infernal beep beeping.  But other factors need be taken into consideration.  Like sound reflects off objects.  The height of the sound is provided by a small amount of reflection off the back edge of the ear lobe.  I have teeny weeny ear lobes.  The elongated shape of the lobe causes the pitch to vary with the angle of the source of sound and the expert I found on Google says it takes years of experience to be able to judge how far away sounds are coming from.

Beep beep.  I close the electrical circuit breakers, pull all fuses and I hunch over in attack mode.

Beep beep.

I get my sledge hammer and crowbar, put on my construction gloves so I won’t blister, and I crack open the gyprock, demolishing the plaster and wood lathing, to yank out the electrical wiring.  Submerged in a cloud of fine white powder and despite the gloves, a small blister, I relax, slightly.

Beep beep.

I get my portable, battery-powered chainsaw, don my welding helmet and safety glasses and go into full attack.  It was coming close to interview time and I had to get going.

I raze through the walls and brickwork like the Amazon I would like to be.  As my home tumbles down, wood, stone and bricks landing in one glorious heap, I shut off the chainsaw and wait.  Other than the cacophonous settling of the debris, I hear nothing.  I have won.  I begin my victory dance.

I dust myself off  and pirouette in the direction of the metro for my interview. Beep beep.  I spot my cel phone vibrating under a piece of plaster and pick it up to see a text message had been sent at 4.30 am to notify me that my interview had been cancelled.  A muffled sleepy voice wafts towards me, honey, can you get the coffee going?

THE ISSUE:  This summer  Montreal Serai focuses on the environment through a variety of viewpoints. Jacqueline Fortson, who has moved to Canada from Mexico, gives us a contemporary photo-essay “Montreal – Nature and the City: What makes Montreal a liveable place?” The Quebec city socialist writer, Malcolm Reid, looks at the relation between the environment and social movements, describing the global biosphere as “the new proletariat.” Reid says nature is the oppressed voice which activists must learn to hear. The Montreal environmental leader, David Fletcher, in his striking  essay, “It’s about ecology, stupid!” draws a comprehensive, stark portrait of the current bio-diversity crisis. It is, he warns, a “global winking out of life,” a “waking nightmare” – unless we rouse ourselves. The transport critic of the Quebec’s Green Coalition, Avrom Shtern, writes about car-mad transport, and the urgent need for mass transit of a different kind, while Maria Worton looks through her center-city window and sees a world that is “Living in Traffic.” Rana Bose comments on the BP spill and Subir Das tells us about California politics. And there is much more writing, prose and poetry, in this issue, with more “pushes” to come later this summer.

Amid the varied views presented here though, there is a common theme: we need new vision to break what the poet William Blake called the “mind-forged manacles” of what was once his London and now our world. 

THE EDITORIAL: While Patrick Barnard has acted as general editor for this issue, the editorial board has decided to use four short comments from some of its members as an introduction.

Susan Dubrofsky

I grew up with Strontium-90, the threat of nuclear devastation, fall-out shelters and Coppertone. I was not allowed to suck the tasty marrow from chicken bones and for a few summers even milk was considered suspect. Fifty odd years later, we live with global warming, ozone depletion and traffic pollution, bees disappearing, increasing numbers of cancers, species extinction, deforestation, resource exhaustion, ad infinitum. When googling news about the latest oil spill, not only do I read about it being a massive disaster but how lawyers are making money on it, how politicians are waffling and scuffling and worse, that leaks and spills are more common than we realize. The Gulf of Mexico environmental catastrophe is the elephant in the living room as I recycle my plastics even though I know that only about seven percent is actually reused, as I buy organic food that still uses insecticides, as I bike in city traffic with high UV levels and carbon dioxide emissions, as I use deodorant without aluminum and as I eat genetically modified foods. My dilemma is that, bombarded by media information of videos depicting oil spills, of photos of ocean garbage patches and of daily predictions that climate change will cause massive disappearance of plant and animal species, I cannot comprehend how my recycling will help. But nuclear armageddon did not happen and the new generation is informed and active. And when I ask my friends, what do you think about our planet, one says, do you know that the water around Montreal is cleaner than it used to be twenty years ago, and another, what about the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement to protect our forests, and another, all those companies going carbon neutral, like the airlines, movie studios, the World Bank and you can too. And perhaps I can, in conjunction with the small and the big, contribute.

Maria Worton

Oil slick-sick, more of us than ever before must be asking, “How can we do this differently?”   We know we’re getting down to the wire.  Johann Hari, reporting in The Independent, asks how anyone will deal with accelerating climate change when, “The most powerful country on earth can’t stop a single leaking pipe.”   And what else can we do when the earth’s remaining oil is beneath the ocean floor, in the Arctic or in risky conflict zones.   Must we really go nuclear?  Sure, it’s non-fossil, more climate, plant, animal friendly.  Trouble is it’s killed a lot of people, and threatens everyone else.  

I was ready for good news when I recently happened upon this wonderful report, http://www.offshorevaluation.org/downloads/offshore_vaulation_full.pdf, an evaluation of how Britain can get 150% of its energy needs through off shore energy production using tidal and wind technologies and an international electricity grid system, creating 145,000 jobs in the bargain.  All of which would come at a fraction of the cost of committing to nuclear energy.  Every country on earth needs such a report that scientifically evaluates new energy technologies and their geographical application.

How does one get there?!  It seems that only public assembly, debate, demand, democracy by any other name, will deliver a movement with the critical mass to incline kleptocratic government to agree energy policy for the planet that does not sacrifice nature or its people. 

Patrick Barnard

I believe that human beings do indeed now face a dire threat to our own existence as a species because of our very own activity, and I think that we have probably reached the extinction threshold. Without radical change we will not survive. State socialism, as we have known it, has been a threat to the capitalist oligarchies that rule the world. However, “existing socialism” has failed dismally on the environment, in part because it is actually a form of state capitalism run by managerial redistributors who have the same misguided ideas about nature as their capitalist counterparts.

Out of necessity, human beings, I believe, will rise to the challenge of preserving life for ourselves and our fellow creatures. But the danger of eco-fascism, both of the statist and corporate form, is very great. Hence, the fight for nature and democracy must go hand in hand.

Maya Khankhoje

Children are taught that birds do not foul their own nest. The irony is that those very same adults who admonish their children to respect the environment are the first ones to foul it when the lure of  filthy lucre rears its ugly head. As a species we seem to have forgotten that money is indeed dirty, literally and figuratively, and that it won’t replace  what we have been so diligently destroying. The Cree Indians have a prophecy: “Only after the last tree has been cut down/ Only after the last fish has been caught/ Only after the last river has been poisoned/ Only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten.” This issue of Montreal Serai is a nudge towards this simple truth.

            Years later I understood that he was an immigrant from Poland and still groping with the English language, he had been sent back a grade.  I just thought he was silently cool.

            At recess and at lunchtime, I would look for him in the corridors, trembling when I spotted him.  He was not aware of me at all.  I had an intense and purely imaginative relationship with him during the school fall session.

            In the winter evenings of that year, I would walk up Van Horne avenue to Pratt Park to skate on the pond.  This rink had a small cabin, heated by a small stove, where we changed from boots to skates and skates to boots.

            On the ice, we skated in the same direction, singly, in pairs and in groups.  I was skating around one evening with the others and noticed Eric on the edge of the ice.  The first time I had seen him at the park.  At every round, I peeked at him, creating romantic scenarios.

            On one round, a boy I didn’t know skated close to me.  He grabbed my hand, forcing me to skate with him.  I didn’t like him.  I stopped in the center of the moving circle of skaters and as he stopped with me, I jerked my hand out of his and yelled at him, leave me alone.  Go away.  I yelled louder, go away.  I pushed at his chest.

            What’s the matter with you, he said.

            Just go away, I screamed, I don’t like you.  Go away.

           He stood there confident and assured.   I was furious.  How dare he presume?  He hadn’t asked.  He had just grabbed me.

            Eric arrived, five inches taller than the kid who was offending me.

            What’s going on, Eric said.  Eric loomed over him and raised his hand.  The boy disappeared into the moving circle of skaters.

            Eric took my hand.  Do you want to go around with me?

            I wrenched my hand from his.  How dare he? I thought.  How dare he think I can’t take care of myself?  Did Eric think I wasn’t capable all on my own?

            No, I said and skated off.

            Later, in the cabin, changing to go home, when I removed my skates, my feet ballooned to double their normal size.

            I limped down the hill to home only in my rubber galoshes unable to feel my feet or my toes.

In October 1975 Roy Lowther was charged with the murder of his wife, Pat, a gifted and renowned Canadian poet, when her two young daughters, Chris and Beth, were seven and nine. In this film, the two women revisit the circumstances surrounding the violent death of their mother and try to make sense of their father’s brutal act and its aftermath.

BATTLE OF WILLS tells a story of obsession and intrigue in the art world worthy of Shakespeare himself. It travels from the high-tech labs of North America, to the art galleries of Bond Street and the windswept castles if the English midlands to unravel the mystery behind a painting that shook the art world.

Interview:

 Q. How did you choose the subject for your film Water Marks?

A. I was in British Columbia, about ten years ago now, and I found a book called Furry Creek written by Keith Harrison, which was a fictionalized biography of a poet, Pat Lowther. It included her poetry, the story of her murder and references to her daughters. I was immediately attracted to the story for a very personal reason. My brother Alex had been a west coast lawyer and his very first law case was to represent Roy Lowther, Pat Lowther’s husband. Alex was a young lawyer starting out and she was a much beloved Vancouver poet.  The whole arts community was outraged at the murder. I remember my brother telling me about this case and how high-profile it was for a young lawyer. I knew the back story from my brother’s point of view but I hadn’t yet investigated the larger story, the story of Pat and her husband and her children. And of her poetry. I had studied English literature at Mcgill was going to be a English professor until I got side tracked into film. So a lot of things came together in the subject matter.  I wanted to do a film on the west coast, because it is a second home for me.  My brother had lived there, my parents. I grew up in Montreal but everyone else in my family had migrated west. Pat Lowther was a great poet of the West Coast landscape, much of her imagery conveys that rain forest feeling of the West Coast. I read her poems when I began that film.  There were a number of levels that interested me, there was the tragedy of two young girls, the West coast, poetry.  There was a lot of creative room for me to explore. Plus it was a strong feminist story, a story of the two daughters of Pat Lowther trying to reclaim their childhood which was robbed from them and to  reclaim their family history.

Q. How long was it after Pat Lowther was killed that you did the film?

A. She was killed in the mid-seventies and I did the film around 2001. It is a story that has continued to resonate in poetry circles in Canada. There is the Pat Lowther prize that is given to an emerging female poet every year.  She had been active in the League of Canadian Poets and a much beloved figure in those circles. I would not have considered doing the film without that. She was an important figure in the mythology of the West Coast literary circles. The seventies had been a particularly fertile period for writers. With the aftermath of the sixties, the West Coast was laid-back, bohemian and people drifted to that area. Visual artists as well.

Q. Where did Pat Lowther live?

A. She lived in the city of Vancouver. She and her husband owned a tiny rudimentary cabin on Mayne Island, which is in the film. After  Roy Lowther murdered her, he took their two children over to this cabin and hung out there until he was arrested. And that was another way in which the story overlapped with my own life. My brother had a rustic cabin just off Mayne Island. So it was a place I knew well.  There were all these resonances for me and it seemed that I was supposed to do it.  So I did.

Q. Was the murder more important than the other aspects, the children, the poetry and the family context.

A. I would not like to think it was more important. One cannot sum up the life of an artist by a catastrophe that happens to her in one instant.  That would be diminishing her, but I cannot deny that as a film maker I am always trying to find the drama and murder, of course, heightens the stakes. Particularly in documentary, you are trying to find some element that is going to give the drama of fiction.  So, yes, the murder ended up being an important dramatic element. I tried very hard not to fall into that “Allo Police” kind of mentality, which is all about blood and gore, so there are no scenes of the body or anything like that, instead I let Pat Lowther’s voice come through, by using her poetry, her voice is present on the screen, in a collage of images. I was giving a sense of who she was. The end of the film, doesn’t end up with her murder, it ends up with her daughters who put together her collective work, a beautiful book – a heartfelt attempt to reclaim a painful history and to move on from it.

Q. What I mainly remember from the film, which I saw quite a few years ago, is the lushness of the scenery and the colouring.

A. The entire film was tinted blue and I had never done that before. I worked with a genius cinematographer, Marc Gadoury. I wanted to film some scenes underwater – we have scenes of jellyfish floating, and a scene where the camera is underwater and Chris Lowther is swimming above.  Both the daughters are writers too, not as well known as Pat, but Chris has published a collection of poetry.  All these women’s voices come through.  When I told my cinematographer that I wanted the film to have this watery feel to it, images of water, the wetness, the fog of the west coast, he suggested that we tint it blue. I was terrified, I thought it would look hokey.

Q. The second main memory, other than the fluidity and lushness, was the daughters, their emotional sense that came across.

A. They are fascinating.  They have a complicated relationship. In the aftermath of that kind of tragedy, where both parents are missing, the mother dead, father in prison (where he died), it is not surprising. The younger resented the older because she was the surrogate boss. But they are of course very close even though the relationship is complicated. They are opposites. The older one, Beth, was urban, edgy, lived in the east side of Vancouver, part of the bohemian milieu. The other had escaped to a wilderness part of the west coast, in Tofino. She and her boyfriend had an apartment in Tofino but even that was too urban for her and they lived on a houseboat most of the time in a bay off Clayoquot Sound which is all rain forest and many uninhabited islands and bays. If you don’t have a lot of money, you can spend ten thousand dollars on a houseboat, take it out, moor it in a bay and you have a mile of waterfront. That’s what Chris Lowther and her boyfriend had done. Living in this paradise, growing organic vegetables on the deck of her houseboat. That was interesting to me, the differences between the sisters.

Q. What did you most like about this film?

A. I always like stretching the creative chops. As a documentary film maker, you are essentially a story teller trying to create a narrative using music, imagery, poetry, character.  How to be true to your subject and how to create a story that will engage and this one was rich with those elements.

Q. Eight years later, is there anything you would do differently?

A. Yes. I have never done a film where I have felt one hundred percent satisfied. I will never be the type of film maker who says “that was just right”. I learned one thing in that film. The subject was charged because the daughters had so many emotions about what had happened and because my brother had represented their father. I was walking on eggshells during the time I was making the film. Because of this somewhat tense situation, I pre-interviewed them a lot before we ever shot. Their best interviews, their best responses, were before the cameras were on. When I repeated the questions on camera, they didn’t have the same freshness, spontaneity. I could have done better interviews if I hadn’t been nervous and over prepared. That is tricky about documentary. It is so much about creating trust and comfort with the person you are interviewing. If they are trying to respond to the question, they are having to think harder because it is a new question, they can get distracted from the camera. I should have trusted my instincts as a film maker and not over prepared. I don’t do that anymore.

Q. Do you like Pat’s poetry?

A. Yes. Some of it’s quite challenging. She writes a combination of poetry that is an homage to the west coast. She writes political poetry, about Chile, and poetry about women’s lives;  she worked for the NDP, and her husband, Roy, was a quasi-communist, they were always left-leaning and that comes through in her poetry.

Q. Is there a poem of Pat Lowther’s that would represent her?

A. Yes.

 ANEMONES

Under the wharf at Saturna

the sea anemones

open their velvet bodies

chalk black

            and apricot

                        and lemon-white

they grow as huge

and glimmering

                        as flesh chandeliers

under the warped

and salt-stained wharf

  letting down

      their translucent mouths

                                                of arms

even the black ones

have an aura

like an afterimage of light

Under our feet

   the gorgeous animals

        are feeding

                                    in the sky

© Pat Lowther

Q. Were you changed in the making of the film?

A. I am changed by every film I make. It was not an easy film to make as the daughters were quite prickly. I cannot fault them considering the circumstances.  But I felt that I had to keep them happy. Documentary film making can be intrusive since you are asking personal questions. 

Q. What was their reaction to Water Marks?

A. I think they were happy. Initially they didn’t quite know what to make of it because it was so personal to them, but they received a huge amount of feedback. It went to different festivals, to screenings and it brought attention to their mother’s work, their mother’s life and to her book which they had just brought out, which was a labour of love.  We are still in touch, it goes on. Allan Safarik, a Canadian poet who was in the film because he was Pat Lowther’s best friend wrote his memoirs and sent a chapter about Water Marks to me. he said that participating in the film, was a huge catharsis because he had kept so much emotion bottled up about Pat and the children and he had felt guilt, and seeing them again and giving them some of her work was incredibly important.

Q. Your latest film Battle of Wills is about Shakespeare. Both films have something to do with writing and literature.

A. In the film I just did, I used Shakespeare’s poetry and “his voice comes through” in the sound track. Like Water Marks, it is about a writer and also about landscape, this time about England. Battle of Wills tells the story of two portraits that are duking it out, both claiming to be the only image of Shakespeare painted from life. It is a deconstruction of two portraits, from the point of view of the outsider, the long shot; the Sanders portrait is owned by Lloyd Sullivan an elderly man in Ottawa whose family has owned this portrait for four hundred years, passing it from generation to generation. It’s an engaging face, an authentic 17th century Elizabethan portrait. Sullivan has spent almost all his lifetime savings vetting this portrait and it is 100 percent Elizabethan painted on oak. But is it Shakespeare? The contending portrait is owned by the National Portrait Gallery in London, a huge, august institution and it is the founding portrait in their collection and they have a huge stake in it being Shakespeare. The film is about the politics of the art world, the dishonesty of the authenticity debates, the hidden agendas in the world of Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is an industry. The film is about the mysteries around him, because we know his works so well and absolutely nothing about his life. He is a big cypher and there are theories upon theories about him. This film plays into those theories. And I have some sexy people in it, like Joseph Fiennes and Simon Callow. It was filmed at Yale University in Ottawa, Toronto, London, Stratford-upon-Avon, the British Midlands and Montreal.

Q. What was your push to do this film?

A. It was a series of articles from the Globe and Mail dating back to 2002, about a new portrait of Shakespeare that had been discovered. It was a big story and then a book by Stephanie Nolen came out. I always thought there has to be a good story here. There were three or four film companies that were competing to tell the story and I lucked out. I love Shakespeare. Water Marks is a serious film, Battle of Wills is tongue-in-cheek. It was my chance to make fun of English pomposity and the art dealers from Bond street with their noses stuck right up in the air – a romp with serious questions.

Q. Is there anything else you want to add about film making.

A. Making documentaries is the most wonderful thing imaginable, except I only get to do it five percent of my time, the rest of the time I am looking for money to do it. It is not for everybody. Young film makers starting out think they will be going into the film industry and spend all their time making films, it is just not the case.

 The Last Room

I am waiting for you

In the lowest room beneath the building

I am smooth as a gourd

without resistance

my shape spreads

            downwards

                        seeking the lowest

centre of gravity

I spend hours memorizing

the labyrinth

            beneath our skins

                        by which I came

waiting for your long shadow

in the passage

I am green as a gourd

but inside I am red

All through the folded hours

I am burning

            quietly

I am becoming a red hollow

skin

            a gourd for drinking

Only now do I recognize

shards patterning the dust

between my legs

they are my former skins

How many times

have I come here

How long have I been waiting

© Pat Lowther

KITCHEN MURDER

Everything here’s a weapon

i pick up a meat fork,

imagine plunging it in,

a heavy male

thrust

in two hands

i heft a stone-

ware plate, heavy

enough?

rummage the cupboards:

red pepper, rape-

seed oil, Drano

I’ll wire myself

into a circuit:

the automatic perc, the dishwater, the

socket above the sink

i’ll smile an electric

eel smile:

whoever touches

me is dead.

© Pat Lowther

For further information on Battle of Wills by Anne Henderson: http://www.informactionfilms.com/en/productions/battle_of_wills/index.html

For further information on Pat Lowther:

www.poets.ca/linktext/awards/lowther.htm

Anne Henderson has been writing and directing documentaries for 25 years, with many international titles to her credit. Her documentaries encompass a wide variety of subjects concerning culture, human rights, history, and the environment. She likes to tell stories about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. She makes her home in the midst of Montreal’s vibrant arts community.