A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

"This is the universe.  Big, isn't it?"--opening lines of A Matter of Life and Death

Last night I saw Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (A.K.A. Stairway to Heaven--I think I prefer that title!) for the second time at the Yonge & Dundas with the Classic Movie Meetup. (Mark the organizer, I couldn't help noticing, looks a bit like Edward Scissorhands.) That's the one where R.A.F. pilot David Niven should have died but there was a mistake and he's fallen in love so he appeals to an afterlife tribunal.  It's a bit like the American movie Here Comes Mr. Jordan.  Very original.  The stairway in it would make for some great mattress surfing!

I finished the book about the Middle Ages and started a new one about Vietnam for the following History Meetup. (Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem went to the same academy in Hue!)

Something happened at the Bickford Centre so this week we had to rehearse the opera at the Anglican Church near Sherbourne station.  The Bickford Centre stage faces east but here the "stage" faced south, yet I unconsciously changed my bearings so it was like I was still looking east!

We've blocked all the Fidelio choruses except the finale.  For the scene where the prisoners have to come back in from the courtyard, the director said we should have the look of a little kid experiencing unfair treatment for the first time.  I thought of Isabella's sad expression in Weeds when her serious grandmother (like Linus' grandmother who disapproved of his blanket) wordlessly grabbed her can of Coke and poured it down the sink.

I'm now imagining my Fidelio character. I see him as a longtime prisoner who's rather lame--then I thought of the paralyzed Mexican in Breaking Bad who could only communicate through a button, but with Walter's help ultimately killed Gustavo!

EDWARD SCISSORHANDS

Edward Scissorhands (on his "father"): "He never woke up."

Yesterday afternoon I saw Edward Scissorhands, the first of the Tim Burton-Johnny Depp collaborations, with Dawna. (I was seeing it for the first time--wasn't ready when it first came out.)

It's pretty imaginative:  Burton has a creepy, original sensibility, like a pastel David Lynch. (Vincent Price, in his last role, has a nice cameo as Edward's creator.) Alan Arkin, in one of his droll supporting roles, has a good scene singing Christmas carols!  I say that Kim should have confessed to her and Kevin's role in turning Edward into a burglar...

This afternoon was the latest Classic Book Club event, in which we discussed The End of the Affair.

I've started carrying my cell phone around again.  This time I'm going to make a habit of it!

I'll have to replace that brown coat of mine.  The zipper will no longer close!

The Official Difference

The flip side of consensus is the Official Difference.  The frustrating thing about the American news media isn't that they present only one position as acceptable but that they present two, and pretend that there's never a third position.

Consider CNN's former talk show Crossfire.  They'd present an aggressive conservative as "on the right," and some apologetic milquetoast liberal as "on the left." While conservatives like Robert Novak or Pat Buchanan were predictably uncompromising, the show's liberals were forever showing how balanced they were! (The show's first liberal, Tom Braden, had a CIA background...)

Crossfire liberal Michael Kinsley was always saying, "I voted against Carter in 1980 and against Reagan in 1984." Crossfire liberal Bill Press would say, "When I was chairman of the California Democratic Party, we used to talk about 'kamikaze liberals.'" (Well, he was a kamikaze moderate!) And it's clear that this was the official intention:  Christopher Hitchens recalls that before he came on the show, the producer pressured him to go easy on Novak if he wanted to get on the show again.

I recall a show they did back in 1991 on the movie JFK.  Now, I've never seen that movie and don't want to:  I'm quite confident that even if there was a conspiracy it wouldn't have happened the way Oliver Stone imagines it!  For me, the only interesting thing about it was watching the Washington establishment get hot and bothered about it.  Consider the Crossfire treatment:  the show's two conservatives said "It's nonsense!" while the two liberals said "Of course it's nonsense, but Oliver Stone has the right to free speech!" Free speech was really a straw man here, since I hadn't noticed anyone calling for the movie to be banned.  What we have here is essentially four people taking the same position but putting a different spin on it, which insults the audience. The bottom line is that the show didn't want to be accused of avoiding the issue, but wouldn't have anyone on who actually defended the movie, so they tried to have it both ways with a sham "debate."

This wasn't just with Crossfire.  Consider the liberals on another CNN show, The Capitol Gang.  Remember when George Bush Sr. made an issue of Michael Dukakis vetoing a blatantly unconstitutional law making the Pledge of Allegiance mandatory?  TCG liberal Mark Shields was the sort who insisted that this was a "legitimate" issue. (So what's illegitimate, exactly?) The show would have all the panelists give their "Outrage of the Week," and on one occasion TCG liberal Al Hunt cited the Senate's decision to actually have a hearing before confirming the renewal of Alan Greenspan's chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, instead of just making it automatic!  Alan Greenspan isn't exactly a liberal hero...

I also recall Jack Germond, one of the liberals on the PBS show The McLaughlin Group. (John McLaughlin was the sort of host whose response to something he couldn't answer was to repeat his original point, loudly.  But I digress, of course.) Germond co-wrote a book about the 1988 presidential campaign where the aforementioned Pledge of Allegiance issue arose and got interviewed on some morning talk show.  He talked about the shortcomings in the Bush and Dukakis campaigns and said about the press coverage, "They were both allowed to get away with it." My grandmother!  Bush may indeed have got away with a great deal, but nobody who actually followed the press coverage could reasonably claim that Dukakis got away with anything!  But of course, if he actually admitted the obvious truth that Bush got away with more, that would look "unbalanced." Balanced spin trumps truth, of course.

You may say that all this is in the past.  But I haven't noticed any significant change since then.  I guess there's the emergence of Fox News, which I've never been able to watch at all.  But at least their one-sidedness is blatant.

Opera rehearsal

Last night at the opera rehearsal we started blocking Fidelio onstage.  We got placed for the scene where the prisoners come out into the courtyard.  I was one of the people who volunteered to sit, and the director warned us against crossing our legs, which looks too healthy. (He wants us looking decrepit!)

It turns out that we won't be handed out opera tickets to peddle like in past years.  I'll have to buy them online and then sell them, but I'm pretty sure I can sell close to ten.

I'm already backsliding on my New Year's resolution not to nap in the daytime! (Shame on me.)

Next week is the next History Meetup, and I still haven't finished that book about the Middle Ages.  I need to get a move on!

Sunday afternoon Moira was watching Robert Altman's western McCabe and Mrs. Miller, in which our memoir group organizer Selia had a tiny acting role. (She didn't get to deliver her line.) At Monday's session I asked her about filming that movie, and she says Warren Beatty was chatting her up, pretending to be interested in the tintype pedant she was wearing.  She also heard talk that Julie Christie went both ways and was interested in her, but she didn't reciprocate.

FAME

Twenty years ago I spent time at mrcranky.com, a website full of snarky reviews of movies.  A few years ago I tried to create a similar forum at 

http://captainsnark.freeforums.net/

but ran out of snark.  Before that I tried posting a prototype review of Fame at mrcranky.com.  This is it as I best recall it:

Quiz time!  Let's say that you're a teenage girl who's an aspiring singer-dancer-actress, and you meet this guy who calls himself Francois Lafete, though his accent is as Brooklynese as the next man! He says he admired you in A Chorus Line(!!) and invites you to his place for a movie audition.  What do you do?

A:  Tell him "Nice try, sleazebag!" and show him the door.

B:  Go to the audition, but when he tells you to take your top off, say "Nice try, sleazebag!" and show yourself the door.

C:  Take your top off and stick to your new career until you're the new Jenna Jameson.

D:  Take your top off, but burst into tears so the audience will pity your stupidity.

If you're Coco (Irene Cara), you of course choose D. That's right, we're talking the original 1980 version of Fame!  I'm too stingy to buy a movie ticket to the new version and watched the original on video instead. It tells the story of kids in New York City's High School for the Performing Arts, in the tradition of those '70s movies that made a big deal of showing The Unflinching Truth but are now badly dated. (Looking for Mr. Goodbar, anyone?) It plays like an After School Special crammed with R-rated cliches, such as boys peeking through a hole to watch girls undress.

Besides Coco, we have Ralph (Barry Miller), a jerky Puerto Rican comedian who aspires to be the next Freddy Prinze--not the junior version who needs a personality transplant but the senior one who screwed the pooch and blew his brains out; Montgomery (Paul McCrane), a gay actor who fell in love with his shrink; Leroy (Gene Anthony Ray), a Negro who's a terrific dancer but can't read! (sob, sob); Martelli (Lee Curreri), an electronic musician; and Lisa (Laura Dean), a ballerina who ends up aborting Leroy's baby.

And then there's Doris (Maureen Teefy), who has to be seen to be disbelieved! When she says "I don't know why I'm here," I didn't know either:  her audition is extremely lame.  In one scene she has to miss going to The Rocky Horror Picture Show because her mother insists that she entertain a children's party. (Say, isn't TRHPS usually shown way past most children's bedtime?) Later she has this line: "Something wonderful is happening to me, Mama--I'm growing up." Has any teenager in the history of the world said anything remotely resembling that?  Christopher Gore's script would rate B Minus at screenwriting school.

This unconvincing kaleidoscope is directed by Alan Parker, who believes that nothing succeeds like excess. (Take The Life of David Gale, please!) So we get a scene where Ralph's five-year-old sister has been raped by a junkie and gets an exorcism. At least I think that's what happened--they didn't subtitle the Spanish dialogue.  We get a scene where Leroy can get into the Alvin Ailey dance company but needs a high school diploma, so he bugs his English teacher to pass him when she's in a hospital reception room because her father is dying.

The music teacher dismisses electronic music with the line, "That isn't music, Martelli, that's masturbation!" I wanted to say, "This isn't filmmaking, Parker, it's masturbation!"

Helter Skelter

Family member on Charles Manson: "Everybody does what he says, even before he'll say it--know what I mean?"--Helter Skelter

Yesterday I saw the three-hour 1976 TV movie Helter Skelter with Dawna and Debi, based on prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's book about the Charles Manson case.  When it was over I said, "I may sleep with the lights on tonight!"

The recently deceased Charles Manson is a disturbing figure indeed!  He surely wasn't playing with a full deck.  His "family" was an aberration even by the standards of hippie counterculture. His handwriting kept running off the page because he didn't recognize limits.  According to a recent biography, during an earlier prison stretch he'd taken Dale Carnegie courses and learned from pimps how to manipulate women.  

The whole business was so crazy that I have a feeling we'll never be sure exactly why they did it. (I wonder if the truth is even crazier than Bugliosi's theory involving the Beatles song and race war?) It's like they might have murdered anyone!  The Family once stole a couple's outdoor-mounted telescope just to scare them--that would have worked with me. Back in the '90s Matt Groening's comic strip Life in Hell dismissed the Republican "family values" soundbite as "Manson family values."

Today was the Reading Out Loud Meetup event, whose topic was British writing, which I titled "The Lion and the Unicorn." I read the part of Orwell's The Animal Farm where Boxer got sold to the slaughterhouse for a case of whiskey; the opening verses of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Lewis Carroll's really funny poem "The White Knight's Tale."

Love and sorrow

Was I posting that "China Doll" video for the second time the other day? (I told you I was lightheaded.) Beauty isn't everything, but it sure isn't nothing! Looking at super-beautiful women like those, I feel a bit sad.  Maybe there's a part of me that's asking, "Is that all there is to life?" But the odd thing is that I don't really mind it.  Sorrow's part of life, and we shouldn't run away from it; we should embrace it.

We may wonder, "What is real?" I know pain is real:  it's "elephant in the living room" real!  And sorrow is real too. I've started to believe that love is also real:  our mother loved us not wisely but too well. The deepest sorrow surely comes from love.

There's a particular moment I remember from Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights.  I find most of his movies somehow off-putting, but I liked that one.  It comes in a montage near the end that shows all the characters "hitting bottom." (I could have done without the heavy-handed chime music, but that's a small point.)

It involves porn actress and frequent cokehead Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), who's in a child custody battle with her ex-husband who disapproves of her lifestyle and wants her to have zero access. There's just been a divorce hearing where the ex said she'd been arrested for drug possession, which she foolishly, desperately denied, but of course the arrest was on record.

In this montage we see Amber sobbing outside the courtroom--no need to say what the court decided!  It was such a real moment--I could feel the  motherly love that led to this sorrow. (If I ever have the good fortune to meet Julianne Moore, I'll ask here how she filmed that scene.)

Custody battles are sad.  Dr. Phil said that when parents fight over their kids, "The mother may win or the father may win, but the children always lose." (Dr. Phil is an annoying bully on the make, but he's right about that.) Some people want to believe that divorce for couples with children is always wrong, but that isn't so. Divorce is clearly the lesser evil for some couples, even for some couples with kids!

What's saddest of all is when one parent convinces himself or herself that if their child is cut off from all contact with the other parent, that'll somehow be in the child's best interest! (They can't admit that this is really about what they want, or even just about denying to the other parent what they want.) It isn't fun being that parent's lawyer. You may well realize that the child is getting a bad deal, but if your client is bloody-minded you have no choice but to work for what they want.  A person's right to have a lawyer who'll do what he wants trumps everything else, and that's the way it must be.

I was just reading about Dylan Farrow insisting her father Woody Allen really is guilty of incest with her, and some people still doubting her. This allegedly happened when she was seven:  granted that there are fathers who screw their daughters, but this is aberrant even by incest standards!  I'm not saying it couldn't have happened, but it's very convenient that her mother Mia Farrow suddenly noticed it after their breakup over  her other daughter Soon-yi: Woody claims that Mia told him, "You took away my daughter, and I'm going to take away yours!" Did she rationalize to herself, "He's guilty enough of incest"? It certainly worked:  the judge not only gave her total custody but made Woody pay her legal bills!

As for Soon-yi, Woody could at least have waited until she graduated from college!

THE POST

(after a friendly fire near-miss) Soldier: "I'm very sorry, sir."

General Raglan (John Gielgud): "What for?"

"For trying to shoot you, sir."

"Well, we all do that..."--Charge of the Light Brigade

Ben Bradlee (urging a tight deadline on a journalist): "Well, can you write like a poet instead of like a novelist?"--The Post

Last night Malcolm, Debi and I saw a DVD of Tony Richardson's sardonic historical epic The Charge of the Light Brigade at the History Meetup. (Malcolm had burned three different versions for us to choose from!) It was all a bit overloaded and sluggish, compared to the same director's zippy Tom Jones.

This afternoon I saw Steven Spielberg's The Post with Ann at the Yonge & Dundas. (The place was full of kids so the popcorn lineup was too long for me.) It stars Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, playing publisher Katherine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post in 1971 when they risked prosecution to get the Pentagon Papers published.  It affected Graham's social relationships with Washington's power elite, and they have Bradlee saying that such coziness between the leaders and the press has to stop.

As intelligent as the movie was, it's hard to ignore what was happening just a decade or two after papers like The New York Times and the Post were taking on the Nixon administration.  Graham became a close friend of Nancy Reagan, and the neoliberal press proved reluctant to take on her husband. (This dovetails with what I was saying yesterday.  I promise not to make a habit of discussing the same subject in consecutive posts:  I dread becoming a bore!)

When I first heard of the Iran-Contra scandals I'd cynically predicted that Reagan would get away with it, and it gave me no pleasure to be proved right.  Of course it's easy to blame cowardly Democrats in Congress. Under James Wright's leadership they spared Reagan impeachment; gave Oliver North immunity from prosecution; and handed over the Iran part of the investigation to the Tower Commission, two of whose three members proved so loyal to the Reagan-Bush administration that two years later Bush Sr. gave them cabinet appointments!

But it's also important to look at the failings of the Washington press.  The Times and the Post had been scooped by a Middle Eastern paper at the start, of course. Then, in the spring of 1987, they suddenly decided that the inadequacies of the Democrats who wanted to succeed Reagan was a safer subject!  It wasn't even bias, just cowardice. What's notable is that the press talked about their general inadequacy more than the specific shortcomings of individual candidates; that it had little to say about what they should actually do differently, beyond platitudes about "vision"; and that the Republican presidential candidates did not experience the same pile-on, though I didn't notice any significant superiority on their part.

And this was the start of a slippery slope.  In the late '90s the Times  and the Post, out of sheer arrogance, launched a smear campaign against Gary Webb's reports showing the connection between the CIA, Washington's covert wars in Central America, and the drug trade. (Webb later killed himself.) Then came 9/11 and blanket deference to Washington--two newspaper columnists were fired for writing columns criticizing Bush Jr.'s performance!  I was also appalled by the hero treatment given to Adolf Bullyani Rudolph Giuliani. Then came war and embedding, and I'll have to stop before I get really exercised! (Hope this didn't bore you.)

The other day I wrote this Tweet: "The Clintonites sailed the Democratic coalition straight into a shipwreck.  Man the scapegoats lifeboats!"

Generational failure

Remember the "greatest generation"? Tom Brokaw wrote a book praising the generation of Americans born between 1905 and 1925, who withstood the Great Depression and World War II and created our world.  (If you ask me, the Civil War generation was even greater, not to mention the Revolutionary War generation!)

There was an article in The New York Times by someone whose name I can't remember saying that the Greatest Generation's big failure was racism.  I'd argue that racism is every generation's failure and that you could just as well single out the World War I generation that joined the Ku Klux Klan in the millions.  If you ask me, the Greatest Generation's big failure was the Cold War.

I think that the Cold War was a mistake.  An avoidable, destructive and protracted mistake which happened to make certain Americans rich and others powerful.  The World War II generation had learned to obey their government like enlisted men obey their officers, view foreigners with a combination of fear and feelings of moral superiority, and accept arbitrary measures like the mass internment of Japanese-Americans. (Americans, I've often said, have a way of learning the wrong lesson from everything...) I'm not saying that the Soviets were guiltless in all this, but this generation let themselves down with McCarthyism, the Vietnam War and Ronald Reagan's unpunished crimes--those who praise Reagan condemn themselves.

Back in the '90s I read a short article in The New Yorker, then edited by deferential Queen of the Weasels Tina Brown, in which Saul Bellow said he didn't know what motivated anti-anticommunists except for residual Stalinism. (Bellow must not have been close to any victims of the Hollywood blacklist.) Well, what motivates anti-anti-anti communists if not residual McCarthyism?  Of course, this was about Bellow trying to spin things so that the issue would be communism rather than anti-communism.

Susan Sontag famously pointed out that Reader's Digest in the 1950s was depicting communism more accurately than The Nation or The New Statesman were. Well, Reader's Digest repeated what the rest of the press was saying--that was their job, of course--while the other two didn't.  Big deal!  What's a lot more important is that the conservative media like Reader's Digest got anti-communism wrong, while the other two got it pretty right.

The most appalling thing about Cold War atrocities like McCarthyism is their enablers and apologists.  There's a fashion among some liberals to subscribe to the conservative myth of the Cold War as a WWII-style "good vs. evil" conflict. Tell it to people in Iran and Guatemala, where the CIA connived to subvert democratic governments and replace them with repressive dictatorships that played ball. It's worth pointing out that "good" Washington's anti-communists in Central America murdered more people than "evil" Moscow's communists in the Warsaw Pact satellites of eastern Europe. (This myth is, to put it nicely if PC, "Eurocentric"!) 

This group also emphasizes the beneficial policies of "liberal realists" like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (He was a liberal historian who joined the Kennedy administration and wrote a pre-Nixon memo promoting presidential deniability!) I have a one-word answer:  Vietnam.  When they weren't enabling conservative atrocities, they came up with one of the biggest on their own there. "Liberal realists" proved to be neither liberal nor realistic.

And the Cold War isn't just ancient history:  today we see Uncle Sam making similar mistakes in the Middle East and Korea, not to mention Russia itself. (I think of the conflict with Islamic terrorists as Cold War II!) And when Congress and the press let Reagan and his henchmen escape the consequences of their Iran-Contra actions--for crying out loud, Colonel North even got out of doing his community service!-- they guaranteed that such malfeasance would happen again.  It used to be that a big White House scandal happened every fifty years:  Grant in the 1870s, Harding in the '20s, Nixon in the '70s.  Now they're happening every ten years!

Nixon would have been impeached, but resigned.

Reagan should have been impeached, but got away with it.

Clinton shouldn't have been impeached, but survived.

Bush Jr. should have been impeached, but was discredited anyway.

And now comes Trump...

I'd say that the Baby Boom generation's big failure was neoliberalism, but that's another story for another post. (What big failure will the post-1980 Millennial Generation come up with?)

A too busy week

Medic: "Chevotarevich, is that a Russian name?" Christopher Walken: "No, it's an American name"--The Deer Hunter 

Yesterday I had a lunch date with Ann at Bar Verde in Nordstrom's at the Eaton Centre.  I was a bit late because the TTC was slow. (I usually arrive ahead of her!) We talked about her magazine, which combines articles by me and by Miriam, and I agreed to do an edit of the first draft. That night I wrote a new article for her about my experience with comic books.

I packed too much into this week.  Besides meeting Ann yesterday and Dr. Hassan tomorrow, I also had a lunch date with Pam today.  I was late again, not because of the TTC but because of sheer carelessness:  I looked at the clock and suddenly noticed I was already ten minutes late!  I rushed there but she'd already left.

What a terrible feeling when you're late, you hurry there but you weren't fast enough!  It's like when you go downstairs to answer the phone and they hang up the millisecond before you get to it.  I remember a few years back when I was in this Chinese girl's Meetup group and RSVPed for a dinner event (we were the only two), but I'd somehow convinced myself it was an hour later than it really was and I got there half an hour late.  It turned out that she'd used her cell phone and already removed me from the group! (When we parted, she had the nerve to wish me "all the best.") If anyone asks me for advice about organizing Meetup groups, one thing I'll say is "Don't remove members until you get home."

Since I ran out of Cipralex last week, my emotions have been getting a bit rawer:  I've been feeling intense anger at times, and also flightiness, as today's carelessness shows.  But it has its good side:  I'm suddenly feeling more inspirations about things to write about here! We'll see how long I can go back to daily posts for my main blog, like I did in its first year five years ago.  And I've stopped napping in the daytime.

Isn't that a cute video at the top?  If I'm ever on the BBC radio show Desert Island Discs, "China Doll" will be one of my choices!

THE WALTONS

I was thinking about the '70s TV show The Waltons.  I liked it at the time (some seasons more than others--didn't care for the first and fifth), but I now realize that I had no taste!  Rouen native Gustave Flaubert said about his hometown, "Disliking Rouen is the beginning of good taste." Well, for me disliking The Waltons was the beginning of good taste!

The Waltons were never poor poor.  The Great Depression was a minor inconvenience for them:  you never saw them getting Relief. (To too many middle-class viewers, that would have made them unsympathetic.)

Let's consider the episode "The Odyssey," written by--why not name her?--Joanna Lee. (It was particularly cheesy that they'd always start by showing the episode title, almost always in the form of "The ______.") 

Homer it isn't.  It starts with narrator Earl Hamner telling us something like "A boy went out that day but a man would return!" Ho hum.  John-Boy goes out to a shack to write or something and meets a young woman who's about to have a baby.  She's there alone because her husband is off making a living with the WPA. (The Waltons didn't do single motherhood.) Of course, John-Boy ends up delivering the baby.

But what's really ineffable is the sub-plot where young Jim-Bob tries to raise tomatoes to win a prize at the agricultural fair but they get ruined by a rainstorm.  At Grandpa's suggestion he heads to the kitchen to make them into preserves.  So we get a scene where he's in an apron peeling them, and his teenage brothers come along and start chanting "Jim-Bob is a mommy's boy!" and he almost attacks them with his kitchen knife. (The Waltons didn't really do subtlety either.)

Then Grandma gives the teenagers a speech something like, "Did you know, the most famous cook in the world is a man--he has a big house with lots of servants..." Something bugged me about this speech and I recently realized, She's talking to these teenagers as if they were little kids!

And of course, The Waltons was written as if all its viewers were little kids.(Someone said, "All television is children's television.") You can also see it in a later scene where Grandma brings Jim-Bob and his preserves to Grandpa and says, "He made them, all by himself!"

I also recall "The Thoroughbred," in which John-Boy, an 18-year-old college student, enters the family mule in some big horse race. There's a scene where he's annoyed about some competitor was the title steed looking down his nose at him and expresses his anger to Pa. Pa says, "I don't know if I should let you go in the race with that attitude," dismisses John-Boy's resentment with "He isn't my son.  You are!" and gives him some hard-nosed speech about how he should only race "for the fun of it."

Think about it.  This guy's son opens up to him and tells him how strongly he feels, and he responds with a threat to forbid him from going in the race. (Isn't John-Boy a bit old for such measures?) Some expert parenting there! Someone gave a rule for parents raising teenagers: "Listen without judging." It isn't that I want TV parents to do everything right, it's that the show expects us to ignore what this says about the father, and just consider what it says about the son and his "attitude." Cheesy, cheesy, cheesy!

And there's a later episode "The Conscience," in which they're starting up conscription in 1940 and Jason considers becoming a Conscientious Objector.  He talks to a recruiting sergeant and leaves just as a couple of louts are coming in to enlist, and the sergeant adds as one last thing, "I hope you talk to your parents about becoming a CO." (My emphasis.) So of course the louts bully Jason later on.  I'm not saying that nobody is careless to that remarkable degree, but I resent a plot that requires a character to be that way!

I could go on, as if you didn't know...

THE LAST JEDI

"Where are you from?" "Nowhere." "No-one's from nowhere." "Jakko." "OK, that's pretty close to nowhere"--The Last Jedi

Tonight I saw The Last Jedi at the Yonge & Eglinton (Would have seen it yesterday afternoon but the TTC was running too slowly.) What can I say?  It was as I expected, all pretty competent but somehow familiar--that sort of thing makes me feel old.  Laura Dern's one of my favorite actresses, but this is one of her lesser roles.  I recognized Benicio Del Toro as the shifty codebreaker.  Because of the tunnel construction, I had to take a snowy ten-minute detour to cross Eglinton Avenue.

Selia and Bev couldn't make the memoir group this afternoon, so I took charge.  There were just eight people, though two were new, so we managed to get through three subjects instead of two!

I've run out of Cipralex so my dreams have been getting wild.  The night before last I dreamed of being in a big family and getting in trouble for quarrelling with some older people, then some people came along with a shovel to dig up human bones, and I woke from the nightmare.  Then I went back to sleep and dreamed of watching a movie in the Cinesphere which was sort of a continuation, about a guy fleeing a powerful household to empty land and to San Francisco train tracks.  Then I tried to leave the Cinesphere but ended up in a maze leading to places like a racing arena.

Last night I dreamed of being in a library or bookstore near Port Elgin, New Brunswick, where all the books seemed to be small paperback series like the Penguin 60s twenty years ago.

Sitcoms

Ensign Parker: "We've no reason to skipper, worry... To worry, Skipper... Well, maybe we do"--McHale's Navy

Today, for the first time I think, there were four people at Dawna's screening.  We watched the sitcoms I Dream of Jeannie and McHale's Navy.  Sourpuss Paul Lynde turned up on Jeannie as a movie director.  I looked at Dawna's Ebay videos and found over twenty I was interested in!

On Youtube I've started listening to a two-hour recording of classic instrumental singles.  I recognized hits like "Swingin' Safari" and "Wheels" whose titles I hadn't known.

We've started watching a Netflix documentary about Napoleon.  I wish they hadn't given the voiceover quotes French accents!  I've also been watching another documentary about the British royals.

The book I'm reading about the Middle Ages is full of little mistakes, like spelling Lotharingia as "Lotharginia."

Dreamed of test pilot Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepherd in THE RIGHT STUFF) in his teenage hot-rodding days!

Headache

"Have you never learned to read?" "Too busy getting an education!"--We of the Never Never

"What's the matter, Yuba?  Did your wife come back?"--M'liss

Tuesday I had a big headache and couldn't do much.  It must have been the warm weather.

Monday at the memoir group Gary was returning an electric keyboard so I played a few songs for them. (I wasn't very good at it.) On the way home I rented some DVDs from Bay Street Video.  

One was the Australian movie We of the Never Never, about an Edwardian wife on an Outback cattle station.  I saw it Tuesday night (for the second time).  It's quite good, with beautiful scenery.

I also rented two silent movies, Heart o' the Hills and M'liss, both with Mary Pickford in a hillbilly spitfire role. (I liked the competitive jig scene in Heart o' the Hills.) I also got Creed, with Sylvester Stallone reprising Rocky, but that was for Moira rather than me.

THE RIGHT STUFF

"Sound barrier--the big farm you buy in the sky!"--The Right Stuff

Friday night we watched the first hour of Michael Cimino's testosterone epic The Deer Hunter yet again.  Back in the '70s they actually showed the blue-collar milieu realistically!

Yesterday afternoon Dawna and I saw the DVD of a 2003 Rolling Stones concert in Twickenham.  I couldn't help feeling a bit sad for those sexagenarians still enacting youthful rebellion. (We also saw part of a ZZ Top concert in Germany--those were the guys with the long beards.)

Saw Philip Kaufman's movie of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff at the Lightbox, for the third time, but the first in 70mm.  Sam Shephard has a good role as test pilot Chuck Yeager.  It's enjoyable enough, though it left me still wondering whether the Mercury astronauts were real heroes or just "spam in a can" (Yeager) inflated by a media blitz.  To play the astronauts they found some of the most quintessentially American actors around:  Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Fred Ward, Dennis Quaid.

History Discussion Group

"You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap.  But I don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love....  With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest:  I hate You, God, I hate You as though you existed"--The End of the Affair

Last night I went to a Cultural Exchange Meetup karaoke. Only a few people showed up:  those cold nights make a lot of no-shows!  But I got in three songs, including Gerry and the Pacemakers' "It's Gonna Be Alright." (Dusty does seem to have every song you could imagine...)

Today I finished The End of the Affair.  It felt very real.

I got The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Middle Ages for the next History Meetup at the Dufferin-St. Clair library. (But for some reason I thought it was at the Bloor-Gladstone and went there first!)

Tonight was this month's History Meetup, and the subject was Russia.  I was afraid that the deep freeze would keep most people away, but half a dozen people turned out.  And it was one of our liveliest discussions, going on for over three hours!

A new blog

"A week ago I had only to say to her 'Do you remember that first time together and how I hadn't got a shilling for the meter?' and the scene would be there for both of us.  Now it was there for me only.  She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself.  I was losing my individuality.  It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs"--The End of the Affair

What with the new year, I've started that new blog, posting my diary entries from fifteen years ago.  The URL is 

https://thistime15yearsago.blogspot.ca/

Lying in bed under the heavy blankets on New Year's Eve, I sweated so much that I had to change pajamas. (Oh well, it probably boosts your health.) My New Year's resolution is to stop napping in the afternoon.

We're watching the Plantagenet documentary Britain's Bloodiest Dynasty.  I've seen it before but I might as well see it again.  I've also been looking at a Netflix documentary about the Windsors.  I got the impression that even without Mrs. Simpson, Edward VIII would have found some other reason to abdicate!

Last night I dreamed about bringing my family to London and seeing a theatre with an elaborate display at the top of the building promoting their new musical production.