THE SOPRANOS

Hasidic Jew (after telling the story of the siege of Masada): "And the Romans--where are they now?"

Tony Soprano: "You're looking at 'em, asshole!"

--The Sopranos

Did I say we dropped our subscription to Crave TV?  We resubscribed because Moira wants to watch The Sopranos. (She tried it before, but couldn't get past that episode with the Hasidic Jew.) Tonight we watched the first episode with him blowing up his friend's restaurant so the fried won't lose business from a hit being carried out there. (A Rhode Island gangster actually did that!) James Gandolfini would have made a good silent movie actor.

I must say that the first season was the best, what with the conflict between Tony and Uncle Junior, though Joe Pantoliano as Ralph Cifaretto did a lot for the third and fourth.  As with Six Feet Under and Mad Men, the later seasons have diminishing returns:  after Adrianna got killed in the fifth season the show couldn't really be funny any more.  And Carmela's character arc, in particular, got inconsistent.  That's what happens when shows get planned one season at a time. (One of many things I admire about Breaking Bad is that all five seasons were planned out from the start!)

I finally fixed the problem with Google Play not loading. (I did it by clearing the memory cache, or something like that.) I paid actual money for an Ebook with a translation of the Lusiades into modern Portuguese.  I've already found a few mistakes I made in my translation:  I thought "frauta" meant fruit when it actually meant flute! And "Parcas" wasn't parks but the Three Fates. I've also resumed reading that book about TV shows that only lasted one season.

We've been eating scalloped potatoes and diced ham almost all this weak!  And I never get tired of it, like Archie Bunker with Edith's meatloaf.

Kobo

"Once, when he had me pinned against a wall, I asked him straight out what had I done to make him dislike me so much; suddenly he relaxed, let me loose and said, 'You're a sissy.  I'm just straightening you out.' He was right, I was a sissy of sorts, and the moment he said it, I realized there was nothing I could do to alter his judgement, other than toughen myself to accept and defend the fact"--"The Thanksgiving Visitor"

I've been making slow, steady progress with my Portuguese translation of The Wizard of Oz on my Kobo reader.  Right now I'm at the point where the Tin Man has just joined the group.  It occurred to me that Charley is Steinbeck's Toto, except that Steinbeck was going from Oz (the New York metropolis) to Kansas (rural America)! I've also started translating "Desiderata" into Portuguese.

I noticed that the Kobo reader offers quite a few free ebooks, especially in Christmas week. Cheapskate that I am, I've been downloading quite a few of them, mostly history and "classic" literature. (Who knows how many of them I'll actually get around to reading?) I actually paid a few dollars for Dee Brown's famous Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a '70s history of the western frontier from the First Nations perspective, and that's a book I've long wanted to read.

I read two more Truman Capote stories in the same book as "A Christmas Memory": "One Christmas" and "A Thanksgiving Visitor." Now I want to read more of his stories, and might even do them in my book club!  I've finished Travels With Charley, and Steinbeck's Cannery Row is next on my list, along with the Lapham's Quarterly special issue about Alexander Hamilton.

On Acorn TV we've started watching a '70s TV miniseries of Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, with Geraldine McEwan in the Maggie Smith role.  The dialogue is a bit hard to hear.

JACKIE

"But Charley doesn't have our problems.  He doesn't belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself"--Travels With Charley

Thursday night I saw Jackie at the Yonge & Dundas. (I hoped to make it into a History Discussion Group event, but nobody else was interested.) It was pretty depressing, really--I basically got out of it what I put in.  Natalie Portman wasn't bad in the title role, considering that she was stuck with the job of imitating the inimitable.  I couldn't help noticing that the early 1960s was a very sexist time, when women were expected to be "charming" and "feminine."

John F. Kennedy strikes me as an oddly overrated president, along the same lines as Obama.  Maybe he did have a plan to get out of Vietnam, but if so he hesitated fatally.  You can only judge leaders by what they actually did while they had the chance, and he seriously escalated the Vietnam conflict in his time.  He's been praised for proving less hawkish than his advisers during the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet a better president wouldn't have surrounded himself with hawks in the first place! (The same applies to Ronald Reagan 25 years later.)

As for Kennedy's assassination, I'm an agnostic (on this as on many other things). For all I know Lee Harvey Oswald may have acted alone--I'm no oddsmaker--but we'll presumably never know.  As a motive for conspiracy, mafia payback seems more plausible than keeping the U.S. in Vietnam.  Anyway, Kennedy was no angel himself!

Last night I dreamed of watching a movie about a serial killer, with this one closeup of a woman he's about to kill who's wearing dark glasses, and we see in the reflection of her shades a car that she thinks will save her, but it drives away and we see her expression as she realizes she's about to die!  Why do I have such sicko dreams? (At Christmastime, yet!) It isn't like I'm a horror fan.

Acorn TV

"Once you are in Texas it seems to take forever to get out, and some people never make it"--Travels With Charley

We've started subscribing to Acorn TV, which has lots of interesting British shows.  Unfortunately we don't seem able to get it on our widescreeen TV, but we can still watch it on our computers.  Last night we saw the first of three episodes of a Waldemar Januszak documentary about Baroque art, which anticipated cinema in some ways.  But I couldn't get in into fullscreen on the downstairs computer, so we ended up watching it in my room. (I later figured out that my mistake downstairs was using the Safari browser instead of Foxfire.  B for Brains...)

Acorn TV also has some classic series like Upstairs, Downstairs.  It's one of my all-time favorite shows despite the occasional cliche.  I've started watching the third season, which is when it really hit its stride. (The first two are somewhat uneven.)  It begins with mother Lady Marjorie going down with the Titanic--most upper-class women actually survived!--and Captain James the jerky son taking an interest in father Richard's mousy secretary Hazel.  I fell in love with Hazel--why do I like mousy women so much?  Hazel soon married James, which was a mistake:  she should have married Richard despite his age!

My favorite character was Hudson the Scottish butler:  watch the ongoing contrast between his strictness toward the other servants and his deference toward the masters!  Anglicized Scots sometimes have a way of seeming more English than the regular English:  witness the Queen Mother and Colin Firth.

I still can't leave off the subject of Hillary vs. Bernie!  One Clintonite line is that Sanders wanted to get the Democratic nomination without doing the "work" that Clinton had done to earn the nomination over the past thirty years.  Yet, it seems to me, Hillary spent thirty years schmoozing and making connections and advancing within the party organization, while Bernie spent the same time actually promoting the policies that most Democrats care about, at a time when they've been in desperate need of that.  Which work is more important to the party?  The Clintonites who are still repeating "Sanders was not a Democrat" create an impression of the Democratic Party not as the famed "big tent" but as a high-class club that doesn't admit riffraff like Bernie!

4000 books!

Dialogue on a sweltering summer day:

"Carrie wanted a drink, but she pushed the cup away and made a face and said, 'Nasty!'

"'You better drink it,' Mary told her. 'I want a cold drink, too, but there isn't any.'

"'I wish I had a drink of well water,' said Laura.

"'I wish I had an icicle,' said Mary.

"Then Laura said, 'I wish I was an Indian and didn't have to wear clothes.'

"'Laura!' said Ma. 'And on Sunday!'

"Laura thought, 'Well, I do!'"

--On the Banks of Plum Creek

Aquilon Books, my father's used book-selling venture, sold its 4000th book last week after a dozen years of online sales through ABE Books.  We celebrated with a party, and the whole family was present, along with four nieces and a Chinese friend Moira met teaching English.  Father spent $140 on Indian food, which took three days to finish.  Moira also baked a vegan chocolate cake (accommodating brother John's family), and decorated it with the digits 4000.  I tend to find large-scale company tiring, and now I feel like I've gone through Christmas already!

Donald was there and solved the problem of my computer not allowing you to open Google Play Ebooks and ignoring the prescribed steps to solve the problem.  Unfortunately, after he left the problem came back! (I don't have the heart to tell him...) But he did fix our widescreen TV set so that when you start the DVD player the screen no longer cuts off an outer ring.

Yesterday I went to the Lillian Smith library to borrow some books, but it turned out I'd lost my library card!  I thought I'd left it at the Yorkville library the day before, but I checked and it wasn't there.  I couldn't find it at home either, so it looks like I'll have to get a new one.

This afternoon was the last Reading Out Loud at the Victory Cafe. (Next month we'll try the Ryerson Hub.) It was December so our topic was children's writing, and I titled the event with the Whittier line "Blessings on thee, little man!" I read the Walt Whitman poem "There Was a Child Went Forth"; the middle part of "A Christmas Memory"; and the chapter of Huckleberry Finn where Huck gets separated from the raft in the fog, then tells Jim he's been dreaming, hurts his feelings and ends up apologizing.  You know, I think I'm pretty good at reading things aloud!

There was a new member called Beatriz from Argentina.  I gave her a chapter to read from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House book On the Banks of Plum Creek. (Unlike Huckleberry Finn, that's easy English for a foreigner.) It was "Rings of Fire," where their haystacks are threatened by burning tumbleweeds from a prairie fire to the west.  And I gave Max the chapter from The Wizard of Oz I've just been translating, where the Scarecrow describes his brief life before meeting Dorothy.  Afterward Doreen gave me some chocolates!

ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE

"Maybe everybody needs Russians.  I'll bet even in Russia they need Russians.  Maybe they call it Americans"--Travels with Charley  

 

Last night I saw the documentary All Governments Lie at the Bloor.  It's about the legacy of I.F. Stone among today's non-mainstream muckraking journalists like Green Greenwald and Amy Goodman.  I must look up the websites intercept.com and tomdispatch.com , which the documentary mentioned.

Today I went to Yorkville library to find a copy of Truman Capote's wonderful story "A Christmas Memory," which I want to read part of at Reading Out Loud Meetup this Sunday.  The snow was pretty heavy, suitable for Christmas. (At the Bloor-Yonge station the TTC set up a fancy Christmas exhibit with some electric trains!)

 

This evening I went to a Non-Fiction Meetup event where we talked about what we'll be reading next year. (I ordered a chocolate lava cake.) I mentioned my theory that the Soviet system of shortages, rationing and long queues may be our future!

 

Father and Moira can't find anything interesting on Crave TV, so I've been looking at alternatives.  Both Acorn TV and Fandor look promising!

 

As you can see, I've noticed how to use a larger font on this blog. (I like nice big fonts!)

THE NUTCRACKER

"I wanted to go to the rooftree of Maine to start my trip before turning west.   It seemed to give the journey a design, and everything in the world must have design or the human mind rejects it.  But in addition it must have purpose or the human conscience shies away from it.  Maine was my design, potatoes my purpose.  If I had not seen a single potato my status as vacilador [a Spanish word referring to someone going somewhere but not so serious about reaching his destination] would not have been affected.  As it turned out I saw almost more potatoes than I needed to see.  I saw mountains of potatoes--oceans--more potatoes than you would think the world's population could consume in a hundred years"--Travels With Charley

"My nerves are stretched to the breaking point! [PING sound effect] There goes one now"--The Goon Show

Sunday afternoon I saw a screening of the Bolshoi Ballet production of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker.  It was a terrific show, even better than the Royal Ballet production I saw screened a couple of years ago!  The Arab Dance was especially impressive.  I hoped to meet Mary of the Classical Music Meetup, but we came in at different times and only met briefly.

I thought I knew everything about The Nutcracker, but I learned something new the other week, with the usual help of Wikipedia.  In the original score, several of the dances are assigned a flavor:  the Trepak is peppermint sticks, the Dance of the Flutes is marzipan, etc.  Also, the musical suite was more popular than the ballet at first:  the ballet only became a North American Christmas staple in the 1960s following George Balanchine's New York Ballet production.

Back in 1974, when I was twelve, I saw the Bolshoi Ballet on their Canadian tour shortly after Mikhail Barishnikov defected. (We drove to Wolfville, Nova Scotia.) They had to change the program because of his departure, so I didn't know what I was watching!  Mother thought they looked demoralized.

I've started listening to The Goon Show on Youtube.  That was a zany BBC radio comedy in the 1950s, starring Spike Milligan (who also wrote it), Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers at the start of his career.  My parents were in Britain at that time, and Father liked it more than Mother.  Sometimes Father says "I don't wish to know it," and I just learned that was one of the show's many catchphrases!  Another BBC radio comedy they listened to was Take It From Here, and he often repeats Jimmy Edwards' line "'Allo, 'allo, 'allo!"

My Peyton Place DVD arrived today!

TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY

"In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won't happen.  As the day approached, my warm bed and comfortable house grew increasingly desirable and my dear wife incalculably precious.  To give these up for three months for the terrors of the uncomfortable and unknown seemed crazy.  I didn't want to go.  Something had to happen to forbid my going, but it didn't"--Travels With Charley

 Yesterday I had lunch with John Snow at the Schnitzelhub again.  He gave me a couple of books, and I wish I'd brought something for him!  We talked about the schedule for our book clubs (he has a new one), so we wouldn't conflict.  I was going to do The Dubliners in mid-March and Gulliver's Travels at the end of April, but moved them to late March and the end of May, after I get back from London.

I was going to show the DVD of Tom Jones at the next history event this Tuesday, but it turned out it wasn't on DVD!  So I changed it to John Ford's Stagecoach, to match our discussing the frontier earlier this month.  

Next month the history group's subject is the 1950s.  I've scheduled Lana Turner's Peyton Place for next month:  couldn't find it in the video stores, but I ordered a used copy online for ten dollars and some.  I'm now reading Steinbeck's Travels With Charley for the history group (for the second time), which actually takes place in 1960, but close enough.  The library was short of copies so this afternoon I bought a copy at Chapters in the Yonge-Eglinton Centre.  Some long queues there!

It bugs me that Clinton worshipers want to blame Trump's election on everything except the most obvious cause:  the Democrats chose a very problematic candidate.  Some of them are even blaming Bernie Sanders for promoting what they consider "false narratives" about Hillary Clinton!  And some are still insisting that Sanders was never a genuine Democrat.  I want to say to them, "Well, he's more of a Democrat than Trump, isn't he?  Who's being a 'purist' now?" And which candidate was the true Democrat when Congress was voting on invading Iraq?  If any candidate was cynically "using" the party to advance his personal ambition, it seems to me, that would be Clinton.  

But too many Democrats had a specious notion of loyalty to their "team," and chose the wrong moment to be clannish.  I say this as someone who had seen Hillary's weaknesses, yet actually ended up swallowing the line that she'd win anyway!  It wasn't so much that I was won over to admiring her political skills, more that I just gave up on doubting.  I've been accused of "gloating," but I'm really rather annoyed:  when the Democrats screwed Bernie Sanders--the Republicans have no monopoly on vote suppression!--they screwed themselves, and the nation.  

Some people are denying that Sanders could have beaten Trump, but their arguments don't impress me.  Almost everyone who voted for Hillary would have voted for Bernie too; while almost everyone who would have voted Republican to defeat Bernie voted to defeat Hillary anyway.  Bernie would surely have managed a higher turnout among Democratic voters, especially in the all-important category of young voters.  And he clearly would have got greater support from the independent voters, a crucial group. (He probably would have won the nomination if independents hadn't been excluded from crucial state primaries.) I also think he would have grabbed more Republican votes than did Hillary, whom the Republicans had a longstanding hate-on for.  At the very least, it's very hard to imagine him doing any worse than she did--would he have taken Wisconsin for granted?  Sure, the Republicans would have thrown the works at him, but I think he would have won anyway.  Trump only had to outperform the polls by a couple of percentage points to upset Clinton, but to upset Sanders he would have had to outperform them by almost ten points!

Some people have been calling on the Electoral College to rebel and install Hillary as president, but I think they should install Bernie!  Democrats, who mostly supported Hillary, are about 30% of the U.S. population; Republicans, who mostly supported the Donald, are also about 30%; but independents, who mostly supported Bernie, are more like 40%.  The two-party system is a barrier to American democracy.

A Greek philosopher said: "The fox has a thousand ideas in his head.  The hedgehog has one big idea." It occurred to me that Trump is a hedgehog.  Hedgehogs are sometimes underestimated, though in this case it was more that Hillary Clinton was overestimated.

Gonks!

Since I have a second fan, I intend to become more prolific with my vanity press.

"What the hell is a gonk?" either of you may say.  It's a round toy that was popular in Britain in the '60s. (See the picture--I should attach more pics here!) My family spent a year in mod Brighton in the mid-60s, and we got one of those. They also figured in Gonks Go Beat, the sort of bizarre Swinging London movie where you'd expect Spike Milligan to turn up, but he doesn't.

Why am I talking about gonks?  Last night I watched Produced by George Martin on Crave TV.  That's a documentary about George Martin, the Beatles' genius producer who left us earlier this year. (He had a head like a sports car!) But he produced a lot more than the Beatles, introducing a sort of impressionism to recording.  He once produced a CD of Dylan Thomas' radio play Under Milkwood with Tom Jones doing a musical number:  the documentary didn't mention it, but I recall Melvyn Bragg's South Bank Show doing an episode about it.  The '70s band America was also his project.  He built a recording studio on the Caribbean island of Montserrat which produced some great music in the '80s--the Police and such--but got wrecked by a hurricane.

Back to the gonks... Early on he produced a lot of comedy records--Peter Sellers and such--and in 1962 came up with Bernard Cribbins' novelty single "Right, Said Fred." (That's also the name of a British band in the early '90s whose one hit was "I'm Too Sexy.") Anyway, they showed a bit of a video of the song with Gumby-type dimensional animation, using gonks!  I found the whole thing on Youtube, and looked at it so many times that the tune's going around in my head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5XX9LX2es4 

 (I can attach links too!) 

We've also started watching a Crave TV documentary about Frank Sinatra, another musical genius.

I've booked a room at Goodenough College in London, where I'll be staying in May. (Sending them a scan of their credit card form with my signature turned out to be a bigger challenge than I expected!)

Tonight was the history Meetup, where we talked about the frontier and the Little House books.  The political Meetup was at the same place (Scallywag's) but started an hour later, so we ended up seguing right into that one!

NORMA

Yesterday afternoon I saw a screening of the Bellini opera Norma at the Bloor, the one about the Druidess who holds sway over the rebellious Gauls but's been in love with an unfaithful Roman proconsul.  It was a Royal Opera production with a 20th-century design, which I didn't care for with this sort of story.  I remember seeing a Met production of Lucia di Lamermoor set in Victorian Scotland which didn't seem right either. (But I could imagine a Lucia production set in the antebellum South, what with its notorious feuds.) The lead soprano reminded me of Melania Trump!  

My favorite part of the opera, besides the famous "Casta Diva" aria, is the Norma-Pollione duet just before the finale.  I also like the war cry chorus, which reminds me of Indian music in westerns. (I suppose that Gauls were the Indians of the Roman world!) It's very challenging music:  I read that the first production had good singers in the lead, but they just weren't in their best voice and the show flopped.

We saw another library DVD with an episode of the Overland Trekker series.  Last week it was Australia; this week it was the Silk Road in central Asia.

This afternoon was the latest Classic Book Club event:  Dicken's Christmas novellas A Christmas Carol, The Chimes and Cricket on the Hearth. (I'd finished rereading A Christmas Carol just yesterday morning.) Karen even recited part of Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales"! Recitations are a useful addition to these events.  I ordered an omelette and when they were late bringing the home fries the Victory Cafe people generously threw an a free mulligatawny soup order to make up for it.  And I don't even care for home fries!

I met a new member called Ryan, who's an archaeologist.  What an odd calling archaeology must be!  It's all about the old days, yet it's one of the most modern sciences--to the extent that you can call it a science at all.  So much of it is conjecture which can't be proved or disproved that I think of it as an art!  You dig up the bones of your ancestors, and imagine how they must have lived.  In one sense it's the world of the dead, but in another sense it's all about life!  Ryan was amused when I mentioned a quote by Agatha Christie, who married archaeologist Max Mallowan: "An archaeologist makes a perfect husband, because as his wife grows older he gets more interested in her!" A gerontologist would make a good husband too.

In these events our conversation can go all over the place!  Karen mentioned how much she liked Fritz Lang's movie M, so Ryan started talking about Lang, and I mentioned Lang's film noir Scarlet Street, and mentioned how a couple of bits near the end of the Warner Brothers cartoon One Froggy Evening were borrowed from that movie. (One with the hero sitting alone on a park bench in the winter; another with him plodding along the sidewalk, a broken man.) So we got into Warner Brothers cartoons, which Ryan and I both love.  We were also discussing the different movie versions of A Christmas Carol:  I'll have to see the George C. Scott TV movie someday!

Since the history group subject in January will be the '50s, I wanted to screen the Lana Turner movie Peyton Place.  But I couldn't find it in the video stores so I was thinking of showing Leo di Caprio in This Boy's Life instead.  But then I found out that Suspect Video has Peyton Place after all!  Suspect Video is closing at year's end, however, so I'll see if they'll sell it to me.