Musee Eden, Les Canadiens and Genes

Three Rivers Hockey Team 1904. Hugh Blair at left. I know because he looks like my brother in law.

Hmm. I’ve been listening to Le Docteur Pascal by Emile Zola on litteratureaudio.com and it’s about faith/science and genetics… The doctor of the title speculates on what it is that allows traits, physical and mental to pass down through the generations. He is a scientist, but he figures some mystical kind of material must be responsible.

I want to yell, “Nothing mystical! Just a ladder of beads..Like something a kid puts together, but much longer.”

Anyway, the Canadiens have won the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs and that is all people care about in these parts. (It’s been a long time.)

I think the last time the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup was in 1994 and my son, then a little boy, stayed up until 10 pm for many nights in a row. I worried for his schooling (grade 1) but I really couldn’t make him go to bed. My husband and I didn’t watch hockey much then, but my aunt had come to live with us for a year or so and at about four, my son had gone into her room and watched the game with her and from that moment on he he was entranced. It’s in the genes. He had no peer pressure in pre-school.
(My husband, who edits sports for TV, is now a big fan. I just watched a little vignette he put together using the I Believe song on CTV Montreal.) I was a big fan in my youth, and I remember one year, I think 69, I was living in Rosemere and the Canadiens were in the final and I couldn’t watch so I went for a walk, it was May and very warm and then I heard a roar go up in the community. They had won. It’s like that now, but the play offs go until June. You can have pool/Stanley Cup parties.

My girlfriend, Lise, is a huge fan. Her uncle played for the Canadiens years ago, so she is ‘in the family.’ But she gets so nervous she channel zaps.

How does this tie into Flo in the City, my middle school novel about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1910 era: Well, Norman Nicholson of the www.tighsolas.ca website left behind a lot of stuff, letters, ledgers, but mostly lists. He was working on the railway in the 1908-1913 era and he had time on his hands. I also think he made lists for another reason: stress. How do I know? Well, my little son, when he had a fever, used to make lists, once of all the hockey players in the NHL. GENES again.

Oh, and I’ve been watching back episodes of Musee Eden. It is getting quite interesting, actually. And Eric Bruneau, who looks a lot like Colin Firth, had a nude scene and he is, yes, a beautiful young man. Even lying on his back. Well, especially lying on his back.

A la Francaise

an early nichelodeon

I haven’t been working on my first draft edit of Flo in the City, my novel in progress about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1910 era based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas/. But I did take the hard copy out from under the coffee table and smooth it down a bit with my hand.

I have been listening to French audio books free online at http://www.litteratureaudio.com/. For a while I have tried to find the equivalent of BBC Radio Four readings online in French and I just found this large library of books – recently posted – and believe it or not – I am listening to Sense and Sensibility in French only because I stumbled upon it first and I have just heard a dramatization on BBC Radio 7. I should be listening to Zola..which I will.

I’m trying to upgrade my French. I have classic anglo Quebec French, very strong in some areas, poor in others. Classic for my age group, who learned French in the classroom mostly. Almost all of my classmates moved to Ontario or beyond, largely for lack of French. (As I wrote elsewhere, the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal was the second highest performing school board in North American in the 60′s. My classmates went to to career success for the most part.) My kids attended 50 50 immersion and aren’t totally bilingual. You don’t learn French in a classroom. (I actually found document form the late 1800′s, Quebec Education Ministry, where this was stated and underlined for emphasis. They knew it back then.

(My mother was a very well educated French Canadian, but that’s another story.) I am also listening to Curb Your Enthusiasm in French. It has snappy dialogue so is good to listen to.) I don’t like French TV anymore than I like English daytime TV. I am watching Musee Eden on Societe Radio Canada, and have been blogging about it.

Improving your language skills is much easier in the age of DVDs and the Internet. Although I do not like listening to Colin Firth doublé as the actor who voices his characters does not that that rich theatre voice, which is one of CF’s many charms.

I have also been reading essays for the Heritage Course I will be taking online starting next month. Very interesting and very well written essays on an area I am now convinced is right for me. Museums are all about MEDIA. And I have worked in the non-profit sector and I have an understanding of early education issues like learning styles.

My favorite and most influential read back in college, where I studied Film and Communications, was WAYS Of SEEING, which was a small book based on a BBC Television Program.

I’ve taken 30 years to find out what I really want to do, sort of. Because I haven’t changed much from what I wanted to do in my twenties. There are just so many more options now. I also taped Young Victoria off the satellite. Well, I bought it. So I have lots to do – and nothing at the same time.

Anyway, I’ve been practicing my French at the hospital, talking to nurses as my father in law, 90, is ill. Most doctors can speak English, but few nurses from what I see. One nurse, according to my aged father in law, actually told him “You’re 90. You should speak French by now.” It’s an awful statement, especially since it’s the old folk in Quebec who don’t know French. But I won’t complain: I don’t want to rock the boat. If I get people mad, he could get worse treatment (and they are fairly nice)or worse, be kicked out of the system, like my mother, last year, and left to fend for himself. Hey, it’s sleeting outside. Gee. We’ve had such a warm dry spring so far, and now it sort of snows.

Stream of Unconsciousness

Boys riding an automobile in 1910 era.

I am watching the fourth installment of Musee Eden and can say the plot is quickening… I can see where it is going and it is interesting and that cute Colin Firth lookalike actor, Eric Bruneau, is getting beaten up, which is hard to take, although I’m sure it will all end up well in the end.

I went through Google News today to see what women are in the news: not many and mostly actresses or minor celebrities. Hilary Duff etc. I think I will do this everyday. You can see what people look up, the zeitgeist, so to speak and it is tabloid, even in the legitimate news.

Oh well.

I really have to get going on my editing of the first chapter of Flo in the City, my story about a girl coming of age in the 1910 era, based on http://www.tighsolas.ca/, but I can’t focus right now, with things to do related to parents and in-laws.

I did take up reading again (something I haven’t really done lately (I do listent to BBC Radio’s 4 and 7 for literary joys) I have three books on the go, Book of Negroes, Juliet Naked by Hornby and Andrea Levy’s first book. (I just loved Small Island.) The problem is my glasses, I need to buy new reading glasses and make sure they are full lensed, just for reading. I get dizzy adjusting my gaze.

My son came home and was writing a difficult philosophy paper and he read me the beginning, but I couldn’t help him. Didn’t understand a thing. Sign and signifier stuff which I remember not understanding when I went to school. Barthes and all that. Why Freud is wrong, so to speak. He’s big on why Freud is wrong. But I grew up with Freud, so I choose to invest in his theories.

But, yes, I did do something brash. I enrolled in a diploma program at Athabaska Online University, Heritage Studies. Museums and such. Since I’m so into Heritage, and I hope to upgrade my http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website, I might learn something. This 3 credit course is more expensive than one year of tuition at McGill in 1974, when I went to school. I answered an online questionnaire that is supposed to determine if a person is cut out for self-study. A great deal of importance is placed on essay writing skills. Well, I can write essays, that’s my profession, but I wonder if I have the discipline and stamina to take such a complicated course.

Time out of Place..

A still from a film of Moscow in 1908 off Youtube. It was hard to catch this horse as it went by in a second. Amazing stuff now available for all to see. Imagine had there been film in 1800 or 1700 or earlier. Well, if there had been film, it the course of history would be changed, as ‘technology’ changes us.

Still, while Flo, perhaps, was sitting on the Tighsolas porch in 1908 this horse, I want to call in a troika, but it’s just one animal, was trotting through Moscow.

So, I’m going to get on this editing business, for by first rough draft of Chapter One of Flo in the City, my novel about a girl coming of age in the 1910 era, based on the real life letters of www.tighsolas.ca, but frankly, I’m tired. More than that, my eyes are tired. I’ve had a hectic week (life!) dealing with banks and government in the age of endless telephone menus and departments that call themselves “Customer Care” but should be called “Customer We Don’t Care.. Not a whit except about getting our money.” The conversations are always monitored, but I suspect it’s to make sure the agents don’t exhibit any human feeling or plain common sense. It’s as if they have been absorbed by the Borg Collective.

I watched the 3rd installment of Musee Eden on Radio Canada, on the TV, and it was quite gruesome, and graphic nakedness too that is soooo Radio Canada. And that Eric Bruneau is looking more and more like Colin Firth, each episode. (Nice!) But I was watching to see if the two sisters, installed in rooms over the wax museum they inherited in old Montreal, had a maid. It seems not. The episode had a couple of scenes in their home.

You see, in 1910, women weren’t allowed to live alone (well, it was considered unseemly) but they also couldn’t live alone because it was impossible to run a house back then and have a life. It’s not like they had microwavable meals and permanent press clothing!

I know for a FACT because the Nicholson sisters in 1913 took the bold step of taking a flat, with two other teachers, and it turned out badly. One, they had to promise that their mother was coming to live with them to get the place, and two, they had to give up the apartment because it was too much of a mess. Terrific story, really!

I mean this was VERY bold of them. I remember, in the sixties, a group of nurses lived in a duplex near us and how people, well, my father, assumed they were wild women.

I do like the costumes in the show: they look exactly like home-made clothes, the kind the Nicholson’s wore.

Again, the prostitutes are a little over the top, cliche.

Prostitutes were often very young and often just working girls, in the real sense. They worked in factories, or shops, but couldn’t make enough to live on. Maybe that’s why they decided to give teachers decent salaries!!

Musee Eden Episode 2: Looking Backward on 1910

A Valentine’s and Son postcard of 1910 Montreal. My favorite of them all. This picture evokes 1910 to me. It’s Park and Prince Arthur.

I didn’t watch an old movie last night, but I did see the second episode of Musee Eden from Radio Canada on their website, so now I am caught up and I have the third episode tapes for later viewing.

I spent the first little while mesmerized by how much one of the lead actors, Eric Bruneau looks like Colin Firth, so I had to rewind and start watching the episode all over.

The story is moving now, but it really does mix the genres, or tries to cover all the bases with respect to what people like. It is a crime thriller, forensic thingy (a genre I do not like at all) as well a a period piece, women’s social history piece (which I like very much)courtroom drama (which I like but only when well done)and political thriller (which I like). There’s a journalism angle, that I always like, although, so far, no deep insight into how newspapers worked in that era. Usually, shows which juggle too many genres fall apart, but this one seems to work.

The problem is the show is very dark. I keep hoping for a scene in the sunshine on the mountain. And it could use some levity. This episode had a scene with a maid and that could have been played up for laughs. Servants make good comedy. It was shot in Old Montreal, and that helps evoke a Victorian quality, which is what they are looking for, but it doesn’t show what huge changes were going on 100 years ago. So, in short, this story is not so much about 1910, or it is about 1910 but looks backward, and Flo in the City, my novel in progress about a woman coming of age in the pivotal 1910 era, based on the letters of www.tighsolas.ca will look forward. Very much so.

Oh, there was a scene with a prostitute and, boy, was she a caricature. There were two prostitutes in the episode, both older women. The sad fact was prostitutes back then were mostly young. Girls left school at 12, after all.

Musee Eden, so far, doesn’t show that 1910 was actually, as the BBC put it, The Birth of NOW. It was the beginning of the modern age. Many Montreal streets hardly look different today from what they looked like in 1910, take away the trams and add satellite dishes.

I read that the production cost about a million to make (not a lot at all)and had 70 sets and 400 costumes. It’s not really a costume drama, in that it has middle class and poor characters, and, true to as it was, middle class women rotated only a few outfits.

In a review I read the writer complained that the women comport themselves liked modern women. As an ‘expert’ in middle class women of the era, I am not so upset about this. First, as I wrote before, most historical dramas are more about “now” than “then.” I Claudius isn’t about Rome, it’s about Britain. And from my Nicholson letters, it is clear that young women back then were really no different than us…and they had huge dreams of independence and emancipation back then too, although not with respect to sexuality.

First Impressions of Musée Eden, Episode 1

Sainte-Catherine West in 1910. Valentine and Son’s postcard.

I’m old enough to remember this Montreal Main street in the 60′s, when it still had major echoes of what it had looked like in the 1910′s.

So, I saw the first episode of Musee Eden http://musee-eden.radio-canada.ca/ ;

And as a connoisseur of period pieces and an expert, of sorts, in the 1910 era in Canada I thought I’d comment.

The first episode if Musée Eden is meticulously produced, although it suffers from a lack of exterior shots, that characterize British Period pieces. (Well, the British have all those wonderful locales, castles and such.)

So the tone is dark, which, in a big way, befits the crime thriller nature of its plot.

What exteriors there are seem to be shot in Old Montreal, which was around back then, but I don’t think that area evokes the 1910 era. Still, the extras in the exteriors are all wearing great costumes, so I enjoyed them.

From what I saw, the costumes in Musee Eden are perfect, bang on middle class wear. They are the kind of suits and blouses shown in pictures on this website. Right down to the Merry Widow hat one of the leads was wearing.

In this first episode, two young women from Manitoba, played by Laurence Leboef and Mariloup Wolfe, arrive to take possession of their inheritance, a wax museum, where their uncle has been murdered. As they arrive, a man is being tried for his murder. Handsome men ensue.

Yes, as befits a Period Piece, the lead men, Vincent Guillaume Otis and Eric Bruneau are beautiful, indeed, Bruneau greatly resembles Colin Firth, especially around the brows. And he’s got dark Mr. Darcy curls and the lead women , Wolfe and LeBoeuf, are fresh faced and engaging, so that women will identify with them. So Musee Eden, in my opinion, is well cast.

The acting by everyone is terrific and the pacing is excellent, so good editing and direction.

I will have to watch it again to better critique how authentically 1910 Montreal life is depicted. (Of course, any historical drama is more about the present than the past.)

As my website, http://www.tighsolas.ca/ reveals, women in 1910 had very little freedom. Edith Nicholson, 26, couldn’t go out alone to ‘lectures’ which were respectable venues. Marion couldn’t go to the 1909 horse show ( a big event) as she had no beau or elderly matron to take her. (Well, she was independent and didn’t want to have to go somewhere chaperoned.)Two sisters living alone would have been fairly scandalous, (see the Nicholson women in 1913 when they get a place of their own) and if these young women had no maid….well, remember, it took Edith two days to iron her dresses.

I saw adverts in the 1910 Montreal Gazette for tea rooms for women only and skating rinks with matrons on hand. Still, lust and love existed pretty much as today and so the ‘romance’ parts of Musee Eden between the younger sister and adorable Paul McCartney style gent (Vincent Guillaume Otis)are not far off the mark. (I have to better think this out.)

Funny, funny. In the first episode of Musee Eden, Otis’s character recites a list of French Canadian millionaires. Well, the Nicholsons cut out a list of Montreal millionaires which I posted on this blog, earlier on. Otis leads off by naming Forget, who is my relation, and one of the reasons my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, rose to be Director of Services for Montreal in 1921. Dandurand is also named. He is named on my Tighsolas website as the first man to own a car in Montreal. My grandfather knew him, too.

PS. As I wrote this blog I put the link for SRC in and most of my blog disappeared, so I had to rewrite it. Hmm. Never hurts to rewrite anything.

MUSEE EDEN – Radio-Canada

The cover of a promotional brochure for the Ladies’ Home Journal. From the Nicholson Collection, which means I have it somewhere in a box somewhere.

Gee, I’m frazzled. Just as I finished the first rough draft of my novel Flo in the City, about a girl coming of age in the tumultuous 1910 era, based on the authentic information in the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ I see that someone comes to my website looking up “The Montreal Ripper 1910.”

Now I know an awful lot about Montreal in 1910, as this blog shows, and I know of no Montreal Ripper. Well, tracing the link back, I find that the French CBC, or Radio-Canada, is currently airing a new 9 part mini-series about Montreal in 1910, that appears to be half Period Piece, half Forensic Thriller.

So someone has got there before me and juiced it up a bit more than I intend to. Good for them!

The blurb I find online says that Musée Eden, the name of the mini series, is an in-depth look at the life of women in 1910 as well as a crime thriller. (Damn! That’s what Tighsolas is all about.) And it takes place in the red light district. Well, I only recently added a scene about the Red Light District in my story Flo in the City, because, even I know sex sells and because the ‘social evil’ as it was called back then was an issue and even involved the middle class, their men of course. (I also did this as an inside joke. Whenever I swore as a girl, my French Canadian mom would say, “You talk like a girl from de Bullion Street.” There was even a variation, “You dress like a girl from de Bullion Street.” I had no real idea what that meant. I thought it meant I talked like a poor girl. I only lately realized my dear mother was likening me to a prostitute. My mother likely said it, because her mother said it to her. Today, I just wish I had a place on de Bullion. It would mean I was rich.

But, frankly, Flo in the City is an authentic look into middle class anglo life in Montreal in 1910 and has to stay that way, even if I ‘fill in the blanks’ a bit. I guess if I put vampires into the story, it would be more marketable to teens, but,hey, they’ve already done that with Pride and Predator

Anyway, what an interesting event, this mini-series! I missed the premiere. Just a few days ago I decided to go on tour, giving talks about Women’s Life in 1910 to various groups. (I used to go around giving talks on various women’s issues in the 80′s and I gave workshops on literacy and such in the 90′s.) So, now, I have a hook. It’s always important to have a hook.