Letter to Mike

Katharine AsalsLeave a comment

Oh Mike, they made a movie about you!

Well, about you and Newfoundland of course, but you know, just the way you would have had it, would have insisted that it be.

How lovely it was to be with your voice again for an hour or so.

I can still see clearly the day I met you in that office at NFB Headquarters in Montreal – you were in town doing the sound mix for Secret Nation, and I was more or less living there, working on the Chomsky film. You already had the grey grizzled beard at that point, and you made a comment about my footwear – well, I mean you were such a flirt, you would always find an angle. Who knew then what a long-lasting friendship it would turn out to be.

I can’t quite recall the details of the next big scene a few years later – as I remember it, I was riding the bus down St. Urbain, you were walking up, right near the corner of Sherbrooke where it slopes down abruptly, and did we shout out our email addresses to each other? Was the bus moving slowly enough that we were able to launch the essentials? And then… how many hundreds and hundreds of pages did we write to each other over the years.

But anyway, this movie they’ve made – they had so much footage of the hilarity of the world you inhabited back in the day – the riotous deliberately silly outrageous ways of your crowd, that nascent St. John’s cultural scene… what a treat to see the world you came from in its youth in the 70s when you were all wildly creative long-hairs.

They spent a fair bit of time with Faustus Bidgood, then with Secret Nation, and then the later “eccentric” years. I saw a bit of those years. The tumultuous friendships. The state of the house.

Visiting you in St. John’s it was rather startling to realize you had an entire house to yourself and yet you basically just lived in the kitchen – the rest was a kind of storage and or renovation zone that never actually got renovated. A state of affairs I hadn’t really understood from our email exchanges. From emails I’d gathered you had a passionate writers group, you were growing wheatgrass, you would date here and there, and you would go for long kayaking trips and describe them in exquisite detail.

The movie had only one photograph of you in a kayak, which was a bit disappointing, but I came home and dug out the photos of you and Benj from that summer we went to visit you in Halifax while you were house sitting at Cathy’s. Kayaking through those little bays, each of us with our own kayak, and the minke whale coming up in the water between me and Benj… Benj staying cool as a cucumber… it’s gotta be one of my fave stories of all time. You gave us that.

The friends who told me about the screening are old friends of Andy’s, and of course Andy pretty much narrates the film, he’s the main storyteller of those early days of CODCO, those early days of what they called the “Newfoundland Renaissance”.

Walking out of the theatre, I was trying to remember a funny moment to tell my friends – was it the Montreal film co-op, that in its fundraising efforts one year, was auctioning off a one hour conversation in a St. John’s pub with the one and only Mike Jones? I feel like Pete Wintonick set that one up – as a stunt, it has his sense of the great in the apparently ordinary.

I did have to wipe away tears by the end of the movie. I was pretty shocked when you died – happened to see a notice on Facebook. I always thought you cut me off cause that’s what you did with quite a few people, and I figured it was just my turn. But in the movie it sounded like maybe there were health problems you probably didn’t want to talk about, family you wanted to focus on. I get that.

My buddy Mike Jones died in 2018.

For many years we were quite dedicated penpals and managed to hang out in person sometimes too.

I’ve often felt like this blog is a kind of latter day Letter to Mike. I don’t know if any of those thousands of words we wrote to each other is anything anyone would ever want to read, but… I sure as heck learned a lot about “voice”.

Wabi Sabi

Katharine Asals9 Comments

Last week I noticed a spider had started setting up a web in the feathers that are hanging around on my windowsill. The feathers are there, I suspect, to remind me of Air and Wind, the elemental project for the year, but I wasn’t loving the spider web in the feathers so much, and after hesitating for a moment, as I do rather love spiders – catchers of other bugs and genius engineers – I decided to remove just the web and let the spider figure things out.

Meanwhile, in our ongoing mystery class, Teach told us to find a stone to hold for several exercises. I reached for the closest one in view, which happened to be a piece of obsidian, a remnant from when I was doing a lot of Sergio Magaña workshops and exercises, a very ancient Mexico scene, and I thought for a minute, Wait, why did I stop those…? And then remembered, Oh yeah, I started the British-based multi-year, elements around the wheel thing, and I didn’t want to split focus between traditions.

But obsidian is pretty strange stuff – beginning as molten rock erupting as lava, it cools so quickly it has “no crystal structure” and becomes a volcanic glass that polishes up nicely to a mirror…

Which I think was part of the appeal for the ancient MesoAmerican types, that shadowy reflection… But I wasn’t sure it felt a satisfying as a stone, like as a hunk of rock.

So I tried picking up the carving of the eagle that sits there on the windowsill, and he is made from limestone. Now this particular piece of limestone felt like a completely different sensory world, so much softer, more porous…

Limestone it seems is fundamentally born of water rather than fire. Apparently it formed primarily in shallow, warm waters, and often has bits of shell and coral fragments and marine organisms that slowly became sediments, which then slowly became rock.

Totally different vibes in the hand.

I was thinking about that elemental piece as I was out for my walk, and the day was windy, the kind you have to really lean into, and the wind pushed the water around, changing the colour, creating little waves agains the pier.

And I felt the pleasure of the wind, how it toys with the water, and it was powerful enough that I took refuge around the corner in the new garden they’ve put in, and of course it’s November so the big blooms are gone, but there are some hardy types who look like they might take their time withering into the winter.

My new favourite spot, that end of the pier.

Back in my studio I notice the spider seems to be setting up a little further down the windowsill. It doesn’t look full on web yet, but it does look like little tendril fragments that could be the beginning of a web. It is sort of the “death corner” of the sill, with the coyote skull and old leaves and a tiny bit of a what once was a wasp nest, so it seems like the right spot for him to do his thing.

Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

It is a beauty of things modest and humble.

It is a beauty of things unconventional.

~ Leonard Koren

Lens-Artists Challenge – Wabi Sabi

Remembering Ronda

Katharine Asals13 Comments

When I was a kid we lived in Ronda, a small town in Southern Spain, for a year.

As small towns go, it’s pretty famous, perhaps not least for English speakers by being immortalized in The Story of Ferdinand, by Munro Leaf, and illustrated by Robert Lawson –

I’ve been tinkering around with this year we lived in Ronda, wondering if I might write something about this period, as it has a kind of “time out of time” feeling in my memory – a year when I was still sort of half American, half Canadian, but might conceivably become a whole new thing, a Spanish girl who went to the nuns school around the corner and wore their goofy gingham uniform and had a little kitten called Eduardo.

As projects go, it’s also kind of easy to research, and even on Google Maps it has barely changed –

Here’s the entrance to our apartment up on the second floor, looking pretty much exactly the same, although it looks like they keep the heavy wooden doors open rather than closed, and somebody got rid of the boulder in the lower right from my picture – sensible. I have a faint recollection that the boulder served a function back in the day, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

My bedroom when I was 10 was up there on the right with the red trim, above the main doorway the master bedroom had that little balcony, and then the left side was part of the living room dining room area. I wonder if the inside has changed at all.

Anyway, maybe a block or two away were our neighbours Hilly and Alastair who were a ton of fun, and we spent plenty of time over there – they were Brits, amongst the many ex-pats hanging out in Spain at the time, and I suppose they were the perfect drinking buddies for Dad, and it was a great place for me too, as there were kids around and Hilly was a blast, always cooking up a storm or taking me horseback riding, and they had lodgers like Dan who had a room with a ping pong table in it that was so tight it was kind of up against the walls, and you had to suck in your stomach to be able to play, but it was nonetheless about the coolest place in town.

Now I do remember that it was the “palacio” – that series of squirrely rooms where Hilly and Alastair and Dan and the ping pong table lived, and it seems perhaps Hilly and Alastair may have run something called Casa Mondragón – a kind of hodge podge ex-pat rooming house maybe owned by Alastair that had yet to be reclaimed by the town and turned into what it is now, which is the formal tourist attraction of the Palacio Mondragón –

But in all of this are these various side trails of research and maybe fragments of memory that can be followed further, as Hilly was in fact, the mother of Martin Amis (and ex-wife of Kingsley Amis, and mother of several others as well, but I do remember a conversation between Dad and Hilly about the suddenly famous son, and if I look into the timing of that, Martin had probably published the Rachel Papers just the year before we arrived). But Martin is helpful for me because later he wrote Experience, and in it he talks about Hilly, and he says: “…There were many reasons why my mother loved living in Spain, not least of them being that you could, in most pharmacies, buy speed over the counter”. Which certainly does help flesh out my sense of Hilly as an indefatigable ball of totally fun energy, leading me on horseback up and down the hills around town.

But in thinking back on the more visceral kinds of memories one carries, I do remember some interesting things about diet and teeth. Like I remember many of my school friends would have pan con chocolate at lunch – essentially a chocolate bar wedged into a small short loaf. Coming from Toronto, I didn’t even know that level of hedonism was “allowed”.

Amis is not particularly kind on this front, but I see where he’s going –

It struck you, or it struck me, that Ronda was a place that had yet to experience dental self consciousness. Many a perfectly moulded visage would unreservedly open out to you – revealing a bag of mixed nuts or, more typically in Andalucia, a bag of mixed nuts and raisins.

At some point, I’d been invited to sleep over at Maria del Carmen’s house, and she lived in the last house on the road that led out of town.

And I think it might have been the morning after when I stood in the large, airy, essentially rural courtyard of her home, by the lavadero in the middle of everything – as I guess they didn’t have little private bathrooms – so I stood there putting toothpaste onto my toothbrush, and it was as if the entire family stopped to look at this eccentric behaviour of toothbrush and toothpaste to marvel and say, “what the heck is that?”

Lens-Artists Challenge – Memories