20TH CENTURY WOMEN

"Why can't something just be pretty?"--20th Century Women

This evening I saw 20th Century Women at the Yonge & Dundas.  It was a pretty good comedy set in 1979 California, with a fine cast. (Shame that there are so few worthy roles for middle-aged actresses like Annette Bening.) I identified with it somewhat because in my childhood I was known as Jamie, like the son in the movie, and was also born in the early '60s, and my mother, like his mother, gave birth to me in her early 40s.  Really funny scene where one girl insists on talking about menstruation among mixed company!

This afternoon was the latest Classic Book Club event where we talked about Steinbeck's Cannery Row. I also recited the short chapter from The Grapes of Wrath about the turtle crossing the highway.

Yesterday Moira and I had lunch with Puitak and Gordon at the King's Noodle near Spadina & Dundas.  That sort of Chinese food is rather oily for me.

I've been getting thinner, or else my long johns have been stretching.  When I was at the movies the other night those long johns fell down to my knees inside my pants.  It gave me a funny feeling, like I was walking around with my outside pants down and nobody noticing!

I finally cracked Candy Crush Saga's Level 530 after a couple of weeks.  It's one of the hardest levels ever!

We skipped the Sopranos episodes where Dr. Melfi got raped and A.J. and his friends trashed their school, and we should also skip the one where Jackie Jr. is dumb enough to try robbing the big poker game.  And there's a scene at the end of the fourth season's first episode worth skipping!

SILENCE

Sometimes I run into a drought with this blog and can't think of anything to say.  I seemed to be in one earlier today, but this evening when we were going to watch another Sopranos episode (we skipped the one where Dr. Melfi got raped), we couldn't get the cable signal!  So I went out to see a movie instead.

I saw Martin Scorsese's slow but fairly powerful Silence at Canada Square. That's about a couple of Jesuits who go to Japan to track down Liam Neeson, a priest reported to have gone apostate.  As Jesuit movies go, mind you, I'd give the edge to Bruce Beresford's Black Robe just because of its Canadian scenery!

Andrew Garfield plays one of the Jesuits, who comes under pressure from a Japanese inquisitor to publicly recant his faith too. (This reminded me of Hacksaw Ridge, where Garfield was pressured to abandon his pacifism.) Neeson only turns up late in the movie, and I couldn't help thinking about his losing his wife Natasha Richardson and how that must have been like his character losing his Catholic faith.

Half-assed agnostic that I am, I identify with religious dissidents, whether they're Catholics facing a Japanese inquisition or people facing the Catholic inquisition.  Here the Japanese inquisitors had taken the course of making priests recant by executing their followers. (There's nobody lower than hostage takers!) I couldn't help thinking of the interrogation in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is back in the news these days.  They say, "With power comes responsibility," but I say that power is the ability to hold other people responsible for your actions!  Those in power always have a rationale, you see...

Tuesday at opera rehearsal we blocked the rest of Carmen and started doing The Merry Widow. Peter also gave us tickets to sell.  When some guys brought out the Madonna statue (Mary, that is) for the pre-bullfight scene, it was slightly tilted, and Beatrice said, "Mary's drunk!"

BEST WORST THING THAT EVER COULD HAVE HAPPENED

Alan Alda's advice to a young actor: "If you can see yourself doing anything else, do it"--Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened

Saturday night I saw the Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them at the Kingsway. (Haven't been there since that whaling movie about a year ago.) It was complicated but moderately entertaining.  Those scenes where a whole building gets destroyed in a wizard battle then restored by further wizardry strike me as a cheat!

Yesterday I saw Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened at the Bloor, with the Sunday Afternoon Movie Meetup.  It's a documentary about Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince's 1981 Broadway musical Merrily We Roll Along, with three characters shown in reverse chronological order, going from middle-aged cynicism back to youthful ambition. (I was lucky to see the cinemacast of the award-winning London revival a year or two ago.)

For the original production Prince cast only actors under 25, in the hope of capturing youthful essence, and had them wearing T-shirts with labels like "Best pal" and "Wealthy backer" and "Fan." (I have a feeling he was trying to be original for the sake of originality...)  But critics were largely unimpressed and the original production closed after two weeks, though the show got a cult following through revivals. (Twenty years afterward the cast reunited to perform the songs in a benefit concert.) 

The documentary interviews the performers three decades later and considers how the experience changed their lives.  One of them went on to become a theatre director, and directed this film; another, Jason Alexander, became a TV star on Seinfeld. (Fifteen or twenty actors producing one star:  that gives you an idea of the heavy odds in the profession these people devote their whole beings to!) Quite interesting, especially for Sondheim fans.

I noticed that in Trump's inaugural speech, in a dig at Obama, he complained about leaders who were "all talk and no action." That reminded me of Aesop's fable about the frogs who wanted a king, so Zeus sent them an inert log.  The frogs decided they deserved better than that, so Zeus sent them a serpent who ate them all!

The other day I was translating Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Portuguese (because, why not?). Now that's a speech!

I'm a welfare queen!

Or I will be soon.  When we talked to Dr. Hassan last week, he said that I should start by applying for welfare so that they'll send me an ODSP kit. Yesterday I went to an Ontario Works office near Sheppard station, and they sent me on to a Social Services office near Metro Hall.  

Today I went to that office, but they told me you have to apply by phone or online, so that's the next step.  Moira hates the idea of applying online, but applying by phone means staying on hold for about 40 minutes, so I'll be weighing both options.

We're finished with the second season of The Sopranos. (I doubt that the others would be interested in the last few episodes.) Next we'll be looking at the third season, which introduces Ralph the twisted gangster.  I like Joe Pantaliano in the role, but I don't know how the others will feel.  The episode involving the ill-fated stripper is considered a classic, but I don't think they'll want to see it; I know I don't want to see it again.  And there's the depressing storyline about Jackie Aprile Jr., a young guy Tony wants to keep out of trouble, but if he succeeded there wouldn't be any point. (I mentioned the other week that I don't like that kind of plot.) But I'm sure we'll see that last episode where Tony tries to put his son into military school:  some of my favorite episodes involve A.J.!

The Donald got inaugurated today.  I'm pretty frustrated that so many Democrats are still in denial about their unfair primary.  I posted online, "If the primary had been an election for president of the Teamsters union, the government would have made them do it over." If the DNC elite isn't held answerable for their shenanigans, they can be expected to stack the next primary for another "insider" candidate, as they clearly care more about controlling the party than winning elections. When the Democrats screwed Bernie Sanders in the primaries, they screwed themselves in November, and they screwed America for the next four years!

Back to the opera

Last night was the first opera rehearsal of the new year.  We went onto the stage and blocked out the first half of Carmen. It turns out that both stage director Beatrice and music director Adolfo are going elsewhere next year.  I can't imagine Toronto City Opera without them! (Then again, a decade ago I couldn't have imagined it without stage/musical director Giuseppe Macina.)

Beatrice is a fun director.  Tonight she showed the girls how to fake hair-pulling in the catfight scene! (The pullee puts her hand on the puller's hand and guides it down her head.) For the gypsy dance at the start of the second act, she has the men watching it on the stage this time.

Tonight I went to that Cozy Drinks & Books Meetup again.  One of the girls there reminded me of Giovanna Baccelli in that Gainsborough painting, so I printed it out to show her.  On my first attempt, the paper got stuck inside the printer and I had to drag it out a little at a time. (I'd had the same problem a few days earlier trying to print something out for Reading Out Loud.) I ended up printing three copies!  When I showed it to her, I realized she didn't look that much like the picture...

I wrote about the incoming U.S. president online, "Wait and see, but don't hold your breath!"

Sez you!

Janice Soprano: "Did you know there's a Zuni saying, 'Of twenty things a child does, pay no attention to nineteen'?" Tony Soprano: "Did you know there's an Italian saying, 'Fuck up once and you lose two teeth'?"

Yesterday was Reading Out Loud, and the topic was opinion pieces, with the title "Sez you!"  I'd moved the location from the Victory Cafe to the Ryerson Hub next to Jorgenson Hall.  It seems to be a good location, with lots of seats and nobody else around.  One person couldn't find the place, but they should figure it out before long.

Seven people came.  A few of them read their poems, and Beatriz read a Spanish poem she'd written, along with an English translation.  I read a Christopher Hitchens article from The Nation about Bill Clinton executing brain-damaged Ricky Ray Rector on the eve of the 1992 New Hampshire primary; and a review from Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn column of the British version of the reality TV show (more like unreality!) Temptation Island.  A couple of items I brought but let other people read were Roger Ebert's review of Her Alibi (the one with a romantic denouement at Tom Selleck's country house which had been blown up half an hour earlier!), and Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant."

Looks like Bernie Sanders is taking the lead in resisting Trump.  Someone has to!

Season finale

Livia Soprano (to her grandson): "You die in your own arms!"

Yesterday I took Moira to see my shrink Dr. Hassan. (She'd never met him before.) We discussed my application for ODSP, but the subject's too boring for me to give any details here.

Last night I was going to go to an Introvert Meetup but I ended up cancelling at the last minute because John and Kathrine were bringing over dinner (burritos). I don't feel good about making those last-minute cancellations.

Tonight we saw the season finale of the first season of The Sopranos.  John Heard had a good role as a corrupt NYPD detective!  Moira's favorite character was Livia. (An Ellen Willis article on the show in The Nation titled "Our Mobsters, Our Selves" referred to Livia as one of "the damned.")

We're going to pick and choose with the second season, since there are parts that I'm sure Moira and Father wouldn't like. (I didn't like those parts so much myself.) We'll see the first couple of episodes, then in the third see the part where Meadow and her friends trash Livia's old house but fast-forward through the part with sociopath Richie Aprile.  Then we'll skip the fourth episode where Tony visits Naples and the sixth episode where he lets the guy enter the big poker game and accrue a big debt, leading to him and his business being squeezed to the last penny.  But we'll see the fifth episode where Christopher takes an acting class, and the seventh where A.J. is into Nietzsche (which he pronounces "Nich"!). In the ninth episode we'll see the part where Christopher describes a nightmarish "out of body" experience, but skip the part with the mob execution.  And we can skip the rest.  Lucky that I've seen it before!

GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES

Junior Soprano (explaining why his crew has to attend funerals for people like the guy they murdered): "Fucking manners!"

Last night I saw the Studio Ghibli anime Grave of the Fireflies for the third time, at the Lightbox. Directed by Isao Takahata, it's a compelling story about two doomed orphans in Japan in the last year of World War II, still the most terrible of all wars, whose death toll includes millions of children. (I tried to make it a History Meetup event, but nobody else was interested.) I'm not spoiling the ending:  we learn of their deaths right at the beginning!  It sounds like a downer, and in some ways it is, but it's also very life-affirming in its details.  Animation can somehow depict such a story more powerfully than live action.

There's a scene near the end just after the little sister Setsuko has died--is her name a reference to Yasujiro Ozu's actress Setsuko Hara?--when a phonograph plays the song "Home Sweet Home" as we see a montage of brief moments of her while she was alive.  That song, of course, is a reference to Kon Ichikawa's Harp of Burma, about Japanese soldiers at the end of the war seeking atonement in music.  A cheesier movie would repeat moments we'd already seen, but these moments are one-time! 

I've seen the movie three times, and three times that scene has brought me to tears.  I guess that comes from the realization that the movie, which seemed to be about death at first, is really about life!  It left me with the thought that at the end of the day, love is the only thing we're left with.  The whole world should see it, especially Donald Trump.

Today I went to Mark's Work Warehouse near St. Clair and Keele to get a new sweater.  I got a light one because I have enough heavy ones. (They seem to be moth-proof.) I was hoping that Father would come with me, but he wasn't up to it so Moira came instead.  I hope he gets better so we can have a few outings like that:  he'll be 87 in a couple of months, and I don't know how much longer he'll be able to get out. I also got a big new bag of peanuts at the nearby Bulk Barn in the place where the stockyards used to be. (I visited that place just after it opened, and it still had a bit of a stockyard smell!)

Tonight I put on a spurt and finished Cannery Row.  Now I can focus on reading Don't Know Much About History for the History Meetup next month!

CANNERY ROW

I've had some more unusual dreams. The other day I dreamt I was back in our Sackville house and it was summer but there was snow on the ground! (The temperature was expected to rise to thirty degrees.) I also dreamed about going to a film festival documentary from Nicaragua--or was it a TV episode from Germany?--except that when we got to the cinema they put us on a bus to the screening!  And I dreamed of trying to remember all the movies George Roy Hill directed, and being unsure whether the Chevy Chase comedy The Funny Farm was one. (Awake, I confirmed that it was.)

I also dreamed of finding my father lying on a hillside fast asleep.  And of reading a big children's book with the chapters in reverse order, including the story of a superhero who morphed into a little quail who was about to be attacked in the street by hundreds of armored rats, but when they walked off the curb they fell into an acidic puddle that disintegrated them!

Ever read a book or see a movie where it lost you at one key moment? Screenwriter William Goldman, in Adventures in the Screen Trade, remembers a preview for his The Great Waldo Pepper and this scene where Susan Sarandon was supposed to perform this wing-walking stunt but froze in the middle of it, and barnstormer Robert Redford tried to save her, but she fell to her death. The audience had liked the earlier scenes, but right at that moment the movie lost them. (That was one of the movies George Roy Hill directed.) Similarly, Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander lost me in the scene where the kids were in two places at once.

I was thinking of this because of Steinbeck's Cannery Row.  The first half was pretty fun, but then there was this chapter where the local low-lifes had been gathering hundreds of frogs for Doc the marine biologist to sell, and he was out of town then so they decided that when he came back they'd throw him a surprise party at his place, which they'd sneaked into.  But he was late getting back and they started the party without him, and things got so out of hand that by the time he returned they'd trashed the place! (And the frogs escaped, of course.)

The book kind of lost me at that point.  Things have to go wrong, of course, otherwise there'd be no point!  That sort of plot I find depressing.  It reminded me of George Orwell's novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which I haven't read, but I saw the movie with Richard E. Grant as a full-of- himself advertising copywriter who decides to go through a poverty stage so he can become an Artist.  After a while he actually sells something and comes into some money, but it just results in him going on a tear, getting arrested and screwing up royally.  Because if he didn't screw up there'd be no point.

Presidential election figuring

Tony Soprano (to his shrink): "I'm a man and you're a woman.  End of story!"

Wednesday I had lunch with Pam at the Schnitzel Hub.  She had fish and chips and let me finish her French fries!

Wednesday night was the History Discussion Group.  The subject was the 1950s and I got a pretty good turnout of six people.  I've started collecting the dues for 2017, which I've lowered from $7 back to $5. (My Meetup groups have been growing somewhat.)

The other day I dreamed that we were in our Sackville house for the last time when we got visited by the rock band Journey!  That's an odd dream because I'm not a Journey fan by any means.

A Movie Meetup went to see The Poseidon Adventure at The Event Screen last night. ("...and he's dead, and that's it--or do you want to make something more of it?") I thought of seeing it but didn't bother in the end.

Today I did some figuring.  How would the American election have gone if they'd reformed the Electoral College system of each state being "winner take all"?  First I figured out what would happen if each state's total electoral votes--House seats plus two Senate seats--were allotted as close as possible to its popular vote.  This system, under which small states would have a slight advantage, would give this result:  261 electoral votes for Democrat Clinton, 260 for Republican Trump, 15 for Libertarian Johnson, 1 for Green Stein (in California), and 1 for independent Evan McMullan (in Utah). A squeaker victory for Clinton!

Then I figured it under a system where each state's electoral votes would be two fewer, with just its House seats--a system closer to overall popular vote.  Now we get 217 Clinton, 209 Trump, 8 Johnson, 1 Stein, 1 McMullan.  A less narrow Clinton victory.

But another possible system is for the two votes from a state's Senate seats to be "winner take all" and the votes from the House seats to be proportional, maximizing the advantage for small states.  Clinton won 20 states and the District of Columbia while Trump won 30 states, so the new result is 259 Clinton, 269 Trump, 8 Johnson, 1 Stein, 1 McMullan.  A Trump victory, and compared to the first system his gains are mostly at Johnson's expense.

I enjoy figuring stuff like this from time to time...

MOANA

"Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical and aesthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation.  Two generations of Americans know more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars"--Cannery Row

Tonight I saw the animated Disney Polynesian movie Moana.  I was basically seeing it so I'd have something to write about here, but it was actually pretty good as the present-day Disney formula goes.  There were quite a few imaginative touches, like the demigod's animated tattoos.  The climax owed a little something to Hayao Miyazaki anime like Princess Mononoke. (The father was voiced by Temuara Morrison, who was in the Maori movie Once Were Warriors twenty years ago.)

They showed a trailer for the live-action version of Beauty and the Beast.  In the B&tB version I'd like to see, Belle would marry Beast and give birth to mutants, causing visiting friends to say, "What cute little mutants you have!"

Yesterday I booked my Air Canada ticket for London in May. (I'm leaving on the 5th and returning on the 22nd.) It cost about a grand in total.  I could have saved a few hundred, but there was always a catch.  I didn't want to land at Gatwick: that would mean taking a train into Victoria Station and catching the tube from there, whereas I can take the Picadilly Line to Russell Square station right from Heathrow.  Neither did I want to take a flight early in the morning, which would mean spending the night at the airport first. (I've landed at Gatwick and left in the early morning before, but now I feel too old for such trouble now, a feeling my father understands well.) Also, I didn't want to take a flight where I'd have to get off at JFK Airport then get to the connecting flight at La Guardia Airport, or one where we'd go by way of Rome and take a very long time.

More Googleplay Ebook trouble.  I opened The Ghosts of Inverloch to look at it again, and it showed the pages from The Wrath of Hypsis!  The Wrath of Hypsis has been sneaking into my other Googleplay Ebooks too.  I posted a question about it in the Google problems forum.

Valerian and Laureline

Mikey (to Brendan, just before shooting him): "Hi, Jack.  Bye, Jack."--The Sopranos

Tonight I bought a Googleplay Ebook version of a French science fiction comic book--they call it a "bande dessinee"--about Valerian and Laureline. (I got a version already translated into English; there was a time when I would have got the French version and translated it myself.) Valerian is an agent born on the future earth colony planet Galaxity, who goes on missions through space and time to pre-empt disasters. Laureline is his partner (and lover!), whom he picked up in the Middle Ages:  I have a feeling she's the real reason for the series' success, sort of like Captain Haddock in the Tintin comics.

I downloaded a double story from the books "The Ghosts of Inverloch" and "The Wrath of Hypsis." The clever thing about the story is that their mission, and how they can accomplish it, only gradually emerges over two books--even they're in the dark at first!  It turns out to involve beings on the planet Hypsis wanting to trigger a nuclear holocaust on 20th-century earth to prevent the eventual founding of Galaxity, and our hero and heroine finding a way to prevent this.  A full explanation would take forever, so you might as well read the books directly.  It gets really weird when they reach Hypsis!

Friday afternoon I saw Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann at the Bloor. (It started at 11:30 A.M.!) It was a Royal Opera revival of a classic 1980 production directed by John Schlesinger.  The story with Antonia and Dr. Miraculous gives me the creeps!

Someone I know doesn't want me to write about him on this blog. (For which reason, I can't say who he is.) Frankly, I'm impressed that he thinks anyone will read it.  John Snow and Pena, I value your readership highly.  In that Proust-based Vanity Fair celebrity questionnaire one of the questions is, "What do you consider your greatest achievement?" I'd say that my greatest achievement is making friends.  It isn't like Jerry Seinfeld collecting Porsches; every new friendship is unique!