Charlotte Makes Photos

One lovely thing about entering the darker and colder season is that we have this sort of time where we almost seem to collectively resist the change. Whether this is an act of resistance, not hearing nature’s call to downshift, or getting energized by the arrival of Christmas, Halloween never really seems to mark the end of things to do.

With so much on, Kathleen and I gave ourselves a pretty full weekend by our standards. We began with a little trip to the Bytowne where You Can See Everything was showing. Rarely one for newer movies — or in this case, a metadocumentary — my interest was piqued once I saw that my Bluesky mutuals are unanimous in how great it was. They weren’t wrong about Camp Miasma earlier this year, so I booked the tickets.

Neither of us knew what to expect really, outside of knowing the general topic. I don’t know if I expected that the theatre would explode in laughter as much as it did or even be moved to jeer at one of the characters like it did. Much of this died down (save for the jeers) when the documentary’s meta second act began.

Like most people leaving the theatre, the near-3 hour showing gave us all a whole lot to discuss. The chatter hanging in the air above the sidewalk outside the theatre confirmed it. For my own part, while it’s positioned as the/a central question of the documentary — was Elizabeth Holmes lying? — depends entirely on how you define and understand lying.

What I do know is three things came to mind as the three hours unfolded:

1. I recognized in her the same sort of face I’ve long made when locating my handy little internal phrase book for the right thing to say when speaking with someone so as to come off as “normal”. Even if I’ve either failed to conceal or have even offered up that I’m a bit off, my little internal rolodex continues to be well-used and the phrase I choose depends on my watching the person closely.
2. The single most pervasive thought came through in the first act too. It occurred fairly quickly that I was watching my grandmother on screen. A person who is never especially genuine, because she can’t be genuine. Since she doesn’t really know what that actually means, she believes herself to be inherently genuine.
3. As the film was nearing its end and these questions were causing all sorts of bother, I couldn’t help but remember a small collection of Criminology theses I read from the 1980s. I don’t remember much of their content outside of them being in Canada and they involved young researchers interviewing incarcerated men in federal facilities for violent crimes. What I do remember is that it became clear to me that as they went deeper into their research, they were clearly being spun by the men they were interviewing. It was never clear if these men knew they were doing it or not, but you could easily see the crime they were convicted of fall into a subtextual background and how these men felt come to to front of the stage.¹

Ultimately, even though I’d answer the question of whether or not she was lying as “yes”, the question itself neither made the film what it was, nor does that question really matter. Lying? Manipulative? To everyone else, sure. But in the same way that a house cat can’t recognize their comforts, that’s hardly the question.

Less seriously, as June Martin put it recently: “[W]hat the Elizabeth Holmes stuff is teaching me is that I could have a totally different life if my eyes were a bit bigger.”

After We Saw Nothing

Once we left the theatre, we made our way home for a little bit. Kathleen was in need of another tea and a certain spoiled housecat was going to need some more of the good stuff (paté).

Our next weekend stop was a little space behind a mechanic’s garage in Little Italy. By then it was dark, humid, and there was this constant threat of rain. How noir, how November. It was, of course, the promise of vegan food that brought us to this location. Normally the home base of Nonna’s Pizza, it was being used by Little Jo Berry’s and YugiRolls for a little pop-up event that evening, and a sort of send-off for YugiRolls, who will be winding down at the end of the year.

Now, before Saturday, we had never actually tried them, but figured it would be a good time, especially since the only reason we hadn’t before was that the lines were too long at Vegans Who Snack.

…it’s really unfortunate that they are winding down, because our noodle dishes, spring, and egg rolls were delicious. We also brought home some frozen bao buns and potstickers to tide us over and we have until the end of the year to enjoy their food. We’re hoping to order from them for our Christmas Eve meal.

It got busy rather quickly while we were there (Ottawa’s hungry for good vegan options, which really are lacking in a traditional sense), but we enjoyed ourselves without my getting overwhelmed by the chatter reverberating off the cinder block walls.

On the way out, we chose some sweet treats to enjoy through the week, and it was back home to our warm apartment. Since we had already watched a movie and it was getting a little later, we just watched the latest Cassie Workman is Witchy AF, which, like the episode before, was an emotional roller coaster.

1. It also made me wonder about some of what was driving some opposition to the carceral state. There are many good reasons to be so (and, on balance, I would be closer to that position), but I’m not especially moved by an argument that positions life imprisonment of one who has been convicted of rape and/or murder as cruel and unusual vis-a-vis the nature of their trespass. ↩︎