Astounding Sphinx

My opera evening didn’t start as it usually does. I had forgotten that this was the night, so I ended up not being able to remind my companions in time and taking the world’s fastest shower and taxi ride to get there on time. That I made it was a miracle; that I had the world’s most expensive coat chair next to me — with a spare on the other side — was just a shame.

Panting, I was in my seat in enough time to read the synopsis before the lights went down and the curtain went up. I was still shaken enough, however, that the name of the substitute tenor did not register with me. I’m left wondering how the bed scene with a shirtless des Grieux might have been with Portuguese tenor Bruno Ribeiro (below) who couldn’t make it. As an aside, the substitute, who was apparently filling in on a mere three days’ notice, was excellent. It’s only too bad I can’t seem to find his name on the Opéra de Montréal website!

The other thing I will comment on before getting to the performance itself is the promotion. You might remember the uproar I wrote about in a previous post about using models versus using the actual singers for the promotion. At the top of this post is the actual soprano of this production, Marianne Fiset, and below is the model photo. It seems that the Opéra de Montréal has learned from the controversy and is using the images in parallel, but with somewhat more prominent use of a better thought-out photo of the star. I actually prefer the star’s photo, wearing something other than one of the costumes used, but conveying the feel of the promotional model photo quite well. We will see if next year is parallel imagery or a focus on the stars, but this one was very well done and the Opéra de Montréal deserves kudos for it.

I always enjoy the plots of operas. This one — Manon by Massenet — is no exception. “A litany of poor choices and regrets,” I tweeted during the first intermission. And indeed it was, from leaving your sixteen-year-old cousin waiting at the equivalent of the bus station while you go to drink and gamble with your friends, to running off with a stranger you just met, to throwing yourself at your ex-lover when he is about to take his vows as a priest to the real kicker: telling your penniless lover that if he really loves you he will gamble to win a fortune for you both. Let’s just say that the character of Manon might inspire admiration for her beauty, but she will not encourage feelings of empathy. Not from me, anyway. (My title is a name she gets called in the libretto.)

So by the time we get to the end everyone is quite unhappy, except Manon, who is dying in her lover’s arms, so as usual you can’t really be happy and live. But that’s why opera is such a refreshing form of storytelling that compares favourably to our usual Hollywood movie fare.

The music was lovely — many catchy tunes to draw you in — and the singing was good (this coming from a non-expert, so don’t take my adjective as a slap in the face or a kudo too far). I especially liked Marianne Fiset in the role of the detestable Manon, and Gordon Bintner in the role of Lescaut (cousin who leaves her outside while he gambles.). Bintner, pictured above, has been singled out by Barihunks as “opera’s new Golden Boy” and his voice is a joy to listen to.

They seem to paying a good deal of attention to the acting aspects of productions, too, and the comic timing in certain parts of this was most excellent. We had some good laughs and they were intended!

I usually remark, too, how much I want to appropriate the sets of the Opéra de Montréal productions as apartments for myself to live in. This set didn’t so much make me want to live in it, but I started out a little skeptical about the visibly flat trees in many layers that appeared in a number of the acts, but they really grew on me and left me feeling the depth and lushness of the foliage. A lot of the other parts of the sets had a similar “flat, but grew on me” feel, and then the mist at the end was quite good. It must have been a real feat to keep such a good layer of fog around the feet of the singers throughout the last part of Act 5.

Oh, and one other touch that kept amusing me: blowing bubbles in the crowd scene in Act 3. They weren’t intrusive, just little hints of bubbles floating up from various parts of the back of the crowd…and I didn’t see them being blown! It definitely added to ambiance of the chaotic outdoor scene with vendors hawking wares and such. It somehow felt summery.

One last aside with respect to the Opéra de Montréal. When I got to my seat(s), there were stickers on the backs reminding me to renew for the next season. I do find that they tend to go into renewal overdrive rather early (got the form in the mail weeks ago!), but I had to admire the extra effort involved in putting the stickers on my seat(s) so that I would see them upon my arrival. Well played.

Now I have to decide if I will renew (probably, and probably soon, so stop calling me!) and if I will expand my little zone by also buying the seat that my friend has decided not to buy for next year. His reason is one that merits some attention, too: there is an inexcusable dearth of women in important positions in these productions. We’re not talking about the performing parts, but roles like Director and Conductor. Far too rarely are these roles filled by women and that ought to be fixed.

Methinks

Let me paraphrase Shakespeare to explain my lovely creation above: Methinks the government doth profess too much.

I have to say that I have been extremely annoyed with the sales pitch at feverish levels for quite some time. Endless TV ads, the giant signs that go up (and stay up for a long time) at sites where there has been some government investment. At times – most times – it seems that there is more trumpeting of action than actual action.

I suppose it's reasonable that they would want to really sell their budget bill. After all, they have rolled all the other legislation into the budget bill for each of the last two years, so they really have nothing else to sell. Curious, though, that they aren't gleefully announcing the gutting of environmental review mechanisms or out-of-control military procurement programs as being the way of the future for the economy. Oh, that's right, they do believe that.

I don't know why the general population seems to operate under the impression that the right wing party will be the best manager of the economy when they are proving themselves again and again to be rather challenged on that score.

It must be the advertising that makes us feel that way.

To be fair (or to crow about my creativity), here's the original government logo that is pasted on anything that doesn't move these days:

Challenges of Prevention

My editor over at Positive Lite asked me to write about the future of prevention. In taking up that challenge, I am discovering that I probably have more questions than answers, but I do have some ideas of the challenges we must meet if we are really going to stop HIV transmission.

Motivation.

Scary "death" and "doom" messages will not motivate people to take measures to avoid contracting HIV. Fright messages sometimes have short-term effects, but these truly lack credibility in a context where a lot of people (particularly in the gay community) know someone living with HIV and living quite well with treatment. We need to be realistic talking about what it means to live with HIV today. I personally don't look like I'm about to die (not of HIV/AIDS anyway!) and I have a fairly active life, but I wouldn't wish my HIV infection on anyone else. We need to learn how to share our experiences of living with HIV in straightforward, honest ways if we want people to understand why they might not want this virus.

Risk Assessment.

In all health issues, the quantification of risk is problematic. I have a friend who, in the course of his internship, was sometimes called upon to deliver a prognosis to an ailing patient. "How much time do I have left?" rivalled "What are the chances of the operation not working?" for tops of the unpopularity contest. He was reticent to tell the elderly patient that there was a 4% risk of death in an operation because it was so unlikely to occur and so likely to panic the patient to hear and try to interpret the words.

How then do we explain that a single act of condomless anal sex with a person with a high viral load might have a transmission rate somewhat less than 1%, but that people still get infected with HIV? I know there has been some degree of reticence to share those percentages of risk because they are so very difficult to wrap our heads around, but that is an attitude that smacks of paternalism. If it is difficult to understand, then our challenge on this point is clear: learn to explain risk in a way that helps people to make informed decisions about their actions.

A Full Toolbox.

There are many approaches to prevention these days, ranging from motivational counselling all the way to pharmaceutical intervention. We need to figure out which tools work best for which people in which situations. Then we need to be able to make sure that those people have access to the tools they need, understand the strengths and limits of those tools, and know how to use them. With budgets for prevention stagnant and some new approaches taking up a lot of virtual space, those who make decisions about what to fund might be tempted to put all their eggs in one basket. We have to continue to recognize that there isn't a single approach that will work for all and fight to preserve the diversity of the available tools even as we work to understand them better and to improve them.

The Pleasure Principle.

Most of the time – if we're lucky – sex is about pleasure. When our prevention messages are peppered with words like "safe" and "secure" or "protection" it shouldn't surprise us that not everyone wants to hear them, or even listen to them. We need to talk more about what to do, and not as much about what not to do. This goes beyond how our messages look (we've learned to make them sexy) right to the core of what they say.

Since I am given to wild and sometimes inappropriate metaphors, let me just charge headlong into this one: Waterskiing is not all about the life jacket. That life jacket might be an essential tool in the end, depending on how you go about the sport, but the waterskiing is about hanging onto the rope, getting up on the skis (and staying there!), and it's even more about the sun on your face, the wind in your hair and the pure exhilaration of skimming across the water behind a powerboat. We need to focus on that approach when we talk about sex.

Autonomy.

We need to trust people to make choices for themselves. That means sharing all of the information in the best way to ensure that it is truly understood and letting people determine how they will act on it in their own lives. I would hasten to add that one person's autonomy doesn't trump another's. I'm trying (and probably failing) to make this point not be about disclosure, but if we lived in a world where people wouldn't face unreasonable discrimination after disclosure I would be happy to include it. And when I talk about discrimination, I'm not talking about getting turned down by a potential partner, but about losing a job or not getting one, or about losing all semblance of privacy when the person trusted with the information decides it needs to be shared.

Back to the autonomy part. People will not necessarily make logical or sensible decisions when it comes to sex and pleasure. We wouldn't be human if we always acted logically and based on the best available evidence. Humans have issues like self-esteem, desires, fears, urges…these all push logic out the nearest window from time to time. Sometimes we make bad choices for ourselves and sometimes we make good ones. Sometimes good and bad are a little difficult to sort out. That doesn't mean that someone else gets a licence to tell me what to do with a willing partner; it means that the prevention challenge is to try to ensure that I have all the information and tools I need to make the right decision for myself, and that my partner has those too.

I don't know if we'll find the ideal approach to prevention or the means to make sure that the multiple approaches that work the best for now are fully available. I only know that we can't stop trying. One new infection is one too many.

Check out this article at Positive Lite here (with its own set of comments, if there are any).

To the Wonderbread

By my cheeky headline, I am surely not suggesting that this latest œuvre of Terrence Malick lacks substance. Not that, Just plot. It lacks plot.

You will howl that I am just some kind of unsophisticated rube (is that redundant?) with no appreciation for the art of this especially talented director, whose work stretches back to the 1970s with large, but rapidly decreasing breaks between them. It almost seems like he's putting out one every few months now, a far cry from the twenty-year break between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line.

When I went to see The Tree of Life, I didn't necessarily find more coherent plot lines, but I got chills from the familiarity of the feeling of a neighbourhood – even a suburban neighbourhood – teeming with the life of kids playing elaborate and distinctly non-electronic games together. I found a dearth of those warm and fuzzy familiar feelings in this film. Maybe the little glimpses of the Paris Métro, but those were really not the focus of the film. I suppose for someone more familiar with the feel of today's small urban decay and sterile suburbia those warm and fuzzy feelings might arise, but I really think that one is an anathema to the other.

We see the woman moving from her familiar Mont-St-Michel and Paris with all their history, richness and life to a suburb so sterile that even the sod has not had a chance to take hold and become green lawns. The interiors are lovely, but barren. The exteriors oddly hunkered down under big roofs and high fences look like an outpost expecting an attack at any moment. Needless to say, there are no sidewalks, let alone sidewalk cafés. She parachutes into this strange land where nobody speaks her language and all is unfamiliar. There's a little bit of the shy joy of discovering each other, but how can it be that your sterile new suburban home still looks as sterile and new after you have lived in it together?

It's enough to drive you to outside distractions, and it does for both of our main characters. An old girlfriend, an unsurprisingly available handyman – those will throw a wrench into your relationship, especially when you already can't communicate very well. I'm not even sure the language difference was the biggest barrier to communication.

So I might not be loving the substance of the content I saw in the film, and that might well have been a part of Malick's point, but there is no disputing the beauty of the cinematography, and the reactions I had to certain scenes. Sweeping vistas of the prairie surrounding the suburban outpost, thundering horses and bison, rushing waters: all very beautiful. Horrible and badly disguised poverty and small urban decay, brutal prisons, sterile suburbs: also very beautifully presented, if disturbing. I was a bit annoyed by the blatant symbolism of the cross in the form of intersecting jet trails that appeared following a bunch of voiceover religious symbolism, but my annoyance at that was a short-lived as the image itself. And the most delightful image of all? Two women walking through the small town, speaking French and Spanish, the Spanish-speaking one shouting at the top her lungs, and neither getting any reactions or fitting in for that matter.
 
***

How about some fun notes about the cinema experience itself? An odd one, to be sure. We were the first to arrive of the ten people who were there for this screening. Considering it has only been out for a week, this doesn't bode well for box office receipts, but perhaps that is a consideration too pedestrian for the artist.

The two older women who arrived after us chose some nice seats…right behind us! You have the whole cinema to choose from and you must install yourself in the seats behind the only other two people there when you arrived? That's just odd. Not quite as odd, however, as the two people sitting down in front, about three rows back from the screen. They commented back and forth during the whole film and the one guy's voice really carried more than I think he knew. I almost thought it was a part of the soundtrack and a distracting part at that.

And then there was the guy in my row who kept making little sounds like he was waking from short naps and hoping to cover up any sounds of possible snoring. Oh. That was me. Now I guess we all have an alternate theory about the decipherability of the plot.

Beyond the Pining

Was there something about the month of April that encouraged filmmakers to make pretty actors ugly? First it was James Franco's scary mouth hardware in Spring Breakers, and now some truly awful and excessive tattooing on Ryan Gosling in The Place Beyond the Pines. (I am classifying this film in April although my review will appear in May.)

This film is really a story about people trapped in their fates, as determined by their economic classes. Ryan Gosling's character is poor, with few prospects (think about that before getting that many bad tattoos, especially facial ones!) and the only way he can attempt to get ahead is by breaking the law in ways that are not tolerated by those in power.

Bradley Cooper's character is at the other end of the spectrum. Son of a judge, law school graduate who has passed the bar, he has decided to become a police officer, and that's how his path crosses with Ryan Gosling's. We get to see how a scared new police officer can be swept up in the camaraderie of the force, paying little attention to the rules being broken. At least for a while. The veiled coaching about how he will respond to questions around his shooting of Gosling's bank robber morphs into explicitly illegal and off-the-books seizure of ill-gotten gains and he starts to have second thoughts.

Is it the guilt of having killed some child's father, or some malaise about the "search" of the mother's house? Whatever the source, there are a couple of feeble attempts to right that wrong and other future ones by ratting out those who are breaking the rules for their own benefit. He uses his revelations to buy himself a safer place in which to pursue his career, to the displeasure of his new boss, and then we see him later on using his position and influence to bend the rules for his son. Learned nothing from his past experiences, or learned everything from them?

Of course, the paths of those two sons – of shooter and shot – will cross tragically, if only to underline the repeated pattern that will emerge in how those boys deal with the world. Spoiled rich kid using others and breaking the rules, without consequences, of course. Poor but well-meaning kid driven to break the rules and suffer the consequences, at least until he is saved by the guilt of his father's shooter.

Maybe the most important lessons to retain from the film are that Bradley Cooper looks lovely in any outfit or position (jeans, uniform, suit, kneeling in the forest….) and that it looks like motorcycle-riding ability is genetic (the poor kid gets on for the first time and rides off into the sunrise like he's been doing it all his life).

The hanging question comes from the credits (yes, we are those people who stay to watch the credits). There was an item labelled "stunts" listing only two names: Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper. Did they do all their own stunts? Or, more likely, which stunts did they do? How will I stand not knowing the answer to this nagging question?

Entranced

You might think that it would be a risky enterprise for someone like myself, so given to dozing off in the cinema, to go to a film with hypnotism – and therefore presumably the putting to sleep of various subjects. I am positively thrilled to report that not a wink was had – much less forty – although I seem to have most handily forgotten all about the movie trailers we saw just before the main feature, so I may have been somewhere else at that time.

A wacky premise here: high end art auction house with a set procedure to save the most valuable art from theft. Theft situation arrives and then it gets complicated for us all. The gang that has arranged to steal the painting finds itself with an empty frame and needs to find out where the painting is. The trouble? The auction house employee who conveyed the painting – or at least the sleeve that was supposed to contain the painting – to the safety slot was knocked out and has lost his memory.

The "randomly chosen" hypnotherapist who is going to help find the missing painting has secrets of her own, including some bad experiences with unsavoury portions of our auction house employee's past and some rather close encounters with one of the members of the gang.

There's a fair amount of violence and some surreal gore (the above head was talking quite clearly), and it takes quite some time to unravel the complexity of the layers of deception planted by some handy hypnotism. For my money, though, this was a much better way to get through layers of complexity than was Inception, and Rosario Dawson is both hot and cool in her role.

If you're wondering who comes out on top, I will only say that it's someone who is both hot and cool (and I never said that Rosario Dawson's character was the only one in that category).

A little post screening amusement, too. A couple a couple of rows ahead of us was making out during the credits. It has been quite some time since I have seen that in a cinema (maybe not seeing the right films?), but I can understand how gunfire and explosions would make you want to kiss…

Numbers Games

Whenever I see news reports about anything related to HIV, I have to brace myself for the parts with numbers. Not because I'm afraid of numbers – I'm geeky enough to have participated in math contests when I was in high school, and even won prizes at them (math books). No, I brace myself for what people will do with numbers to try to validate their points of view.

Most of the uses of numbers that leave me shaking my head involve a lack of context. A classic is the use of percentages to describe trends in HIV infections. First of all, one should be clear that in our society without compulsory and regular testing of the entire population, we are usually talking about statistics regarding diagnoses, and only sometimes about estimates of actual HIV infections. Second, one can't compare on pure percentage changes in these diagnoses without suggesting that an increase of diagnoses in a particular group from 2 to 4 (100%) is somehow more significant than an increase in another group from 300 to 303 (1%). If you see the percentages, you need to also look for the numbers.

When you don't see the absolute numbers, you might not understand other aspects of the meaning of what you are seeing. It is all well and good to say that gay men are an increasing portion of the new diagnoses, but are they a bigger slice of a shrinking or stable pie? Could those absolute numbers also be decreasing, while the percentage goes up? The percentages won't tell you that on their own.

There are other times when the absolute numbers on their own don't tell the whole story. I remember my own reaction in the context of a national meeting once when someone from a more rural area talked about a "huge" increase in people being seen in the local AIDS organization. The number was 4 or 5 in the past year. The organization I worked for at the time regularly welcomed between 40 and 60 new HIV positive people every year, and it was only one of almost twenty organizations in the city. In the context of the population of the region being served, however, those 4 or 5 people were probably very significant.

Another little statistical game occurs in the classifying of the data. It is a very difficult task to classify people when we are talking about those numbers of new diagnoses. People don't stay in their own boxes, so might just fit into several different categories or might even justify a new category that epidemiologists and those responsible for surveillance are not ready to create (it's difficult to follow trends when you keep splitting the lines into their sub-categories). There's more than a little interpretation involved in the classifying, so it's worth asking questions about the results.

One of the things that has most annoyed me recently is the interpretation of how prevalent condom use is among gay men. We all know the community started at zero – or almost zero – condom use at the beginning of the 1980s, adopted the condom strategy extremely successfully, and that use seems to have declined lately. When the proof of that decline is shrouded in odd definitions, however, I get suspicious. I recently saw one definition that classified people into two groups: those who have consistently used condoms in the last six months, and those who had at least one incident of not using a condom in the last six months. Now suddenly the portrait is of condom-users and condom-eschewers and the person who had sex sixty times in the last six months, only once without a condom, finds himself in the latter group. That's how you get to a rate of consistent condom use somewhere south of 30%, but it doesn't seem to be a very accurate portrait, does it?

Although I have not entered any math contests lately, I reiterate my geeky childhood love of numbers. I just have to add to that love a cheeky appreciation of context and a freaky suspicion that will always drive me to see what else my little number friends might be telling me. Or hiding from me.

This article is also published on Positive Lite here.