Winter Fun

December is here, and that can only mean one thing: a bevy of Winter and Christmas themed posts for the next month or so! I hope you are all looking forward to a whole lot of holiday history lessons, cookie taste tests, and carol misinterpretation, because that is what you are getting for the foreseeable future. Enjoy!

5 Important Life Lessons Figure Skating (ie. the Best Winter Sport) Taught Me

1. Physical Awareness and Athleticism

This is an obvious one, as figure skating is well-known for being a highly physical sport in which the athletes twist and turn and jump and generally fly across the ice. Skating involves incredible balance, posture, flexibility, and muscle control as well as the incredible ability to avoid dizziness after spinning like a top, the latter of which seems to be the only skill which I did not hold onto in my post-skating life. 

I can still touch my toes like nobody's business though and good balance has never served me better than when attempting to navigate through a crowded room carrying a tray of drinks. My sense of spacial awareness also means I can snake through London crowds with ease, a skill which, apparently, no one else in this city possesses.

Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz (here in 2003) are prime examples of the incredible physical feats skaters can achieve. I remember meeting them at Skate Canada. They were super nice. 

2. Elegance and Effortlessness (Even When in Excruciating Agony)

You've just witnessed the incredible acrobatics of two of my favourite figure skaters, and let's admit that they make it look so easy. That being said, the injuries figure skaters acquire during training (broken bones, sprains, stress fractures, cuts and bruises) would often be enough to make a less dedicated person give up the sport. The true sign of a figure skater, however, is the ability to persist through hardship and pain and to do so with a smile on your face.

When Isabelle Brasseur broke her rib in training, she fought through the pain to compete at the Olympics. When Jessica Dube took a blade to the face, she was back on the ice as soon as she was recovered. Some may say this is madness, but the dedication and positivity it must have taken these and countless other skaters to return to the ice post-injury is admirable and makes me shake my head in disgust whenever I see a lazy footballer faking an injury on the pitch. Shame on you, you sad, lazy Arsenals.

3. Self-Motivation and Discipline

A lot of people don't really understand self-motivation, and interpret this phrase to mean 'anything that motivates oneself''. What self-motivation really means is 'internal motivation' (ie. that you are motivated by the desire to succeed due to thirst for knowledge or personal excellence or by some other private, personal factor and not by lots of money and fancy cars), and anyone who is a figure skater knows that the rewards that come with landing your first Axel or being able to contort yourself into a Biellmann Spin are not material. These achievements take dedication, hard work, and a strong sense of personal goals, and while competition with peers may play a small role, the competition to achieve a new personal best is the primary motivation for most skaters - especially ones like me who never competed on a global level.

48 hours after her mother passed away, Joannie Rochette competed in the 2010 Olympics, stating after that her mother would have wanted her to achieve her dreams. Not only did this performance illustrate my previous point, but it also showed that personal dedication to achieving your goals will get you far (and sometimes, a bronze medal at the Olympics). The reward for doing anything in figure skating aside from the obvious of winning medals and endorsement deals are solely personal, and having learned the value of self-motivation at a young age has allowed me to follow my dreams and maintain my dignity (or at least some of it) in my adult life.

4. Love for Aesthetic Creativity

Elegant movement, elaborate costumes, classic pieces of music, and physical prowess are just a few of the aesthetic pleasures that accompany figure skating. My involvement in this sport for so many years allowed me to gain an appreciation for beauty in a world that can oftentimes be harsh. Figure skating allowed me to experience the joy of performing but also the sheer pleasure of being able to entertain others and help them forget their problems for a few moments.

Take Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, for example, who are a pair that excel technically but never fail to put on an incredible show. When these two get on the ice, it's easy to forget the mice squeaking underneath the kitchen cupboard, the icy wind howling outside, and your flatmate stuck in the lift because the joy they are experiencing during a performance is contagious. When I watch performances like this, I want nothing more than to slap my skates on (or head to karaoke or write a silly skit to post on this blog) in order to pay forward my happiness. 

5. Teamwork and Collaboration

Figure skating may appear to be a sport undertaken by an individual or a team of two, but there are many coaches, trainers, choreographers, peers, club administrators, and family members who play a massive role in the skills development of any skater. A figure skater needs to be able to take direction, absorb advice and criticism, and be open to collaboration in order to reach her or his full potential. Besides, teamwork can be fun!

This clip is from my favourite Stars on Ice of all time, and it not only demonstrates that working together is awesome, it shows that figure skating can be fun, silly, musical, beautiful, and sexy. Great job, team Hamilton!

For more figure skating happiness, I recommend Kristi Yamaguchi's performance to '100% Pure Love' which is quite possibly the most iconic gala performance EVER in my mind, or some Brasseur and Eisler  - they do a killer 'Copacabana' peppered with daring tricks, Patrick Chan, Kurt Browning, Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov, Sasha Cohen, Jeffrey Buttle - I'm going to stop myself here. 

Just go watch some figure skating. You'll learn something - I promise!

A Strong Woman?

There are times in life when you cannot help but feel powerless. One of these moments crept up on me this past weekend as I was walking leisurely home from the train station after a beautiful day spent visiting a friend in Manchester. The day had been nearly perfect - sunny, breezy, filled with cider and cream tea and catching up. I was not expecting it to take the stunning turn it did, especially so late in the day.

As I mentioned, I was walking home from the train station along my usual path, down through a pedestrian-only road sheltered by a beautiful canopy of trees. Though it can get a bit dim at night, this area is generally very safe and filled with other students. On Saturday evening, however, I was alone aside from two individuals - a man and a woman - who I could hear shouting at one another before their silhouettes even came into view. As I made my way toward them from the top of the hill, I could tell that they were in the midst of a heated lover's quarrel, and I could also see that the man was becoming increasingly aggressive. He was pacing erratically, waving his arms, and raising his voice louder and louder as their argument became more intense.

As I neared them, the woman attempted to turn away, but the man grabbed the strap of her bag to keep her from leaving. She did not seem afraid, merely exasperated (which I took as a very good sign), but I still felt a bit uneasy at the idea that he felt no harm in abusing her belongings, and his anger seemed to be escalating to the point of abusing other things next. As we crossed paths I did what I have read about passing by potential attackers, and I maintained silent but unflinching eye contact. Then I kept walking.

I felt like a coward, but I didn't know what to do. Should I call emergency services? I hadn't actually witnessed an assault, though I feared that a physical confrontation was imminent. Should I go back and ask if everything was alright? That may have led to myself being attacked, and I know that as a person of relatively small stature I would only have been putting myself in danger. Should I ask the next large man I see to help the woman? What if that led to a bigger fight? There was no right answer. 

This personal conundrum led me to examine an issue facing a lot of women in their everyday lives. Obviously I am a strong feminist, and I believe that women can achieve anything they set their minds too. However, I am also a realist and will not deny the scientific fact that generally men are physically larger and stronger than women. Women can be powerful in both a physical and mental sense, but that doesn't change the fact that if a woman is being threatened by a man or attempts to intervene in a conflict and she does not have any specialised training in self-defence, there is a very likely possibility that she will be injured or worse. Though it is unfair that this inequality should exist, it is a sad fact of life that we as women have to deal with when considering our personal safety.

Thankfully I have not witnessed many incidents such as the one I just described, and I have my fingers crossed that I remain as fortunate as I have been in the future. I only hope that the woman in the argument was able to stand her ground in a way that didn't put her in physical danger. And that she dumped that jerk's ass the second she got the chance.

Girl Crush Pt. III

On today's very special edition of

GIRL CRUSH

Courtney Love

(frontwoman of Hole, solo artist, poet, actress, model, feminist, style icon, weirdo)

'I'm not a woman. I'm a force of nature.'

- Courtney Love

For as long as I can remember, I have been a giant fan of Courtney Love. From the tender days of my pre-teen years, I can recall watching Listed on MuchMore Music and seeing this woman everywhere from best videos of the 90s to best female rockers to best rock ballads and most tragic rock love stories. This programme featured clips of music videos and interviews interlaced with pop culture journalists and enthusiasts discussing memorable moments in music history, and this woman featured prominently on many of said lists. 

'I might lie a lot, but never in my lyrics.'

- Courtney Love

From these brief images of a howling, cursing, strung out yet powerful woman, I became intrigued in her personal history, and I began exploring the music which seemed to be constantly overshadowed in the media by her startling drug-addled antics and the tragic suicide of her husband Kurt Cobain, who was a musical legend in his own right. To pass over a long story, I fell in love with her band Hole, and they are still my favourite band to this day. The music itself ranges from noisy post-rock to rhythmic grunge to guitar-driven pop, and Courtney's lyrics spoke to me in a way music aimed at my demographic never could (Ashlee Simpson, Avril Lavigne, read a novel for once then get back to me). Her words were angry, confrontational, bitter, melancholy, and often very challenging, and I felt I could relate to the pain and frustration she exuded as she moaned 'Someday you will ache like I ache' and 'Oh, just shut up - you're only sixteen'. The fact that she had been repeatedly accused of playing music written by her husband angered me, as it was very obvious that while Hole had similarities to Nirvana, Courtney was no mime. She had things to say and opinions to shout and speakers to straddle in her quest for musical domination. I understood the skepticism - this is, after all, a woman who taught herself to play guitar at the age of thirty, and who had to overcome a miserable childhood and a youth defined by a career stripping to make ends meet - but I felt it was unfair that nobody aside from myself could see that she was the real deal.

'I used to do drugs, but don't tell anyone or it  will ruin my image.'

- Courtney Love

Though Courtney has unfortunately come to be more well known in recent years for her unpredictable and self-destructive behaviours, she has maintained the intelligence and sense of humour which made her appeal so much to me in the first place. As you can tell from the above quote, she has a strong sense of self-deprecation, and she remains strong despite having been forced to deal with her inner demons in a highly public forum. Her Myspace blog is one of the most poetic, interesting, and confusing blogs I have ever followed, but it is filled with humour and humanity in a way very few other celebrity blogs are. With Courtney, what you see is exactly what you get, scabs and scrapes and all, and she is not afraid to admit to her mistakes and pull herself up and try again time after time, a trait which I consider to be highly admirable.

'I don't need plastic in my body to validate me as a woman.'

- Courtney Love

Finally, and quite importantly as we are speaking of crushes here, after all, Courtney had an alternative sense of style which strongly appealed to me as being delicate, feminine, but also wickedly bad-ass and purposely messy and casual. Her kinderwhore sensibilities (think short babydoll dresses, messy curls, hairbows and barrettes, dark smudged lipstick, chunky shoes) were highly appealing to a teen frustrated with the status quo of jeans, t-shirts, and hoodies her peers seemed to be permanently prescribing to. I wanted to wear lace. I wanted to bleach my hair. I wanted to take a guitar and teach a crowd of whiny girls and sexist boys what was what, and I wanted to do it while looking like Courtney. She was tough; she was ragged, but she was also beautiful. In recent years, she has lost a bit of her round-faced charm (having lost a ton of weight and quite possibly gone under the knife - forgive her, she's getting older), but she remains fashionably relevant in a Versace-heavy, heroin chic wardrobe, and I can honestly say that I will probably never get over my fixation on her early 90s style.

'Being offended is part of being in the real world.'

- Courtney Love

Despite seeming like she would be a less-than-ideal role model for a young girl attempting to discover herself as a writer/feminist/fashionista, Courtney has had an overwhelmingly positive influence on me. She made me realise it was ok to be aggressive and outspoken and unapologetic about my opinions. She made me want to be creative in all areas of my life due to her fantastic work in both music and film (see The People vs. Larry Flynt if you don't believe me), and she opened up my eyes and ears to all the beautiful things I could achieve at any age in my life. Courtney knew that anything is possible, and she may not be perfect, but realistically, I think she had a much larger impact on me due to being interesting and challenging, and I will always be a Hole fan. Love might last a day, but mine is forever. and I will always be in love with Courtney Love. 

'You gotta be able to change worlds.'

- the intelligent, talented, wonderful Courtney Love

Happy birthday, Courtney. 

CURRENTLY READING: Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris.

The Future?

'I don't want comfort. I want God. I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'

In 1932 Aldous Huxley published Brave New World. In this novel about the dehumanizing aspects of scientific and material 'progress' he wrote the following:

'. . . the price of stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies . . . instead*.' 

'It's curious . . . to read what people in the [early 1900s] used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to have imagined that it could be allowed to go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then . . . . [Ford] did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.'

It is unfortunate that many of Huxley's predictions have come true including the fact that Western society has become a mass consumer culture deeply ensconced in substance abuse to quell emotional distress and reliant on mindless television, activities, and jobs for base comfort rather than striving passionately to achieve self-actualization. The world is filled with Leninas and Lindas and Henry Fosters as well as cowardly Bernard Marxes and angry but helpless John Savages. 

In protest to his society, Huxley makes John Savage unable to understand 'civilization', causing him to not want to belong, and Savage exchanges these words with the Controller of the Dystopian society.

'I like the inconveniences.'

'We don't,' said the Controller. 'We prefer to do things comfortably.'

'But I don't want comfort. I want God. I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'

'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.'

There was a long silence.

'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.

Obviously Huxley intended for his readership to sympathize with the Savage, and I find myself often in a similar - though not nearly as extreme - situation to John, protesting against the rationalizations society forces upon me as a creative individual where arts funding is scarce (it was recently brought to my attention that the largest creative writing prize in Canada is only $50,000 while the Calgary Stampede regularly distributes over $3 million worth of prizes EVERY FREAKING YEAR!), and I am constantly told that I need to find 'a real job'. If anything, though, I think Huxley's work and the work of authors such as George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O'Connor suggests that literature has more power to persuade people to think individually and critically than any 'feelie' you can watch or immerse yourself in. 

My only fear is that we have become too deeply grounded in a Future like Huxley's, and the way out may be less desirable than John Savage's own conclusion.

*the 'feelies' in Huxley's Dystopia are equivalent to mindless action/melodrama/pseudo-reality films and TV programs which are currently enjoying mass popularity

CURRENTLY HUMMING (WHILE SECRETLY CRYING INTERNALLY): 'Red Heart' by Hey Rosetta! 

Sympathy, Empathy and a Film Screen

Sometimes it is difficult to know what to say when you come into contact with someone who has recently dealt with a tragedy or personal difficulty. Everyone deals with these situations differently, and offering condolences can, to one person, seem trite and contrived, while another person will be bitterly offended if you don't react as though you knew the lost loved one as dearly as you know a sibling. It can be especially difficult to contextualize these situations when they occur to people you do not know.

Alison Landsberg wrote an extremely stimulating article titled 'Memory, Empathy and the Politics of Identification' which deals with notions of confronting tragedy in the lives of others and especially with regards to tragedy in film. She discusses Roman Polanski's Holocaust drama The Pianist to illustrate her points that sympathy and empathy are a far cry from one another, and that merely being able to relate to an individual's plight emotionally is not enough to enable a person to contextualize the event in a historical context that can be intellectually examined and learned from.

This is a subject I am extremely passionate about, having written my own article regarding the use of imagery of children in Holocaust discourse to stimulate emotion without engaging intellect. In my article I argue that many individual authors and even some museums use the imagery of childhood innocence (a very recent social invention, but don't even get me started on that) to provoke an emotional connection which leads to the lack of intellectual engagement with historical material and devalues the experiences of individuals living through the Holocaust. I only wish I had known about Landsberg's amazing article before writing my own paper, and I now feel that I definitely need to incorporate some of her brilliant enlightening points as support for my own thesis.

Landsberg comments on the notion that film and other visual media facilitate the creation of 'prosthetic memories' during the formation of which people 'suture' themselves to historical narratives. She writes, 'The person does not simply learn about the past intellectually, but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live in the traditional sense.'

She draws attention to the differences between sympathy and empathy as such: 'Empathy, unlike sympathy, requires mental, cognitive activity. It entails an intellectual engagement with the plight of the other . . . . Contemplation and distance, two elements central to empathy, are not present in sympathy.'  While sympathy assumes similarity and shared feelings among the subject and the viewer, empathy places emphasis on difference and forces the viewer to examine the experience of the other as entirely separate from his or her own experiences.

In relation to the protagonist of The Pianist Landsberg writes, 'His progressive dehumanization makes [identification] difficult to sustain and ultimately requires us to develop a more intellectual engagement with him and with the circumstances of his existence.' The ability of Polanski to utilize this technique demonstrates his immense skill as a filmmaker and his integrity as a man who refuses to trivialize the experience of individuals who lived through the Holocaust. (This certainly has something to do with the fact that as a young child Polanski lived in the Krakow ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland and survived the Holocaust by hiding with Catholic families. His father survived Mauthausen Concentration Camp, but his mother was killed in Auschwitz.) Unlike many films which frame WWII and Holocaust narratives as Americanized hero stories, Polanski takes a different route by focussing on the dehumanizing and solitude undergone by most Jews who survived.

While reading this article, I felt an intense intrigue which I haven't felt while reading an academic article since before Christmas when I was reading a brilliant book about Alfred Hitchcock's aesthetics and the visual representation of his politics by Allan Richard called Hitchcock's Romantic Irony (my boyfriend can attest to how gleeful I was when reading this work, as he was repeatedly interrupted in his own reading by my constantly chirping, 'Oh my god, listen to this! This book is awesome!'), and I strongly urge everyone to get their hands on a copy of this article if you have even the remotist interest in film theory or the Holocaust. It is a very important and extremely relevant piece of writing regarding critical audience engagement with global entertainment media, and I can't stress enough how well Landsberg articulates points I have attempted to put forward in the past.

Landsberg writes, 'There is a layer of mediation between viewers and narrative . . . . We as viewers must make the intellectual bridge.' I promise that analysing a film's political and social messages will not make watching movies less enjoyable. It will merely make you a more informed citizen and, most likely, a better person. What's holding you back?

Alison Landsberg's article was published in International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society in June 2009 (edition 22.2). Go find a copy!