Hot Docs

Reporter: "People say you're a vulture for publicity." Alice Cooper: "What's wrong with that?"

Sunday night I went to the Hot Docs documentary Doc of the Dead at the Hart House cinema.  This screening wasn't sold out, so I managed to get a ticket when I arrived there.  While I was waiting for the film to come on, they kept repeating this piano theme three times a minute! (I measured the time with my watch.) It became a steady drip-drip-drip like Chinese water torture.  The documentary itself was about zombie movies and the whole zombie subculture, including zombie weddings:  it reminded me of the time I saw Toronto's annual zombie walk, which included an undead Pope.  They also discussed issues like zombies who can run fast vs. those who can't.  I guess I should see Night of the Living Dead someday.

Monday afternoon I went to the festival headquarters in Cumberland Terrace and bought a few more tickets.  I couldn't get into the documentary about the making of Top of the Lake or the one about the expert who says slums are the solution rather than the problem. (Sure hope I can find them on Netflix or somewhere.) Two of the three screenings I did get into were at the Bloor:  that place is huge and rarely sells out.  But there was a delay on the Bloor line between Yonge and St. George, so I ended up taking the streetcar west from St. Clair station and was pretty late.

Last night I saw Super Duper Alice Cooper at the Bloor.  As with Purple Rain, I sat near the balcony's back row.  The first half was uproarious. (I didn't realize that the incident of killing the chicken onstage--he says it was killed by the audience after he threw it out to them--happened in Toronto!) But the second half got more serious, talking about his battles with alcohol, then with cocaine.

Yesterday afternoon I finally went to the Jones library in the east end to explain I'd lost their book. (Before doing so, I took the opportunity to go to Wychwood library and get my library card renewed.) They're going to contact the other libraries and see if the book shows up within the system, which will take a couple of months.  Glad that's over with.

THE FRIENDLY PERSUASION

Daughter: "Mama's so strait-laced!" Gary Cooper: "I think I can loosen a few laces"--The Friendly Persuasion

Thursday night I went to the Poetry Meetup at Hart House and recited my translation of passages from Sophocles' Prometheus Bound. (It's actually drama, of course, but I think it works on the level of poetry.) Irene was there, whom I hadn't seen since we tried to start the theatre group a year ago.  She'd written a play of religious satire, but the others wanted to do a zombie play.  Then later on we started to develop a mystery, but that fell through...

Yesterday afternoon at the acting class, we did the Man on the Moon scene from memory. We're going to put the scene aside for now, though I think Nancy would like to come back to it sometime.  Linda and Chris were also doing a scene from Loraine Hansbury's A Raisin in the Sun.  Some of us arrive early just so we can chat with Nancy before the class itself.

Last night I went to a Karaoke Meetup at the Piper's, near our house north of St. Clair Avenue.  There were more people than I expected, and I waited two hours between songs. Jim with the sinus-clearing voice was there.  The poor waitress was stuck handling the bar and all the tables by herself!

This afternoon I saw William Wyler's wonderful The Friendly Persuasion, for the third time, with the Classic Movie Meetup at a screening in the Central in Mirvish Village. (We also got a buffet lunch, which is no great shakes but that isn't important.) Those Gary Cooper movies seem to get better and better with every viewing!  It's a compelling, often funny story about an Indiana Quaker family finding their principles put to the test during the Civil War.  It's easy to forget that Cooper often had a droll touch in movies like this one, and I also liked Dorothy McGuire as his wife.  Pity that whenever we see Anthony Perkins today we think of Psycho.  Pat Boone's theme song "Thee I Love" raised guffaws in the audience.

HUD

Paul Newman (being roused out of bed by his teenage nephew): "I sure do hope for your sake that this house is on fire!"--Hud

Last night I went to see Film 101 at the Event Screen.  They showed Martin Ritt's Hud from the novel Horseman Riding By by Larry McMurtry, one of my favourite writers.  I'd seen it before, but only on TV; photographed by the famous James Wong Howe, on the big screen it's a revelation!  Paul Newman's in rare form as the carousing, amoral ranch heir.  The scene where they have to shoot their whole herd to prevent the spread of hoof and mouth disease is still pretty shocking, though they didn't hurt any real cows in filming it  When Murray Pomerance asked for audience feedback after the movie, I pointed out the obvious comparison between that movie and Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, also based on a McMurtry novel.

Tonight at the Bloor I saw Afternoon of a Faun, a documentary about Chantaquil LeClerc, a great ballerina who inspired George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins but was crippled by polio in her prime.  Lots of Debussy music.  This was the movie's last night and I almost forgot to see it, but during dinner Moira mentioned something about Balanchine and that reminded me.  I owe her one.

I've been seeing quite a few movies at the Bloor lately.  I saw the trailer for Satan Came to Eden and the one for this movie several times, and lately I've been seeing the trailer for Teenage, a documentary about adolescent culture in the twentieth century, and The Missing Picture, about a Cambodian recreating the unphotographed Khmer Rouge autogenocide through miniature dioramas.  While I was there I also got a schedule for the Hot Docs festival, which starts tomorrow. (They have a documentary of Jane Campion filming Top of the Lake!)

Yesterday I was replenishing some medication at Shoppers Drug Mart, and I also bought a lot of post-Easter candy at a markdown.  It included some Ferrero Rocher, which I now think is my favourite candy, sold in an egg-shaped container.  They were selling chocolate in the shape of a high-heeled shoe, but I skipped that.

Tax time

"I wonder what you do all day?" "I run in and out of doors trying to stay out of the rain"--It Happened One Night

Yesterday afternoon I saw Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (for the second time) at the Event Screen with a big group from the Classic Movie Meetup.  It's a well-crafted populist comedy with a nice chemistry between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.  I liked the scene where Gable pretended to be a tough gangster to shut up a guy who was endangering their secret.

It was unusually warm today, so I opened my windows for the first time in months.  I also strolled down to Hillcrest Park, which attracted a lot of other people too.

I finally finished my tax return. (I would have done it Friday night, but I went to see Purple Rain instead.  Priorities first!) As usual, I didn't earn enough to qualify for paying taxes, even with the Aquilon Books profit being put in my name.  I'd do my taxes earlier, but I have to wait for Father to get up a financial statement for our used-book business.  I included receipts for my TTC Metropass subscription and my Ontario N.D.P. membership, but there wasn't much point:  I would have had nothing to pay anyhow.

We're still watching that series exploring Shakespeare on Netflix.  We've just seen Derek Jacobi talking about Richard II and Jeremy Irons discussing the trilogy involving Henry IV and V.  I don't know as much about Shakespeare as I should!

I've finally finished that book about 50 architectural ideas!  And I'm running short, alas.

PURPLE RAIN

Last night I saw the Prince vehicle Purple Rain (for the third time) at the Bloor.  It was part of the "This Film Should Be Played Loud" series, and I sat in the balcony near the back row.  There was a huge queue to the popcorn place--they sold a lot of beer--and I waited until the film started to get popcorn.  Fortunately, they preceded it was the video of the Batdance Prince did for the 1989 Batman movie, which was so long I had time to go and return before it was finished!

The movie is something of a guilty pleasure:  the concert scenes are pretty good, but the rest is on the crude side, with Prince a better stage presence than an actor.  Morris Day steals the show, of course, as Prince's shameless rival--I especially liked his numbers "Jungle Love" and "The Bird." Of course, I knew all that already.  The place was packed, and a lot of people had glow-sticks which they were waving during the final numbers.  Safer than matches, I guess.

Today was my acting class.  There were a record eight people there!  The two new people both did an animal impersonation, as everyone does when they start out, and two others were new enough to elaborate their earlier ones. I did the "George Gray" monologue completely by heart.  We also did the "Man on the Moon" scene again.  It turns out that Andy Kaufman is telling the truth about his cancer, though Nancy let us think otherwise so we'd be natural in the scene.  Next week we're going to do the scene one more time, from memory, which shouldn't be hard for me since I have just a handful of lines, none of them very long.

Sometime I should start learning a new monologue.  This time I'd like to do something comic.  Back when I was taking drama classes in the Toronto District School Board night school program, some people said I had natural comic timing.

This is Easter weekend, so Monday will be unusually idle for me.  And next week they'll be selling chocolate at clearance prices! (Someday I want to find that store in the Junction that sells fair-trade chocolate.)

Queen Street art walk

I didn't go out at all on Tuesday what with the cold weather.  At times like this I get headaches and can barely do one thing at a time. (I'd stopped wearing a warm blanket around the computer, but have temporarily resumed.) I hardly went out at all until this evening to join Betty Anne for her latest art walk.  This time it was along Dundas Street around Dufferin Street.  I intended to be on time, but as usual I was on the late side:  blame the slow Dufferin bus service. (Though I'm grateful that we have buses at all!)

The walk started at PM Gallery where we saw some pictures by Amanda Clyne of ethereal women, which reminded me of Edvard Munch.  Then we went to a Japanese-themed boutique called the Blue Button Shop; the Art Metropole, which sells art publications and "multiples"; and a Sky Glabush exhibition at MKG127, including an elaborate pencil sketch of a Baha'i information booth.  We got some snacks from Hogtown Cure, but didn't go in because they were busy gutting a pig.

I finished From the Earth to the Moon, which ends with the spaceship launched and seen orbiting the moon.  Jules Verne continued the story in a sequel titled All Around the Moon, which I'll have to pick up sometime, no doubt online from Chapters-Indigo like the first book. (The Classics Illustrated comic I vividly remember was based on both books.) I also read the introduction, which mentioned that they've been designing unmanned spacecraft that can be launched in the cannon style of this book, at a far smaller cost than rocketry!

Now I've resumed reading the revolution issue of Lapham's Quarterly.  It looks like a particularly good one!

It finally occurred to me to give over one of my twelve cherished Safari bookmark spots to blogger.com .  With several new blogs that'll be a convenient change.  I've also given a spot to comics kingdom.com .  One of the websites I dropped was youtube.com .  I can just type the letter "Y" and it'll come up quickly!  The other was my email page, because with the Mavericks update of my computer operating system, I can now get it on non-Safari software.  Now the computer makes a noise whenever I get a new email, and I'm no longer letting big backlogs accumulate.

Two Meetups

This afternoon I hosted the latest ROLT event.  I tried to do science fiction again, with the clever event title "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow..." But only three people showed up. (Why not repeat your mistakes?) Also, because I only reserved our place at the last minute we didn't have our usual room but a louder area.  I'm glad I was careless with just a small group:  I'll be sure to reserve earlier with larger groups.

I read a passage from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, about the battle with the giant squid.  The Nautilus crew normally speaks an Esperanto-like language, but a sailor who gets carried away in a tentacle reverts to his native French and yells "Au secours!" which makes a big impression on the French hero.  I also read a passage from Arthur C. Clarke's novelization of 2001:  A Space Odyssey, imagining the state of the world in 2001. (His world population estimate of six billion proved accurate.) And I read Clarke's story "Encounter in the Dawn," about an encounter between spacemen from a technologically-advanced planet and savages from a primitive one, which influenced 2001 greatly.

Craig read Mina Loy's futuristic poem "Lunar Baedeker," while Christina preferred to listen. (I always tell such members, "The world needs more people who listen.") For next month I'm going to do humorous writing again.

In the evening I had dinner with a Karaoke Meetup group at Milestone's just south of Empress Walk.  I ate Chicken Harissa, whose name I remember because it rhymes with Clarissa. (It was a spicy Middle Eastern dish that included quinoa and chickpeas.) 

Afterward we rented a karaoke booth and got in two hours of songs.  I was one of the only people who could handle the remote control, because it was similar to the ones at Bar Plus.  I saw a video with Katy Perry shooting fireworks out of her bosom! (I couldn't make that up.)

PRINCE IGOR

Today I saw another Met opera at the Yonge & Eglinton:  Borodin's Prince Igor, based on a mediaeval Russian poem.  I'd never seen it before, though I've certainly heard the famous Polovtsian Dances.  It's the one where Prince Igor goes out to battle the Polovtsians from the steppes despite an inauspicious solar eclipse and gets routed and ends up a guest-prisoner of the khan and back home his brother-in-law Galitsky tries to usurp his throne but another khan invades and devastates the place and the Prince escapes and returns home and everyone celebrates.

The second act, set in a poppy field, was pretty confusing. (It's taking place in his head, see?) But the next act had a great Galitsky:  in the scene where he threatened his sister (Igor's wife), they clearly had a history.  There was a superb party scene too.

They mentioned the operas the Met will be transmitting, and they sound promising.  They're doing quite a few that I've worked on at the Toronto City Opera or at the choir:  Carmen, Macbeth, Merry Widow, Marriage of Figaro, Tales of Hoffmann.

Margaret and her oldest daughter Sarah are visiting from Kingston.  They came to shop for a prom dress for Sarah and she found one in sapphire blue.

I haven't run short like this for a while.  Anything for variety!

"The Second Cup on Yonge Street"

I would have gone to see my MP Carolyn Bennett today with the group from Fair Vote to present our petition for proportional representation.  But I went to the wrong branch of The Second Cup to meet the group.  The place was set as The Second Cup near Yonge & Heath two months ago (there were some delays), but I thought it was the one near Yonge & Davisville.  A few days ago the guy arranging it reminded us to meet on "The Second Cup on Yonge Street." Well, that could be a lot of places!  I wish I could have gone directly to the constituency office, but I'd forgotten where it was and he didn't remind us.

These things are really frustrating for me! (Moira asked me, "Are you still taking your medication?") It reminds me of when I started university 35 years ago.  They had an initiation for people to enter the freshman class, but fortunately it was just a scavenger hunt.  However, they changed the place at the last moment and the only signs to show the right place were posted in the dining halls.  I was a townie so I missed out.

Then 20 years ago or so the Joint Center of Asia-Pacific Studies was having a Christmas party or something at this Thai restaurant downtown.  But I came too early and the others came too late.  I tried to explain the reservation group I was part of, but I was dealing with a waiter who couldn't speak English!

I still felt annoyed when I went out this evening to see the documentary Satan Came to Eden at the Bloor.  It's about some Germans who moved away from civilization to a remote island in the Galapagos and the homicidal end result. (They'd been reading too many Karl May westerns.) It reminded me of a Werner Herzog movie.

Today I managed to read sixty pages of From the Earth to the Moon!

It's funny with this blog.  Last week I went six days between posts, but this week I've been finding something to write about every night.  And I haven't padded it out that much!

FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON

"Now when an American has an idea he looks for another American to share it.  If there are three of them they elect a president and two vice-presidents.  If there are four they appoint a secretary and their staff is ready to function.  If there are five they convene in a general assembly and their club is formed"--From the Earth to the Moon

"And yet they were planning only to send a projectile to the moon.  This is a rather brusque way of establishing relations, even with a satellite, but it is in very common use by civilized nations"--ibid.

Yesterday I finished The Innocents Abroad.  There's still the foreword and the afterword, but they won't take long.  I'm also close to finishing that book about fifty architectural ideas.

So now I'm starting a new book.  I chose Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon because I read the Classics Illustrated comic book version when I was a kid.  It's about a group of Americans being shot to the moon from a giant cannon, with lots of scientific information about the moon, though with nineteenth-century limits.  Verne knew how to write adventure stories with a little-boy appeal along with the science and technology stuff.  I read over forty pages just today.

From reading to writing:  I've started some new blogs. (If blogger.com has a limit on how many blogs one address can open, I don't think I've reached it.) I now have a total of five, including this one and memoirslam.blogspot.ca .  They're "Poems" at jjmatthewspoems.blogspot.ca ; "Translations" at jjmatthewstranslations.blogspot.ca ; and "Fairy Tales Retold" at jjmatthewsfairytales.blogspot ca . I've posted my first Dumbass adventure ("The Golden Goose") at the fairy tale blog, and my translation from Greek of a few parts of Sophocles' Prometheus Bound at the translation blog.  But I'll have to write some poems before I can post them at the poetry blog. (I've started work on a Cinderella poem.)

And now I've included two quotes from the book, breaking my usual limit of one per post. (Rules are made to be broken.)

Spring changes

Spring has come, and that can mean putting things in order.  We just finished assembling a new filing cabinet. (Father did most of the work, but I would have helped more if he'd just asked me!) There's a long story behind it.

A few years back, I noticed that Father had a small filing cabinet for receipts and stuff from our used book business.  I mentioned that I'd like to have one to store some of the comic strips in my collection.  So Father went out and bought one--except that what he bought was a chest of drawers, not something you could hang file folders inside.  If he'd taken me with him, I would have told him that wasn't what I wanted, but he tends to do things on his own.

In the end, Father said that he'd give me his cabinet and use the new chest in its place.  I wasn't happy that he'd be using a less suitable filing place on my account, but there was nothing I could do but accept this arrangement.

For a while I did store my comics in it, but last September it was arranged that the original filing cabinet would go to Margaret's home in Kingston.  Did I agree to this?  For the life of me I don't remember, so I'll assume I did.  But now I had no place to put those comics.

We've been rearranging things since Mother's death, and Moira couldn't see why I didn't just use the chest of drawers to store those comics.  It was hard to explain to her that this wasn't what I needed.

My room is pretty full, so we've placed the filing cabinet in the upstairs hallway. (We also have an extra bookcase there.) It fits perfectly in a corner next to the stairs to the attic room.  As for that chest of drawers, it's still empty! But for how long?

Another spring change is that I went out and bought new shoes, since the sole was starting to come off one of my old ones.  I bought them at Walmart, which makes me feel guilty, but I couldn't figure out where else to go.  I also bought a new pair of slippers there.  By referring to "spring changes," I've managed to make the filing cabinet and the shoes into a single subject!

JOHNNY HAZARD

It's been a while since I made any changes with the strips I follow every day at the King Features website. (It's now called comics kingdom.com .) My main interest is their classic strips, of course. The other day I noticed that they've started carrying Johnny Hazard, so I added that to my favorites list.  It started just a few months ago, so I got caught up pretty quick.

They're carrying Frank Robbins' adventure strip from its beginning in 1944.  The title character is a USAF pilot fighting the Nazis, and he's a rebellious badass.  The first story had him escaping from behind enemy lines in a stolen Messerschmidt--I think maybe they couldn't find the first week--and now he's on a particularly dangerous mission to supply weapons to partisans to support a big Allied operation.  The mission is complicated by the presence of Brandy, a blond photographer who wants to land to photograph the partisans...  All this is in the dailies; the Sundays are more comic.

Later on Johnny becomes a postwar pilot going on big adventures around the world and eventually becomes an agent for an organization called WING.  It has some nice artwork: I liked reading the strip from the mid-1970s in my Menomonee Falls Gazette collection.  And the dialogue has lots of wartime slang. ("Flying coffins!")

Among the other classic strips, the current Rip Kirby story has him and Desmond rescuing a prince and his baby son from a prison behind the Iron Curtain.  The Cold War was always a bit too complex for adventure stories, and I would have thought Rip Kirby was too smart for Cold War stuff.  The Cold War worked better as implicit subtext, like in the current Flash Gordon stories where he's battling the Skorpi empire that's threatening the earth from afar.

I'm seeing all this on my computer with its Mac OSX operating system, which I just updated to something called "Mavericks." (Did Don Draper suggest the name?) I can no longer use the zoom-in and zoom-out feature.

HEIMAT

This past week I've spent watching Edgar Reisz' German miniseries Heimat.  It's about 14 hours long, and we had it out of the library for only a week.  I watched about two and a half hours a day, which is why I haven't been posting here.  Fifteen years ago I saw the first half. (It was vaguely familiar to me, and I confirmed I'd seen it before when I saw the scene where three top-level Nazis get invited to the big house.  I also remembered stuff like the guy disarming bombs.)

The show's a pretty stunning depiction of life in a village in Germany's Hunsruck region before, during and after the Nazi era.  Granted that the second half, set after 1945, isn't as good as the first.  It's like with Gunter Grass' novel The Tin Drum, where the third section, also set in the postwar period, wasn't as good as the first two, and was omitted from the movie version. (Everything after the Nazis is bound to seem anticlimactic.)

You wouldn't think I'd have any time for movies, but I managed to see two documentaries at the Bloor.  Friday I saw The Great Flood, a documentary of pre-sound footage of the Mississippi flood of 1927.  Then this afternoon I saw Errol Morris' Donald Rumsfeld documentary The Unknown Known. Scary guy!

I ordered a copy of The Innocents Abroad from Chapters-Indigo online.  I splurged on postage, and it arrived the next day.  I only had a hundred pages left and it'll be finished soon.  I've checked the TTC lost & found, but the book hasn't shown up there.  Maybe they've returned it directly to the library.