CHANTAL BRAGANZA

A thing I wrote about Prince.

Is it spring yet? Is it really spring?

Departures - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic

Can we all just agree that Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national treasure that deserves some kind of 24 hour protection squad, or at least we can all chip in and buy him an epipen. 

(via aaronleaf)

“Of course, pawning can be a humbling process. And here’s how Oliver helps distinguish himself from competitors like Jack Berkovits of the Omni chain and Harold the Jewellery Buyer—here’s the genius in his shtick. A man who so willingly paints himself silver or wraps his sizable frame in spandex is not a man who appears given to judgment. These embarrassments, easily embraced, can stand in for your own.”

A golden profile by Danielle Groen.

I interviewed Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen a while back when she was in Toronto. (A long while back, actually. Sorry!) She is exactly in person what is on her blog: friendly, chatty and always curious about the way you cook.

We talked about her cookbook, dumb kitchen tools you don’t actually need (i.e. garlic presses) and all-day breakfasts. Perelman was, at this point, on the sixteenth stop of a multi-city book tour. Her cookbook was selling really well. There was the “What’s next?” question, of course, and I don’t know why this part of the conversation stuck with me, but it did. She told me there weren’t any plans beyond continuing her blog and that she wasn’t sure that there would ever be.

I just want to be happy. I just want to hang out with my family. I guess maybe the busier I’ve gotten, the more I’ve been focused on the small things. What it means to have the good life, whatever your definition of that is. I don’t know. 

I was eating a cheese sandwich in an airport last week and was thinking, “I don’t want to eat cheese sandwiches in airports!” You know what I mean? I know that sounds terrible, that sounds so high maintenance. But I’d rather avoid eating cheese sandwiches, standing up while waiting for a plane. You just realize these are things that don’t really contribute to the quality of your life.

Maybe this has just happened in the past couple of years because I’ve just had a kid, but I just want everyone to sit at the table for meals. Let’s have plates. It doesn’t have to be ironed napkins, but let’s eat real meals at real mealtimes, and let’s sit around a table together. I feel like this is something most of us have forgotten how to do, and something most of us don’t have time to do. It’s become a luxury for many of us, to be able to fit that in. For me, I feel like my life is better with more of that in it.

Why was I so scared?

explore-blog:

Brilliant! Designer Ty Mattson remixes Homeland with vintage jazz record covers.

iheartnorwegianwood:

I’m sorry but this is actually the cutest thing in the entire world…

1. Wanna hear a love story? It’s kind of cute how it starts. This man, on travels from his new-made home in Canada meets this woman in a bar and decides he’s going to talk to her. Even though they don’t speak the same language, and most women he’s dated in his new home either dump him or treat him as a phase. It’s 1979 in Puerto Vallarta. He’s good at travelling, and loves to do so alone. 

And this woman? He didn’t meet her, exactly; she was his server. At some tourist trap of a place called “Las Palomitas” (or, roughly translated, the Love Birds or Little Doves or whatever) and was studying to become a civil servant. She was seventeen and customers would draw portraits of her from their barstools. She still has one of these tucked away in her closet that I found once. 

And so they talked, and got along. They got married, skipped back to Canada and had me and my brother. This is the kind of story we’ve grown up with since childhood and have believed for years. It wasn’t until much later I understood how difficult it was for one party to move to a new country into a family that was surprised to learn smart, well-dressed women could come from south of the U.S. Or, for the other to attend family Christmases in where communications beyond “Feliz Navidad!” consistently had to be translated. Thankfully, over the years things improved.

2. I once had a boyfriend named Mike Armstrong, which is nondescript enough to prevent any actual identification and should tell you all you need to know about his background in this context. I lived in Mississauga; he in Brampton. We were in high school and into things like Anthony Burgess novels and composing nonsensical scores to children’s movies. It goes without saying Pink Floyd was an unfortunate influence. He also, interestingly enough, used to worry about my name. 

“Everyone in my class thinks you’re…some black chick,” he confessed to me once over a weeknight phone call.

“Why?” I asked, not understanding the problem.

“Because your name is Chantal, and it’s spelled with an A.”

“That means it’s French!” I said belligerently. 

From what I know, my parents fought over whether to call me Meyer, or this. 

3. So I’ve been with this guy for a long while now. I’d be lying if I said not being able to explain your background in a neat little sentence hasn’t been awkward at times. For the first little bit of our relationship, I was shamefully slow to correct his family’s idea that I was maybe kinda Portuguese (I’m not). Then there was the time I made the mistake of refusing food at his Nona’s thanksgiving dinner. Or the time I brought him to a house party full of intoxicated teens with an even more toxic definition of what national pride meant, and some misunderstood comment led to his car getting keyed and smashed.

In retrospect none of this really matters, because any of the rules I thought I was breaking or circumventing at the time had already been broken by my parents twenty-five years earlier. This is in no small part why I’ve never spent too long worrying about whether race mattered for this guy and I, and why I’ve been so blessed to never have to. 

But forget all that! We’re planning our wedding right now. One of the issues is whether to serve porchetta or tacos at the midnight snack bar. Got any suggestions?

This post is part of the Ethnic Aisle, a blog about race, ethnicity and other culture curio in the GTA.

Via carnalthoughts, a whole lot of yes:

Typifying the trend to a tee are the two novels named as finalists for every prize this season, including Britain’s prestigious Man Booker: Half-Blood Blues, by Esi Edugyan, a story of music and race in Nazi Germany; and Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, a California-set Western. Joining them to make a majority on the Giller list is The Free World by David Bezmozgis, which is about a family of Soviet émigrés squabbling in Rome on their way to a somewhere else that may or may not be Canada. And having pioneered the new direction with his Booker-winning The English Patient almost 20 years ago, Michael Ondaatje is represented by The Cat’s Table, another novel of transit set on the high seas, a world away from its author’s adopted homeland.

Almost a decade after Yann Martel described Canada as “the greatest hotel on earth” in accepting the Booker Prize for The Life of Pi – a famous Canadian novel that begins in India and ends in Mexico – Canadian content has only become rarer in Canadian literature. While many U.S. and British writers turn inward – a trend exemplified by Julian Barnes’s Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending – Canadian literature is more than ever characterized by free-floating cosmopolitanism.

So says John Barber in The Globe and Mail. Xenophobic click-baiting title aside, there are some interesting points here, mainly on the matter of awarding home-grown or home-set titles. That even the Governor General’s Award’s selection crew didn’t see fit to name at least 3 unambiguously Canadian-set texts certainly suggests the 1970s are over. This is encouraging as someone who hopes to make CanLit syllabi one day and would like to not have “but where is Canada?” come up in response to every text I like after…1980. People still ask it whenever The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is taught, and the usual answer — that not every text has to be taught via nationalism, as indeed, not every text is nationalist — is still unsatisfactory for many people. (And so In the Skin of a Lion, which is good but not as good, gets taught for the sake of being more teachable.) 

There are also some things to qualify, though. First, cosmopolitanism is nothing new: A.M. Klein’s protagonists always fancied themselves men-of-the-world, often with a European slant; ditto Leonard Cohen; ditto Mavis Gallant, whose émigré Canadians are almost always Parisians first; ditto Rohinton Mistry, who actually won the GG for a book set entirely in Mumbai.

Second, I’d point out that Bezmosgis’s characters are certainly, not ambiguously, bound for Canada. Ondaatje’s curiously named protagonist Michael also ends up becoming a writer in Canada, rather like another enigmatic Michael who, for anonymity’s sake, we’ll call M. Ondaatje, or Michael O. My point being: if the fixed address at the end of the journey, which is depicted as the start of the immigrant novel’s composition as it is in both these cases (and in Life of Pi if I’m remembering correctly, and occasionally in Rohinton Mistry), is unambiguously Canada, then what about this cosmopolitanism is “free-floating”?

That’s like saying you’re off the grid whenever you use the TTC.

Here’s another magazine clip at random, just because. Earlier this afternoon I read a joke tweet about Michael Bublé and the mystery that is his dreamboat status among “straight/man-loving/open-minded women.” 

David Hayes profiled him in Saturday Night magazine in 2005. It’s a good profile because Hayes is a good writer, but there’s this one passage that’s stuck in my brain even six years later. It’s probably what, for me, confirmed Bublé as the anti-babe. This kind of behaviour reminds me too much of high school and that’s just not sexy.

Later, during an herbal tea break, Bublé and Furtado join Bublé’s fiancé, Debbie Tumiss, and Furtado’s manager, Chris Smith, at a table in the reception area. Bublé, who is irrepressible when he gets excited, is explaining how Furtado came to be on his new album. “I wanted someone young, I wanted someone who sings beautifully and I wanted someone who sells records internationally and can speak Portuguese. So I’m thinking, yeah, there are people like that everywhere. And all of a sudden I thought, Nelly Furtado!”

Furtado, a petite 26-year-old who today is wearing a black sweater, black scarf and pink sheepskin boots, has a melodic laugh that bursts forth with little provocation. “Oh, Michael,” she says, giggling.

Bublé, a natural mimic who cracks up audiences by breaking into goofy white-boy raps during live shows, begins singing her hit song, I’m Like A Bird, grossly exaggerating Furtado’s warbly style. “And though my luuuuv is ra-er-er-er-er-er, and though my love is true-ohh-ohh-ohh-ohh-yeah-ah-ah-ah, I’m hung like a bird…

The laughter dies down in a minute or so, but when Bublé gets on a roll there’s no stopping him.

“No, I thought you were really cute, Nelly,” he says. “Your eyes. I wanted to pop them out and keep them.”

Unsure what to think about this, Furtado laughs uncertainly.

Bublé fixes her with a soulful gaze, lowers his voice, and earnestly says: “Nelly, if you were a Popsicle, do you know what I’d do with you? I would take off your wrapper and I would hold you by your two little sticks and I would lick you up the centre and then I would break you in half on the counter and put half of you in the freezer for later.”

A few seconds of silence follows, as everyone at the table struggles to absorb this image. Furtado cries out in mock outrage, then laughs indulgently, the way teenaged girls laugh at the goofy antics of teenaged boys. Timuss, smiling, shakes her head and says to me: “Only Michael can get away with saying stuff like that.”

I love me some profiles. And when the writer is good at them they’re the best kind of non-fiction. To me, at least. Anyway, there is this one about L.A. Weekly food critic Jonathan Gold from a couple years back that I keep returning to for this one, tiny anecdote. This usually happens whenever I’ve had too much coffee, which is definitely right now, and I just couldn’t help but share. 

The day [Gold] decided to find the city’s best espresso, he travelled with David Kendrick, who was then the drummer for Devo. After twenty-seven shots, Gold—sweating, trembling, and talking too loud—met up with [his wife Laurie] Ochoa and some friends for dinner. He started to panic and begged the group not to get dessert. When Ochoa ordered tiramisu, he burst into tears, ran out of the restaurant, and took the bus home.

Earlier generations have weathered recessions, of course; this stall we’re in has the look of something nastier. Social Security and Medicare are going to be diminished, at best. Hours worked are up even as hiring staggers along: Blood from a stone looks to be the normal order of things “going…

If 2008 didn’t make clear how much media types love to read about themselves, chances are you haven’t looked at a newspaper in some time. Perhaps this, too, explains the special joy that is the j-flick: movies about journalists and what they do, or in many cases used to do. J-Source did a roundup recently of the ones you need to watch. Rather than replicate that list entirely I figured I’d do the NavFlix thing and tell you which ones are on Netflix. Fun, right? 

Just so you know: these movies only made it on this list by virtue of being on Netflix, and being vaguely about the reporting process. I can vouch for at least half, but some I haven’t seen (Morning Glory) and others are just plain bad (Scoop). That said, I hope it’s of some use! Happy watching.

1. The Front Page

2. Absence of Malice

3. Shattered Glass

There’s only two movies about fact checking I know. Bright Lights, Big City, and this. While the former is funny this one is so good and so accurate and such a must if you’ve ever worked at a magazine. 

4. NewsRadio (TV)

5. Nothing But the Truth

6. Citizen Black

7. The Paper

From what I’ve read, this movie didn’t do particularly well at the box office. Fools. Think The Imperfectionists did a good job of creating the feel of a newsroom? Well.

8. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

9. Morning Glory

10. Deadline (TV)

11. Resurrecting the Champ

This looks like rewrite from The Soloist, only starring Josh Harnett and not based on real life. Take from that what you will. 

12. Scoop

Blech. Who okayed this script?