WILD ANIMALS I HAVE KNOWN

On Saturday, I was in a walk in the Ernest Thompson Seton Park.  I lost interest in READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN, so I decided to start read Seton's famous book WILD ANIMALS I HAVE KNOWN instead. (We had a copy up into the attic, so I didn't have to go to the library.)

It's a wonderful book.  Seton is a great storyteller, and also drew the book's fine illustrations.  So far I've read the story of a wolf pack leader called Lobo and the efforts to trap him; and started the one about a crow pack leader called Silverspot.  The latter, set in Toronto in the Castlefrank area, tells of the different musical tones Silverspot used to lead his group. (A group of crows is called a "murder," right?)

Cecilia and I have made a date for dinner Friday.  Coincidentally, THE HUFFINGTON POST had a column about what not to do on a first date! (In yesterday's TAXI DRIVER, Travis Bickle took his date to a Swedish porno movie.  It didn't end well.) I think I'll wear a cardigan and share a sundae with her.  A week from Wednesday they're showing Audrey Hepburn's ROMAN HOLIDAY at the Event Screen:  maybe she'll want to see it with me. (Sure, I know it's optimistic to think about the second date before you're in the first one.)

At our Coro Verdi concert in June we'll be doing some songs we haven't sung for years, like "Un Bel Raggio Lusinghier" from Rossini's SEMIRAMIDE, "In Mezzo al Mar" and "Din Don." We rehearsed "Din Don" this evening, but it didn't help that the score had some of the baritone-bass notes wrong!

TAXI DRIVER

Travis Bickle (writing to his parents): "One day you will hear a knock on the door and it will be me."

Today I saw Martin Scorcese's classic TAXI DRIVER (for the third time) at the Yonge & Dundas Event Screen with the Sunday Afternoon Movie Meetup.  It's set in the seedy New York, before they Disneyfied Manhattan in the '80s.  Oddly, the climactic violence can feel like a relief, like a taut spring being uncoiled.  That's quite a funny performance by Robert de Niro.  The scene where pimp Harvey Keitel does a slow dance with Jodie Foster is really creepy!

I've read sixty-odd pages of READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN, but I think I've had enough.  I have a feeling the rest of the book will be all the same.

I ate oatmeal for lunch, for the first time in years. (I was going to make an omelette for the parents, but Moira made one first.)

In the afternoon I went out to buy Shredded Wheat, but they were all out.  But I did get yeast, brown sugar, navel oranges and Ambrosia apples.

In the Empire game the Wovles were attacking my Archangels alliance on Friday and Saturday. (They'd invited me to join them, but the Archangels invited me first, and I'm not a turncoat.) So I got hit several times and all my soldiers were killed.  I've been rebuilding slowly since then.

Two Meetups

In the morning I went on a walk with the Life Begins at 40 Meetup.  We started near Eglinton & Leslie--the same place where Sunday's walk started--and walked into Ernest Thompson Seton Park. (I was thinking I should read Seton's WILD ANIMALS I HAVE KNOWN, which we have a copy of.)

Cecilia Ferreira was there, with a pink streak in her hair.  I invited her to have dinner with me at Kramer's, using the gift certificate I won in the trivia contest, and she said yes!  We still have to find the right time, and I've suggested Friday in an email. (We exchanged email addresses by writing on the date-due slip which I've been using as a bookmark for READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN.)

Donald came by for dinner (which was turkey), and afterward figured out how to get my tax return filed!  Too bad I couldn't stay to see it because of my second Meetup.

That was the Toronto Movies and Outings Meetup.  We met at Hue's Kitchen to discuss THE GREAT GATSBY.  When someone mentioned Arsenio Hall, I referred to him by my nickname "Arse Hall," which Jane found clever.  Next month Matthew the organizer will make an event of seeing the new Leo DiCaprio movie of the book, but I'm still unsure if I want to see it.

WEEDS

"What if she [Nancy] dies?" "She's not going to die!" "Why not?" "Because there is no God"--WEEDS

I went to 2Q Video and rented the eighth and last season of WEEDS.  It's a pretty crazy show about widowed soccer mom Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker, as funny as she's sexy), who sells marijuana to pay the bills, and her mixed-up extended family.   Kevin Nealon is especially funny as Doug the crooked accountant, recently on the make in the Wall Street corporate world.

The first couple of seasons were the best; since then it's been going over the top a lot.  They started out in a California suburb and ended up going on the road, moving to New York, and now they're in a Connecticut suburb.  Nancy's been involved with a drug cop and a Mexican cartel head, and even did a prison stretch (to cover for her younger son).  At the start of the latest season she got shot in the head and it turned out to be the work of the son of that drug cop...

I finished translating that book of Portuguese fairy tales. (Three of the six stories involved the Devil.)  So I went back to the Portuguese bookstore and bought a children's history of Portugal and ten booklets telling about Catholic saints.  I've started translating that history book and learning about the ancient Lusitanians.

I still haven't finished the score for "Je Crois Entendre Encore." (Drawing phrases is really difficult in this software!) But I have the main part finished.

Non-Fiction Book Club Meetup

This evening I went to the Non-Fiction Book Club Meetup at the Reference Library.  We talked about Laura Byrne Parquet's WANDERLUST. (Parquet contacted Rose the organizer from Ottawa, pleased that her book was being discussed, and provided some discussion questions that weren't very useful.) Only about a dozen people showed up.  One of us told how she'd walked the pilgrim's road from Portugal to the Santiago de Compostela church, attracted not by religious interest but by cultural curiosity and low costs.  Afterward Rose and I went to Jack Astor's nearby and discussed organizing challenges.

In the afternoon I'd gone to the Gladstone library and borrowed Azar Nafrisi's READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN.  The little I've read leaves me still unsure:  I hope it isn't Oprah-style chick lit. (Moira met an Iranian last weekend who felt the book was anti-Iranian.)

While I was there, I got my library card renewed, producing a credit card bill to establish proof of residence.  I wish they could add a "proof of residence" thing to your existing IDs so you wouldn't need an extra document for things like library cards and voting.

I've started a new computer game called Kingsbridge.  It's about--surprise, surprise!--building and defending a town.

Mengrai Gourmet Thai

Today I joined the Life Begins at 40 Meetup for dinner at the Mengrai Gourmet Thai restaurant near Queen and Sherbourne. (It's a trendy place that's attracted some celebrities:  the manager told us that Samuel L. Jackson is very friendly.)  There were fourteen of us, with just one or two no-shows.  It cost $42 apiece.  At one moment we ended up discussing our favorite lines from YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. ("Damn your eyes!" "Too late!")

I've fixed the earlier glitch in my tax return, but I still can't file it, this time because the file name ends with an .x12 extension when it has to end with .tax.  We'll have to call Donald over to figure it out. (I'm sure there'll be a lot of late returns this year!)

Last night I rented the Blu-Ray disc of Spielberg's LINCOLN and saw it again with the parents.

I was at the supermarket today and they included a penny in my change!  (They aren't quite all gone from circulation.) Just recently we got the last pennies to complete a 50-cent roll.

I've started reading the book PORTUGUESE PHRASES FOR DUMMIES.  It has a lot of expressions that are common in Brazil. Sometime I'm going resume those Memrise lessons because they have audio to show how to pronounce the language.

The King's Adviser

Yesterday I started translating that book of Portuguese folktales.  Here's my translation of "The King's Adviser."

Once upon a time there was a king who could only rule the air in his tummy.  Now he ruled very badly, you see, but he was surrounded by ministers and councillors who passed the time telling him how everything was going well and the people were very happy with his rule.  One day, to find out once and for all whether his ministers and councillors were telling him the truth, the king put on the rags of a beggar and went out into the kingdom to ask the people, “Are you happy with our king?”

And people all answered, “Happy?  And who can be happy, when our king’s a lazybones and a thief?”

“What about his ministers?”

“Windbags!”

“His councillors?”

“Boot-lickers!”

The beggar-king didn’t want to believe what he heard.  But wherever he went the answers were the same.  So he returned very disappointed.

As he was approaching his palace, he met an old peasant, bent with age and weariness, tilling the earth.  This man, who recognized the king despite his beggar disguise, said right away, “God keep Your Majesty for many years!”

The king, amazed by such praise, asked him, “My good man, I’ve just been walking through the kingdom where everyone says the king is a shiftless thief, and now you compliment me in this way?  Does that mean that you at least are happy with my rule?”

The old man answered, “I know Your Majesty too well to complain!  For I knew your grandfather, who was evil as the vipers!  And I knew your father, who was wicked as the Devil.  And as I now know Your Majesty, bad as both of them combined, I’m sure that whoever comes next will be even worse.  Therefore, may God keep you alive for many years!”

The king returned to his palace to consider the old man’s wise words and quickly realized that after all, they were the voice of truth and good sense.  He couldn’t see any hypocrisy or dishonesty in them.  So a few days later he called him in and named him his new adviser, and dismissed all the others.

And today, according to the one who tells this story, he’s still there ruling the air in his tummy.  But now he’s no longer surrounded by the people who deceived him...

LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY

I've started reading the spring issue of LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY, whose subject is animals.  Just today I read an essay about the taxidermic displays at New York's American Museum of Natural History.

One of the subjects in the Boston bombing had the first name Tamerlane, so I've been reading about the original Tamerlane on wikipedia.  In his forty-year career of conquest and destruction, he killed something like five percent of the world's population!  Christians had had a small presence in Persia and Central Asia, but as a faithful Moslem he wiped them out, much like Catholic Spain would obliterate its Moslem and Jewish communities a century later.

It seems ridiculous to me that the surviving suspect should face a federal charge of using weapons of mass destruction.  It's one thing with a real WMD like an A-bomb, which can devastate more than one state.  And trying to blow up an airliner is different, because aviation is a federal matter.  But it seems to me that a mere pressure-cooker bomb like this should clearly be a state matter. (The politicians calling for a death sentence are contemptible, especially "liberals" like Senator Charles Schumer.)

Today I reached the end of my book on Portuguese grammar.  That language actually has a future subjunctive!  In Portugal they have the expression "oxala," which comes from the Arabic "inshallah," meaning "God willing." (Like many Spanish and Portuguese words that start with al-, it goes back to the Middle Ages when Arabic-speaking Moslems dominated the region.) Now I've started translating that book of Portuguese folktales.

At choir practice we're doing several opera pieces along with the folksongs.  Tonight we rehearsed the gypsies & bullfighters chorus from LA TRAVIATA.  Giuseppe confirmed that this concert will be his last one. (He'll be 75 in June, and age is finally catching up with him.)

Snail's Pace Walking Meetup

"But everybody knows that life isn't worth living"--L'ETRANGER

Happily, Anita has revived her Snail's Pace Walking Meetup after taking a break for a year or two.  Today we walked through a Wilket Creek Park trail, which started near Eglinton & Leslie, up to Edwards Gardens. (They had an African violet show and some Earth Day activities.) Afterward we had lunch at a Swiss Chalet near Eglinton & Don Mills.

I recognized Mary and Angela from past Meetups, but didn't remember their names:  they didn't mind me asking but it embarrasses me. (I go to so many Meetup events that I meet too many people to remember most of their names.) I also met an Iranian couple.

On the way back, I finished reading L'ETRANGER.  The last few pages were really jaw-dropping!  I was thinking of making closing passages the topic of the June ROLT Meetup, and I'll have to read this one.

In that Empire game I finally ran out of food and my attack troops deserted.  But now I have a new outpost with a food supply and I'll soon be ready to recruit some new ones.  (I've split my defense troops between the castle and the outpost and I'm starting to run a food surplus again.)

PARSIFAL

Today I saw the Met production of Wagner's PARSIFAL at the Sheppard Grande, the last of this season's opera telecasts.  It lasted about four and a half hours, plus an hour of intermissions.  It's the one about the guy who meets the Knights of the Holy Grail and goes off on a quest to recover the Sacred Spear and restore the order.

If you want to see a Wagner opera for the first time, do NOT start with PARSIFAL! (Choose a RELATIVELY simple one like FLYING DUTCHMAN or LOHENGRIN.) This one is vast and complex, and you need to have acquired a taste for Wagner already.  The very concept can be intimidating:  some years ago I was going to see Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's famous movie of the opera at the Cinematheque, and even bought a ticket, but when the time came I chickened out.  As you may guess from that running time, the... pace... is... rather... slow...  I'm a Verdi man myself:  his operas have more hummable tunes, though Wagner can come up with a nice tune when he isn't preoccupied with drama. (As in "Elsa's Dream" or the Prize Song.) My favorite number was the chorus of the seductive flower-women early in the second act.

This production basically kept my attention for the whole course, though I did get a bit distracted by happy thoughts in the second act and unhappy thoughts in the third.  It has a nice look, especially the clouds in the background.  Percy brings to mind that Russian concept of the "holy fool." Like Siegfried, becomes a hero because he doesn't know any better. (Something American about that.)

They mentioned the Met productions planned for telecast next season.  I may see EUGENE ONEGIN, LA BOHEME, PRINCE IGOR and RUSALKA, or I may go easy next year.  BTW, I find that opening animation with the guy whistling "Libbiamo" annoying. (That is so PBS!)

Tax time

Today I did my taxes.  It's pretty simple for me:  I just needed three bank documents showing my investment income, and the total profit Aquilon Books. (It's just over $500 this year.) That's being reported as my income because my total has been beneath the taxable level for years.

This year you have to do it online, so I bought the Tax Freeway software.  I finished the whole return but found an error:  I hadn't entered the number of the business category for our book trade.  I found out that number, but because of some technical glitch I can't enter it!  If this were on paper, I could just add it to my written description of the business and the person reading it could figure it out.  But this is a computer, so I'm stuck.  Maybe I'll have to buy a new software download. (They're pretty cheap.)

This evening I saw Wim Wenders' THE BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB at the Yonge & Dundas Event Screen.  It's a nice movie with some great Cuban music.  I especially liked the scene where the aged jazz pianist was playing at a ballet school and surrounded by kids.

The last zip.ca DVD has completed its return journey.  My Safari homepage has links to twelve pages, and I've removed zip.ca from the twelve and replaced it with that Empire game. (My main challenge in that game is to raid nearby robber barons to keep food coming in to support my soldiers.)

THE CAT SCREAMED AT MIDNIGHT

In the afternoon I saw BIG FELLA, with Paul Robeson singing "My Curly Headed Baby."  Unfortunately, in the last 15 minutes the DVD became unplayable.  When that happens the words "Skipping over damaged area" appear.  Sometimes the disc will skip forward to just a few minutes later. (Sometimes you can see a bit more by going backward toward where the damage ends.) But in this case it seemed to stay unplayable till the end.  Oh well, I think I can guess how it was going to end anyway.

Afterward I mailed the disc, so we are now completely finished with zip.ca .  Mother suggested checking out Canada's other online DVD rental companies, but zip.ca had the biggest selection.  At least 2Q Video is in our neighborhood and its selection is pretty wide.

John and Kathrine came over to celebrate John's birthday (which was on Sunday, but they only now found the time to come over). We ate Indian food, which I always like.

This evening I joined the theatre group at the Academy of Artisans. (I was half an hour late, because I couldn't remember how far north of Lawrence Avenue the place was.) We considered several themes, including a high-school reunion, a 1920s speakeasy and a mystery involving a restless ghost.  In the end we chose THE CAT SCREAMED AT MIDNIGHT, about the murder of an English lord on a 1930s estate. (Shades of GOSFORD PARK.) It sounds promising.

Our last DVDs from zip.ca

Aidan Quinn to his misbehaving son: "I know that beneath it all you're a good boy.  But I have to teach you to be a good man!"--THE BOOK OF DANIEL

On Saturday I ended our zip.ca subscription. (This Tuesday would have been the start of a new month of shipments.)  They've sent us over 1600 discs over the past nine years, but the well's almost dry. We got seven more working days to return our remaining DVDs.  As of now, there's only one left to send.

One of our last discs was some episodes from the TV series THE BOOK OF DANIEL.  It was a short-lived but interesting show with Aidan Quinn as an Episcopalian priest and family man in upstate New York.  Curiously, in some scenes he'd converse with a rather laid-back Jesus Christ, sort of like the scenes in SIX FEET UNDER where David talked to dead people.

Some of the plotlines are a bit over the top, but the writing is often clever.  I like Quinn in this kind of role.  It's a shame that it got cancelled early:  I got curious about what would happen next.  Today I returned that disc, leaving just one more.

Our last disc is of two British movies from the 1930s starring the great Afro-American singer-actor Paul Robeson.  Today we saw SONG OF FREEDOM, with Robeson as a dock worker who becomes an opera singer, then finds out through an heirloom pendant that he's descended from a queen on an island off the African coast.  So he moves to that island and vies with the local witch doctors to win his people over to modern enlightenment.  As with most of his movies, he has some nice songs.

That DVD has a second Robeson vehicle titled BIG FELLA.  After we see it tomorrow, we'll return it and be finished with Zip.

Je Crois Entendre Encore

This afternoon I went to the Reference Library near the Bloor-Yonge station and borrowed the score for Bizet's THE PEARL FISHERS. (You can borrow the scores with a yellow band on the spine.) I borrowed it because I want to learn the aria "Je Crois Entendre Encore" when I resume my singing lesson with Giuseppe.

It's a tenor aria, but I can sing it in a baritone range with a few changes.  The top note is an A, which is too high for me--the highest note I can do is F or G--so I'll transpose the key from A minor to D minor, where the top note will be a manageable E.  Fortunately, I've purchased the Finale Notepad 2009 software, which allows me to create scores, then play them back through MIDI and spot any mistakes.  The only annoying thing is that when I open the software it always asks whether I want to trade up to a more expensive version.

Then I went to the World's Biggest Bookstore and bought a paperback of Camus' L'ETRANGER for the Book and Brunch Meetup. (This translation was titled THE OUTSIDER.) It has a great opening: "Mother died today.  Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."

In the evening I went to Paula's Toronto Fun Lovin' Friends Meetup at the Golden Griddle near College station. (She somehow reminds me of Paz de la Huerta as the mistress in BOARDWALK EMPIRE.) We talked about Dale Carnegie's book HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE, which I read when I was a kid!  I'd already had dinner, but I ordered ice cream.

The NDP convention

I was rather depressed by the news that the federal NDP at their Montreal convention removed some socialist language from the party constitution.  It isn't that I know the party is about to abandon socialism altogether; for all I know, they'll remain as socialist as always.  But as an attempt to win new centrist votes, I'm skeptical that it'll work.  It seems to me that people who hate socialism will largely continue to vote against the party.  Thomas Mulcair is trying to have it both ways, telling one group of people that the party is faithful to its socialist roots, and telling another that they don't really mean it.  It's a weasel game, and it may end with both groups feeling they're being lied to.

I fear that this may be like Tony Blair's "New Labour" in Britain two decades ago:  a power grab by the party's ruling elite at the expense of the grassroots.  I hear you saying "But Blair brought Labour back to power by making it ELECTABLE!" The truth is, Labour returned to power in 1997 because the Conservative government, after 18 years in power, had finally become unelectable.  If Stalin had been leading Labour in 1997, they still would have returned to power.  And New Labour has far less to show for the next thirteen years in power than Clement Atlee's postwar "old Labour" government accomplished in just six years.

IMHO no party ever won an election by moving to the center. You win elections by moving the center to you.  Show me a party that's moving "to the center," and I'll show you a party that isn't moving to anything, that's only moving away from something.

The Theatre Meetup

The Theatre Meetup had another event today.  Five of us met at the Safari on Avenue Road north of Lawrence.  We were supposed to imagine undead characters to play, and I thought of a twist on the Phantom of the Opera.  I imagined playing the Phantom of the Dinner Theater!  He'd dress very kitschily, with a big, obvious wig, medallions and rings, and maybe an Elvis-type jumper.  I also imagined a zombie walk, staggering about with my left shoulder low and my right shoulder high (like Richard III), twirling my right forearm about the elbow, muttering "DINNER... DINNER..."

Anyway, we got a new idea of putting on an interactive murder mystery.  We'll rent a restaurant and combine the show with dinner.  You can buy a kit online for one of those mysteries, which come in a lot of variations. (One of the guys in the group has performed in mysteries with a Charles Dickens theme and a Dirty Thirties theme.) It sounds fun.

On the way home, I finished WANDERLUST.  It's enjoyable, though it could have used better editing. (At one point the author wrote of "wrangling" a passport, where "wangling" was the correct word.)

I've started a new castle-building online game called Empire.  I'm a sucker for those games.

I have a pretty big headache just now.

Going Places

"Damn these glasses!" Steve Martin: "OK, sir. [to the glasses] I damn thee!"--THE JERK

Today was the latest ROLT Meetup, titled Going Places and concerning travel writing.  There were six people there.  Jane read the beginning of Graham Greene's TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT, and Jim read a story he'd written about a unique house in London, England. (Moira said he should try to publish it.)

I read a funny selection from John Steinbeck's TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY where he talked about Texas, including a bit about seeing rich Texans at a Thanksgiving feast which reminded him of his hired man saying, "You have to be rich to dress that bad." (And Kim Kardashian's mother is from Texas...) I also read an equally bit from Bill Bryson's NEITHER HERE NOR THERE where he talked about visiting the tiny nation of Liechtenstein, and a couple of pages from Charles Dickens AMERICAN NOTES where he talks about Toronto, then gives his general impression of Canada.  I ordered French toast instead of the usual scrambled eggs and sausage.

In the evening I saw Carl Reiner's comedy THE JERK at the Yonge & Dundas Event Screen (for the third time).  The picaresque, hit & miss script is just an excuse for Steve Martin to act goofy for an hour and a half.  It's definitely on the vulgar side (the sort of movie where his dog is called Shithead and he goes to the bathroom in one scene) but it made me laugh a lot when I was a teenager.  Bernadette Peters does a lot for the movie as his romantic interest, and Jackie Mason turns up in a supporting role.

Three movies

"Myrtle, you have a lot to learn and I hope you never learn it"--HARVEY

Last night I saw HARVEY at the Yonge & Dundas Event Screen (for the second time). That's the one with James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd, a good-natured tippler who keeps seeing a six-foot rabbit called Harvey.  An enjoyable farce with Stewart in rare form.

Today I saw the start of Peter Watkins' THE FREETHINKER, a documentary-style biography of Swedish playwright August Strindberg.  It was three or four hours long, but I only saw a little of it:  it was all over the place and hard to follow. (Watkins did better with his more straightforward film about the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch.)

This evening I saw Dudley Nichols' movie of Eugene O'Neill's MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, a curious, powerful reworking of the Electra story. (That's the Greek legend where Agamemnon came back from the Trojan War only to be murdered by his wife and her lover, and his daughter Electra pressured her brother Orestes to avenge their father:  psychologists speak of the Electra complex as a female version of the Oedipus complex.) This version has Rosalind Russell as the Electra figure, moving the story to after the Civil War.  Lots of incestuous subtext and brooding over family ghosts.

My "Life is too short" list

The other day someone in the family asked if I had written anything about the late Margaret Thatcher on this blog.  I answered, "Life is too short." Which got me thinking about writing a list of other "Life is too short" people:

Rob Ford
Stephen Harper
Donald Trump
Kim Kardashian (and anyone else in reality TV)
Dr. Phil
Rappers (I couldn't tell Jay-Z from Kanye West to save my life)
George F. Will (and anyone else who regularly appears on American TV's weaselly Sunday morning talk shows)
Anyone involved in the sitcom FRIENDS (which I've never watched)
Tom Cruise
Hillary Clinton
Shania Twain
Anyone who writes about fashion
Dr. Laura
Tina Brown
Anyone who's famous because of TV commercials
George W. Bush
"Liberal realists"
Charlie Sheen
Jean Chretien
Britney Spears
Don Cherry
Tony Blair
Lindsey Lohan
People who believe in "the sensible center"
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Liberals who hate Ralph Nader
Simon Cowell
People who buy Disney Princess merchandise

And I'm just getting started.  I could spend my whole life writing lists like this!

STANDING IN THE SHADOWS OF MOTOWN

Last night I dreamed about an American dodging the draft in World War II who went underground and wanted to send his sister a letter but was being careful not to give the government a lead to track him down.

This afternoon I went to the Lillian Smith library to borrow Steinbeck's TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY for Saturday's ROLT Meetup.  Afterward I waited for a streetcar during a big downpour, and just before it arrived a car came along and gave us all a big splash!  Then I went to the Beguiling in Mirvish Village and splurged on some new comic strip reprints (PEANUTS, LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, ON STAGE, POPEYE), and a reprint of Carl Barks' Donald Duck comics!

In the evening I saw STANDING IN THE SHADOWS OF MOTOWN, for the second or third time, at the Yonge & Dundas Event Screen. (The April schedule is finally online.) There were only half a dozen people there.

It's a wonderful documentary about the Funk Brothers, the instrumentalists behind a plethora of Motown hits in the 1960s.  Long neglected, the survivors finally get belated recognition here, performing in concert with some famous singers. (You haven't lived till you've seen Bootsy Collins' wardrobe!) Great story, wonderful music:  "What's Goin' On" and "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted" are my favorites.  Next week they're showing THE BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB, another musical documentary I want to see again.

THE GENERAL

"If you lose the war, don't blame me"--rejected Confederate recruit Buster Keaton, THE GENERAL

Last night I dreamed about THE CHANT OF JIMMIE BLACKSMITH, a powerful Australian movie I saw thirty years ago. (Today I can't find it on video.  zip.ca did list WE OF THE NEVER NEVER, another Australian movie I want to see again, but it's one of their many unavailable titles.)

It was warm today so I finally put away my electric heater.  I even opened the windows for a bit!

In the afternoon I saw INTO THE DEEP, an absorbing Ric Burns documentary for PBS about whaling in American history.  Much about the ESSEX, a whaling ship wrecked by an aggressive whale leading to cannibalism, and about MOBY-DICK, which was partly based on that disaster.  Whalers were sort of the cowboys of the pre-Civil War US.

In the evening I went to the Revue and saw Buster Keaton's silent classic THE GENERAL yet again. (They also showed Keaton's National Film Board short THE RAILRODDER, where he crossed Canada on a railroad cart.) Like CITIZEN KANE, it never loses its freshness.  Lots of bits like the scene where Keaton's stopped the engine to gather firewood and the girl takes the opportunity to tie a rope between two little fir trees to block the pursuing engine.  The train predictably uproots the trees in a second, but what we didn't expect is that they get caught in the wheels, forcing it to stop and lose valuable time!  I also like the bit where she's feeding the engine, but she throws one log overboard because it has a hole in it.

Back to Coro Verdi

This evening we returned to choir practice after a three-week break.  We're working on a concert of Italian folk songs for early June.  Giuseppe wasn't happy about the small number of mezzos, but he had a vote and all of us in turn said that we wanted to continue the choir.

It's been a few years since we did a concert that was all folk songs. (I've missed doing that music a lot.) These songs include "Funiculi, Funicula," "Tiritomba," "Lu 'bbene che j' te vuje," "In Mezzo al Mar," "Vola Vola," "O Marenariello," "I Battitore di Grano," and of course "Santa Lucia." Unfortunately, we weren't up to the challenge of "Lu Piante de le Fojje" and Giuseppe almost ended things right there, until we convinced him we could do some easier songs instead.  Too bad, it's a nice song.  And I hope we can get some more mezzos before June.

Last night I dreamed of "waking up" in the morning and singing the Dean Martin song "Memories Are Made of This." (That's one of the songs I sing at karaoke.) But then in my dream I remembered the superstition that if you sing before breakfast, you'll cry before night!  Recently I've had this recurring dream where I have some clothes in a house in one town, and other clothes in another town.

This is the 200th post on this blog of mine.  Woohoo!

LOVE, MARILYN

"I can be smart when it's important.  But most men don't like it"--Marilyn Monroe in HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE

Today I saw the documentary LOVE, MARILYN at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.  It's only about the second movie I've seen at that cinema:  a couple of years ago I saw Michelle Williams' fine western MEEK'S CUTOFF there. (When I mentioned that to Jane today, she asked, "Didn't that also have that notnicknolte-nicknolte guy?" I promised that I'd give her attribution when I mentioned that quote in this blog.)

I saw this movie with the Sunday Afternoon Movie Meetup group. (Several of them had never seen a Marilyn Monroe movie!) The sad story was familiar, but it still fascinates me:  she had this really deep insecurity that nothing could overcome.  They used personal files that were only uncovered recently, and employed a lot of famous actors to deliver her perspective and that of people who were close to her.  I must say that Uma Thurman seemed to get into MM's character pretty deeply.

Moira made dinner today, which was scalloped potatoes and ham.  I suggested that she add some garlic, which gave it an original taste.

Since its high level the week before last, this blog's viewership has dropped again.  Maybe I think too much about the numbers.

RIGOLETTO

Today I saw the Met production of Verdi's RIGOLETTO in the digital telecast at the Sheppard Grande.  That's the opera about Rigoletto, the nasty hunchbacked jester at the court of Mantua's lecherous, happy-go-lucky Duke, who has an innocent daughter called Gilda whom he worships and hides away but she falls in love with the Duke who takes her virginity so Rigoletto schemes to murder the Duke but Gilda takes the Duke's place and dies instead.

The story is clever in the way Rigoletto's nastiness keeps rebounding onto Gilda:  he makes fun of a courtier whose daughter the Duke deflowered, but he ends up in the same boat; he enthusiastically joins a plot to kidnap someone's wife but finds out too late it's Gilda they're really after; he tries to kill the Duke but kills Gilda instead.  It has a great beginning, plunging you into the milieu, and a great ending like Verdi's IL TROVATORE. (Both operas' endings are the equivalent of a movie freeze-frame ending.)

This production moves the setting to Las Vegas in the Rat Pack era.  The Duke becomes a singing star and Rigoletto is his sidekick in a loud Argyle cardigan, with no beard (another of those details Giuseppe doesn't like). Gilda ends up in a car trunk instead of a sack.  The titles are often clever in updating the lines to Rat Pack lingo: "Heaven brought my baby back to me!" and "Beat it, no handouts!" The lead singers were pretty good and it didn't feel long.

I'm finished with zip.ca

I've decided we should end our subscription to zip.ca .  Over the last nine years we've rented over 1600 DVDs from them, and our remaining queue has about 300 titles, but only about 40 of them are now available!  This is what happens when discs get lost in the mail or cracked, and only the more popular ones get replaced.

This evening I finally saw the DVD of EVENING PRIMROSE, Stephen Sondheim's one-act musical made for TV in 1967.  It's about poet Anthony Perkins hiding in a New York Department Store at night and finding a whole group of other people there, including an object of forbidden love.  It's a bit thin but pretty original.

We also saw the documentary YOU'VE BEEN TRUMPED, a real jaw-dropper.  It's about Donald Trump's efforts to build a mega-golf resort in rural Scotland and force out the nearby residents.  The Aberdeen city council rejected his application, but the Scottish government overruled them, and the local police have been doing his dirty work.  It's emerged as an environmental disaster.  IMHO Britain's dirty secret is money worship.

I have a few remaining DVDs from zip.ca to see in our last month, including PBS documentaries about whaling and Lake Chataqua, THE FREETHINKER (Peter Watkins' documentary-style film biography of playwright August Strindberg), and a compilation of movie musicals from the golden age in the 1940s.

Act Now Meetup

This evening I went to the first Act Now Meetup at the Academy of Artisans near Lawrence Avenue & Avenue Road.  We plan to put on a play for charity, but we're still in the early stages.

Irene brought a play called HEAVEN OR HELL, about famous historical people going before the throne of God, with slapstick and lapsed-Catholic humor.  We did a read-through, in which I played Saint Peter. (Coincidentally, this afternoon I was Googling the song that goes, "Oh, you can't get to heaven in a rocking chair, 'Cause the Lord don't want no lazybones there!")

Don preferred doing something about zombies, so Irene will be working on something along that line.  We've been asked to imagine an undead character we'd like to play for next time.  I think I'd like to play someone like the Phantom of the Opera.

Afterward, Irene was telling me about her writing.  She's written two books:  one about her Polish-Canadian childhood in Duplessis' Quebec; and one about working as a printer in a union shop. (In the latter book, she takes an approving view of unions and talks about things women can learn from men.) Neither book's found a publisher, which seems a shame.

Last night I dreamed of Father and I visiting the York University library (he's never been there) and finding a big collection of slide presentations!

I went to see my shrink Dr. Hassan today.  I talked about watching ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS and mentioned that Hassan has an expression a bit like Hitch's deadpan expression in the show's famous introductions (all written by James Allardice).

I read the first fifty pages of WANDERLUST!

Life Begins at 40 Meetup

I've joined the Life Begins at 40 Meetup, organized by Alex, who also does the Classic Movie Meetup. (I have eleven years behind me.) This evening I went to an event with this group, a trivia contest at Kramer's.

My group was called King James and the Jokers. (Their idea, not mine.) In the end, we came first with a score of 79%, and the credit was mostly mine. (I don't think anyone else knew that the tiny nation in the Pyrenees was Andorra.) We won a thirty-dollar gift certificate at Kramer's, and I hope to arrange for the team to come there so we can share it.  I would have enjoyed our victory more except that I had another headache.

I finally got the book WANDERLUST in the mail, and it looks good.  And I should have time to finish it before the Non-Fiction Book Club meets late this month.

I was just looking at the statistics for this webpage.  The leading nations for my pageviews are Germany and the US.  The leading referring website is filmhill.com .  A post I wrote last October about THE HUFFINGTON POST got 50 comments, but they were all spam with links to pages selling drugs like Viagra and phentermine.  I've been getting more hits than usual in the past week.

Another Book Club Meetup

This evening I went to a new Book Club Meetup's first event at an apartment building north of Bathurst & Lawrence.  We were each supposed to bring two book suggestions.  There were a dozen of us, and some of us suggested more than two.  You can imagine that it got pretty hectic. (We could have used a talking stone.)

I suggested Michael Ende's German children's book THE NEVERENDING STORY.  I read it almost thirty years ago and it's really wonderful! (I recall the movie was pretty good too.) It's a book I plan on rereading soon anyway. Then I suggested Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "magical realism" classic ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE.  I also mentioned Giuseppe di Lampedusa's THE LEOPARD, but warned that Toronto libraries have few copies.

For the next few months, we'll be reading NIGHT GARDENING, THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES and CITY OF THIEVES.  I'm not sure whether they're the sort of books I'm interested in or just the stuff of Oprah's Book Club.

Afterward I went to another karaoke session with the INTJ Meetup group.  I sang Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain" and the Kinks' "Come Dancing."

I've finally finished reading the intoxication issue of LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY.

Film noirs

Alfred Hitchcock (displaying a gun): "This is for the man who has everything, enabling you to take it from him."

I've just seen a couple of film noirs on DVD. (I think of them as the "desire and trouble" genre.) Last night we saw WHERE DANGER LIVES, in which doctor Robert Mitchum falls for suicidal rich girl Faith Domergue who tells her she can't marry him because of her father, so he goes to her house and confronts father Claude Rains... who turns out to be her older husband!  Of course, it leads to a fight, in which Rains conks Mitchum on the head with a poker, giving him a concussion that impairs his judgement and slowly paralyzes him, and Mitchum knocks Rains' lights out, and when he returns with water Rains is dead! (Uh-oh Spaghetti-Os!) So Domergue convinces Mitchum to lam it... It isn't as good as the Mitchum noirs OUT OF THE PAST and ANGEL FACE, but it has a sense of paranoia.  Rains is good enough to make me wish his role were less small.

This evening I saw TENSION, in which mousy pharmacist Richard Basehart loses his no-good wife to a rich tough guy who beats him up, so he decides to murder the tough guy through a big scheme that involves him creating a fake identity and moving into an apartment where he meets Cyd Charisse...  Things turn ugly, but not in the way we expected.

Speaking of noirs, I've been watching the 1950s TV anthology ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS on DVD.  It's a clever show with some very original stories, and Hitch's deadpan introductions are always good for a laugh.

Last night I dreamed of a remake of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, but longer and even more explicit!

Dreams

I went to bed early this evening and woke up about midnight.  I dreamed of seeing a rocket launch near the Sackville house.  It produced a lot of sparks and I took off my glasses and didn't look at it in focus.  (There's no mystery where that came from:  I was just looking at the part of that Tintin book with a rocket launch.) I also dreamed of Carol Burnett, and learning that her real first name was Marhavale(?).

I really wish I wouldn't dream about the places of my youth so much.  I feel like I'm not free of the past.  The other week I dreamed of seeing the Sackville house, except that this time it hadn't been lived in for years and was falling to pieces.  Does that mean I'm closer to being free?

The night before I dreamed of a movie about a revolutionary (played by Jack Palance!) sneaking into Sackville and installing a revolutionary regime before the Americans could install a puppet regime there.

I'm finally getting close to finishing that book about 50 physics ideas.  Just today I read about black holes and quasars.

The other day, when I posted about the I Heart Public Transit event, I got almost 70 hits, the biggest number since my post about LES MISERABLES.

I'm running short again.  I could mention that I thought we had one last piece of coconut cream pie in the fridge, but I can't find it.  Maybe it got finished, or maybe it didn't.