THE WIRE

"He's a piece of shit!" "Everyone's a piece of shit when they get in your way.  It goes with the territory"--The Wire

We had a pretty normal, quiet Christmas.  This year instead of turkey we had scalloped potatoes and ham.  We saved our plum pudding for when Donald came over two days ago.

Yesterday we visited the lawyer near Eglinton station and made the last arrangements to create the segregated account so I can qualify for ODSP.  Father's more concerned about my future finances than I've ever been:  he's a child of the Depression.

I've been watching the third season of The Wire on DVD.  This time the focus is on street dealing and a police officer's experiment creating a zone where dealers can operate free of police interference.

I've got up to Level 103 in Candy Crush Saga!  I'm at Level 106 in Pet Rescue Saga but I don't know if it's possible to get any further.

I'm not big on New Year's resolutions, but I've switched to a skim-milk diet.

Monday was the first really cold weather, and Monday night was our first significant snowfall, so now I'm wearing my winter coat and boots.  I like the weather just now, with snow on the ground but the temperature above freezing.

In Barbara Tuchman's history of the 14th century, I was reading about town criers in Paris yesterday.  I'll bet I'd have made a good town crier, what with my loud voice!

I recently read a sick joke online that I found rather funny: "Doctor, I--I can't feel my legs!" "Of course you can't, I took off your arms!"

SPARTACUS

"If there were no gods I'd still worship them; if there were no Rome I'd still dream of her"--Spartacus

Sunday afternoon I saw the cinemacast of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker ballet again, this time with Mary of the Classical Music Meetup.  The popcorn disagreed with me:  I should lay off it for a while.

Monday I went to Paolo and Catriona's open house in North York.  I bought mixed berries for the potluck at the Loblaw's near Bathurst Street and used their self-service checkout for the first time.  (Remind me to go there when it's less busy!) Getting to those places is an adventure for me.

Last night I saw Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, for at least the fourth time, at the Lightbox in all its 70mm glory.  I'd hoped to make it a History Discussion Group event but this was the wrong time of year.

It's one of those movies that gets even better with repeat viewings.   It's more intelligent than most of the ancient epics that were fashionable in the '50s and early '60s.  Kubrick didn't have the creative control he later became accustomed to, but he keeps things moving for the whole three hours.  What a Polish face Kirk Douglas has!  It's minor flaws seem very minor. (John Dall's delivery of the line "I don't know how I shall ever be able to repay you" makes the audience laugh.

I just finished watching the last episodes of Mad Men.  When you think about it, it's a pretty depressing show.  It ended with one of the most cynical commercials of all time:  the Coke ad with young people singing "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing"!

LEGEND (spoiler)

"We honeymooned in Greece.  The Parthenon has been standing there for 2400 years.  Reggie's promise to go straight lasted two weeks)"--Legend

Last night was the choir's last concert, this time at the Columbus Centre.  My tenor voice still isn't as strong as I'd like, and I considered returning to baritone, but I decided to stay for now. (Gary from the memoir group visited us at Monday's dress rehearsal.  He's thinking of joining the choir, but he'll have to audition.  I didn't have to audition a dozen years ago.)

Since's it's Christmas time, I've been playing Candy Crush Saga and Pet Rescue Saga.  I'd forgotten how tough Level 42 in the first game can be!

Wednesday night I saw Legend at Canada Square.  It started 45 minutes later than I expected, so I went over to Indigo Books and bought Ken McGoogan's Celtic Lightning, which the History Discussion Group will be reading soon.

Legend is about the Kray twins, notorious gangsters in Swinging London. (One was insane and ended up in Broadmoor.) Tom Hardy played both roles, with a little help from special effects, and it was pretty creepy.  I saw an earlier version, The Krays, at the Showcase before that cinema closed. (In that version they were played by twins Gary and Martin Kemp from Spandau Ballet.) The main thing I remember about the earlier version is a scene where they've been drafted into the army and their drill sergeant is giving the group his "Make any trouble and you'll wish you'd never been born!" speech, then they go up to him and beat him unconscious!

This version contained a narrative cheat, but I can't talk about it without a spoiler:

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Are you sure you want to read the spoiler?

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Don't say you weren't warned!

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The movie's narrated by Reg's wife, but it turns out that she died before the final scenes, so some of what she's describing is things she didn't live to see!

TRUMBO

"Mac, have you ever been in love?" "No, I've been a bartender all me life"--My Darling Clementine

Thursday night the choir did a concert for the old folk at Villa Colombo.  An old lady got up and started dancing so I danced with her! (We were singing an Italian song that I didn't know anyway.) The following night we did a concert at the Ashbury United Church.  I baked gingerbread for them to sell.

Saturday night we saw John Ford's My Darling Clementine, which Moira got from the library. (Can't remember how often I've seen it.) The O.K. Corrall story has been filmed many times, but never better than here.  Henry Fonda had a great square dancing scene!

Yesterday was the Reading Out Loud Meetup.  Our topic was children's writing, as usual for December.  I read a passage from L.M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon where she met her relatives after her father's death, then another where she sent her poem to a newspaper, not realizing you mustn't write on both sides of the page.  I also read the poem "Harp Song of the Dane Women" from Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, and A.A. Milne's poem "King John's Christmas," which begins: "King John was not a good man.  He had his little ways..." That's a great British expression, "He had his little ways"! Bill and Hillary Clinton have their little ways too!

Last night I saw the biopic Trumbo at the Varsity.  It was pretty good:  Bryan Cranston is one of my favourite actors.  And Louis C.K. had a good role as fellow screenwriter Hurd Hatfield.  But I disagree with Trumbo's final message that McCarthyism had no heroes or villains, just victims.  The Titanic was something with just victims.  In this case, it seems to me that Dashiell Hammett was definitely a hero and Ronald Reagan definitely a villain (both as Screen Actors Guild president and later as president).

It's unusually warm today.  I'll get one last chance to wear my autumn jacket before it gets cold!

New books

"Of late, however, although the transition had been so gradual his audience had scarcely noticed, his interests had moved in a new direction, toward magical, arcane matters; and his fortnightly lectures in the dining hall--the sanatorium's main attraction, the pride of its brochure--which were always delivered from behind a cloth-covered table in an exotic, drawling accent, to an immobile audience of Berghof residents and for which he always wore a frock coat and sandals, no longer dealt with masked forms of love in action or the transformation of illness back into conscious emotion, but with the abstruse oddities of hypnotism and somnambulism, the phenomena of telepathy, prophetic dreams, and second sight, the wonders of hysteria; and as he discussed these topics, philosophic horizons expanded until suddenly his audience beheld great riddles shimmering before their eyes, riddles about the relationship between matter and the psyche, indeed, the very riddle of life itself, which so it appeared, might be more easily approached along very uncanny paths, the paths of illness, than by the direct road of health"--The Magic Mountain

On Youtube, in addition to Spitting Image, I've started watching  Longstreet, a 1971 single-season TV show with James Franciscus as a blind detective(!). I remember seeing the pilot at the time, in which his wife was killed by a bomb meant for him and he was left blind.  There was this really sad moment where he got out of his hospital bed and made a scene, his dead eyes bandaged.  Bruce Lee turns up as a martial arts teacher.  I think there's an episode where a bad guy attacks him and he turns out the lights.  Even the less popular shows from that time seem more interesting than most of today's Big Three network stuff!

With The Magic Mountain finished, I've started some new books.  One is Barbara Tuchman's 14th century history A Distant Mirror for the History Discussion Group.  Another is Felix Salten's Bambi for the Classic Book Club. (It's a lot shorter, and I should finish it pretty quick.) And I've started the fourth and last volume of Shigeru Mizuki's manga history of Shouwa Japan-cum-personal memoir, focusing on the period between 1953 and 1989.

Tonight the Nonfiction Book Club met at Jack Astor's to discuss what we're reading just now.  I brought Tuchman and the manga and that gave me enough to talk about.

The internet signal was off for most of today.  We even had trouble with the cable TV connection!  While waiting for it to come back, I finished translating the poem "Desiderata" into Japanese. (I've already translated it into Scots, French and Chinese.)

Classic Book Club

"Time--not the sort that train station clocks measure with a large hand that jerks forward every five minutes, bur more like the time of a very small watch whose hands move without our being able to notice, or the time grass keeps as it grows without our eyes' catching its secret growth, until the day comes when the fact in undeniable--time a line composed of elastic turning points (and here the late, ill-fated Naphtha would presumably have asked how purely elastic points can ever begin to form a line), time, then, had continued to bring forth changes in its furtive, unobservable, secret, and yet bustling way"--The Magic Mountain

Tuesday night was the last opera rehearsal before the Christmas break.  I have most of my lines memorized.

Wednesday night I saw Brooklyn.  It was pretty good:  a handsome production nicely acted.  In the middle the projection broke down and we had to wait several minutes before it started again.  I took out my book to start reading it and that brought back the movie. (Seems to work every time!)

I had to cancel the December History Discussion Group event focusing on the Roaring '20s and the Bill Bryson book One Summer.  Nobody else could come, but maybe I'll reschedule it next year.

Thursday night I missed choir practice because I went to the wrong place!  We performed in a Friday night concert at the St. Clare church near Dufferin Street, to raise money for Syrian refugees.  Then we did a mass at Villa Colombo this morning.

Friday night I finally finished The Magic Mountain, in time for the Classic Book Club this afternoon.  Nine people came, and to my surprise most of them had finished The Magic Mountain.  Someone suggested that much of the story was in Hans Castorp's head, and if I reread it again I'll probably see it in a very different way!

On Spitting Image I heard the line "I don't go to the loo.  I'm the Queen!" When Elizabeth II visited my alma mater Mt. Allison University thirty years ago, I overheard someone saying that when the Queen visits a place and uses a toilet seat, they have to destroy it afterward.

More people I don't envy

"Ever since the eccentric conclusion to his relationship with a certain personality and all the changes that conclusion had set into motion in the sanatorium; ever since Clavdia Chauchat's renewed departure from the society of those up here, including a respectful, considered farewell to her master's surviving "brother" exchanged beneath the shadow cast by the tragedy of a great failure--ever since that turning point, it had seemed to the young man as if there were something uncanny about the world and life, as if there were something peculiar, something increasingly askew and disquieting about it, as if a demon had seized power, an evil and crazed demon, who had long exercised considerable influence, but now declared his lordship with such unrestrained cantor that he could install in you secret terrors, even prompt you to think of fleeing.  The demon's name was Stupor"--The Magic Mountain

Here are some more people I don't envy:

Parents who have lost a child:  I can't imagine how traumatic that can be!  We forget how often that used to happen:  it happened to both my paternal and maternal grandparents. (The myth of Niobe shows that the Greeks understood the pain of parental bereavement.)

Blind and lame people:  For me, the worst thing about having such a handicap would be depending on other people. (Those who manage to leave fairly independent lives are greatly to be admired.)

Farmers:  Their lives are closer to nature, but their livelihood depends on the whims of weather, and throughout history they've tended to be in debt. (And those tractors are noisy!) But I do like gardening.

Orphans:  Parents are something most children take for granted, and people who've grown up with parents can't imagine what it's like to grow up without them.

Undertakers:  They deal with people at their most traumatized, which can take a huge emotional toll.  I can well believe that some of them become manipulative hawkers of unnecessary items.

Models:  That can't be a healthy way to live.

Refugees:  As a refugee, you leave behind your old life and can't be sure of finding a new one.  Many refugees end up in an excruciating limbo that can produce hardened terrorists.

Young people:  Older people often wax nostalgic about youth, forgetting how severe its difficulties can feel.

Opera fundraiser

"It is not by accident, please note, that we have chosen to associate with minds like those of Messrs. Naphtha and Settembrini, instead of surrounding ourselves with vague Peeperkorns--which leads us, in fact, to a comparison that in many respects and particularly in regard to stature can only be resolved in favour of this late arrival, just as it was resolved in Hans Castorp's own mind as he lay on his balcony and admitted that those two hyperarticulate mentors, tugging at both sides of his soul, simply shrank beside Pieter Peeperkorn, until he was inclined to call them the same name the Dutchman had called him in a fit of drunken royal banter--"little chatterboxes"--and decided it was a piece of good luck that hermetic pedagogy had also brought him into contact with such a manifest personality"--The Magic Mountain

Last Thursday was the opera fundraiser.  This year it took place at the Bickford Centre this year, with a $10 minimum admission for the first time. I baked gingerbread for it the night before. (Most of it I kept to eat at home, and we added icing!) Afterward there was a big variety of cookies and stuff for the crowd.  My favourite was the marble loaf, and the mince tarts were pretty good too.  Afterward I took home a lot of leftovers once more.

My choir octet had a rehearsal on Saturday morning for a change. (I like having a reason to get up earlier.) I brought over those leftovers and they had a few.

Sunday afternoon I went to John Snow's book club where we discussed Emile Zola's Germinal.  I hadn't read the book but John doesn't mind.  That evening I saw the Noam Chomsky documentary Requiem for the American Dream at the Bloor with the Sunday Movie Meetup.  I was familiar with his arguments but enjoyed it anyway. (I saw the Chomsky documentary Manufacturing Consent and the Toronto Film Festival over 20 years ago, and greatly enjoyed it!)

I've started a new Facebook game called Klondike.  It reminds me of Frontierville, which I greatly enjoyed five years ago.  I'm losing interest in Tribez and Castlez and may quit that game soon.

Tonight the choir did a rehearsal at that renaissance church near St. Clair & Dufferin.  I made a commitment to bake more gingerbread for them!

Last night I dreamed of being so depressed that I returned early from a vacation because I hadn't felt like doing anything!  I also dreamed of fleeing a deadly posse outside Moncton with Charlotte and Miranda from Sex & the City. (Why would I dream about them?  I've hardly ever watched the show!)