taking a bite out of malaria

today is the 4th annual World Malaria Day. for the first time in 50 years, we might actually be able to defeat malaria--which killed 781 000 people in 2009. take a second to digest that number. it's a crazy number, especially when a simple mosquito net can vastly cut the infection rate.

what's inspiring about this? we're actually making progress--a rare & wonderful reason to celebrate this day.

zeppelin over Paris

now i know i wasn't hallucinating when i saw a huge football-shaped airship hovering over Gare du Nord. there really was a 75-metre long zeppelin floating around Paris last week.

normally, massive zeppelins do not crisscross the sky above the Paris train stations--though they have been seen, historically (the Prussians used one to bomb the city in 1916 & killed 17 people).

last week, there were sightings all across Paris as the airship cruised around measuring the radiation in our skies. this wasn't because of the tragedy in Japan, but simply a routine annual operation, to keep tabs on normal air quality and radioactivity in the French capital--or at least that's the government line, and they're sticking to it. the zeppelin hovered at around 100 metres up--roughly the 2nd floor of the Eiffel Tower, so really not very high. other cities have apartments with balconies higher than this zeppelin.

the zeppelin over Paris was very plain & utilitarian-looking. [take a look, here] but since spotting it, i've been thinking of Thomas Pynchon's novel, Against the Day. i really admire Pynchon--I especially loved Mason & Dixon, and i wanted to love this hodgepodge airship crew, but by the end i just felt annoyed, as if five different novels had jumped into my head at once, with all the characters running around waving their arms in the air yelling 'look at me! look at me!'

and yet it starts so promisingly... (excerpts from the first pages of the 1120-page novel):

“Hurrah! Up we go!”

It was amid such lively exclamation that the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience, its gondola draped with patriotic bunting, carrying a five-lad crew belonging to that celebrated aeronautics club known as the Chums of Chance, ascended briskly into the morning, and soon caught the southerly wind. […]

At one end of the gondola, largely oblivious to the coming and going on deck, with his tail thumping expressively now and then against the planking, and his nose among the pages of a volume by Mr. Henry James, lay a dog of no particular breed, to all appearances absorbed by the text before him.”

[intrigued by Against the Day? visit its wiki. And don't say I didn't warn you.]

the riotous Theatre des Champs-Elysees

went out last night into rainy Paris to see Robert Lepage's Eonnagata...the show was very flawed, but it was a wonderful excuse to visit the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, built by one of my favourite French architects, the often-radical August Perret.

in 1913, his newly-opened theatre was the site of one of the more interesting riots in Parisian history...because this is where Stravinsky's Rites of Spring was first performed.

Stravinsky's music was booed, and Nijinsky's choreography infuriated the crowd--one elderly Duchess apparently thought the whole thing was some kind of hoax. (here's a great description) But the producer, Diaghilev, was serene... Stravinsky later wrote:

"After the 'performance' we were excited, angry, disgusted, and . . . happy. I went with Diaghilev and Nijinsky to a restaurant... Diaghilev's only comment was 'Exactly what I wanted.' He certainly looked contented. No one could have been quicker to understand the publicity value, and he immediately understood the good thing that had happened in that respect. Quite probably he had already thought about the possibility of such a scandal when I first played him the score, months before, in the east corner ground room of the Grand Hotel in Venice.”

for a great recreation of this moment, there's the film 'Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky' --check out the first 27 seconds of this promo video, below (and then go see the movie! it's gorgeous.)


last night, it was a thrill to look down from my seat in the gods, to see the old fauteuils--because this theatre has small armchairs on its main floor, not fixed theatre seats. And whenever my interest in Lepage's performance waned, i thought about Josephine Baker, who made her premiere here with the Revue Negre in 1925. Baker took Paris by storm, from this very stage. showered with jewelry & marriage proposals after every performance. she wryly said, "Beautiful? It's all a question of luck. I was born with good legs. As for the rest...beautiful, no. Amusing, yes."
interesting quote--because watching the few remaining early clips of her Revue dances, what's really surprising is her great comedic timing. she's a real live wire on stage--making crazy faces, laughing at herself, goofing around--and yes, dancing & singing. no wonder Paris was amazed.

so, yes, Eonnagata was disappointing (Lepage was interesting on stage, as were the two dancers, but the overall concept just didn't work. everyone seemed under-utilized, the movements were predictable, and even the late Alexander McQueen's costumes were dull), BUT i still had a great evening thinking about performance & art. maybe part of the point of performance is to risk failure--or at least, to risk being ridiculous, at least some of the time.

Maize

and so i finally found myself near the amazing, the absurd, the astonishing GREAT VERMONT CORN MAZE, which is exactly what it sounds like: a lot of very tall corn, arranged in an intricate pattern.

i first read about this place five years ago, while living in Paris. seemed like a perfect example of old-fashioned American weirdness, and i immediately added it to my "must-see" list. there are in fact all kinds of corn mazes in the U.S.--who knew--but this one caught my imagination. last week, we managed to get there on a perfect day...after stopping to ask for directions at this wonderful gas station. (note their nice Canadian flag)

now, you would imagine that finding a giant corn maze with 2 miles of labyrinthian passages would be fairly easy. mais non. in fact, we drove in circles for about an hour, up small dirt roads, down small gravel roads, through lovely Vermont farm mud & around forests, looking for the maze.

but eventually we found it, paid the very reasonable admission, and spent 90 wonderful minutes walking around in the corn fields. for you non-farm types (uh, like me), corn at this time of year is well over 8 feet, up to 12 feet in places, rustles dry in the wind, and it's really difficult to see over. if you stand on a ladder in the middle of the maze, you can't make out the pattern or even figure out which way to go. it's only in the aerial photo that you get a proper vision of the maze (and they don't post this year's photo until after the maze has been turned into silage for the cows at the end of October.)

this particular maze is the inspired creation of one obsessed guy who married into a farming family, and decided he needed to save the family farm. so now he spends his summers standing on a small bridge, giving people advice on how to get out of the corn. it's a strange job, but he seems truly delighted by it. and he got me thinking about the nature of creative inspiration...whether it's writing a story or planting a field of corn...planning, plotting, imagining how it will intrigue & delight people...

ideal cities

"On trash night in ideal cities your other neighbors
swap stories in the alleys. Ideal cities

have margins that aren't pretty or bleak
and are without proper representation

but have no grievances. My ideal city
has a wish list written on the back

of an envelope scrap, an ATM slip.
My ideal city is peripheral and claims

uneven sidewalks."

- Erika Meitner

for the complete poem, go here to Poetry Daily

Pteros Tactics

Pteros Tactics is opening at Harbourfront, just in time to help us recover from Valentine's Day. the unusually-named work is a newly-created dance piece from the marvellous Toronto Dance Theatre choreographer Christopher House. it's inspired by an essay by Anne Carson (one of my favourite poets).

A few lines from her essay leap out to me, looking at them now: "mere space has power," Carson writes in Eros the Bittersweet. "The separating power of space can be marked with various activities; by racing through it, for example..." The lines seem purposely written for dance. "Eros... exists because certain boundaries do."

i had a lovely conversation with House about inspiration and the rehearsal process last week. and the resulting article is now up at Toronto's cultural site, Live With Culture, here.

get out there

so much more inspiring than "keep calm..." this is by moleiteau.
i found it at 43 Folders (really good ideas from Merlin Mann)
and you can download the image from flickr.