Watch party

Booker T. Washington: "You will receive a speedy trial and a swift execution."... "Mr. Washington, you speak like an angel.  It's too bad we're down here on earth"--Ragtime

Yesterday I did my first watch party with the History Meetup group, screening Milos Forman's movie of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (which I was seeing for the second time). The group wasn't all in the Toronto vicinity; there was one from Brooklyn and another from Austin, Texas.

The movie's a handsome production but it doesn't really work. It removed a lot of the sprawling book, including Sigmund Freud and Emma Goldman and the Peary expedition and the Zapatistas and the Lusitania, but what's left seems less streamlined than spotty.  What seemed "kaleidoscopic" on paper comes across as hit & miss on the screen. (Maybe it could work better as a miniseries.  I have heard good things about the Broadway musical version.) Among other things, the story's central bourgeois family manufactures fireworks, yet we never see any pyrotechnic displays!  Randy Newman's central theme is graceful, but it's a waltz rather than ragtime.

As lady of scandal Evelyn Nesbit, Elizabeth McGovern seemed to me more teenager than sex goddess.  I noticed a lot of future big names in small roles, including Dominic Chianese (Junior Soprano), whom I recognized from his voice!  The best performance is Howard Rollins as Coalhouse Walker, though his storyline struck me as the novel's most dubious. (An African-American heads down the road to radical terrorism because bigoted firemen vandalized his car??  I guess that's supposed to be the sort of black militancy middle-class white readers can identify with.) Doctorow got away with stuff like this in the book because there was so much else going on, but that sort of thing is harder to pull off in a movie.  Earlier on they'd considered hiring Robert Altman to direct it, and his style might have worked better.

I've started learning music theory on Friday afternoons on Zoom with some people from my singing group.  Level 1 was no challenge for me:  so far it's all stuff I remember from my piano-playing days.

Another dry spell

It's been a week and a half since my last post here!  There just hasn't been much going on in my life.

Every day or two I check the latest Covid-19 statistics.  First I check the Canadian figures to see if we're getting closer to ending isolation. (Even though I know a watched pot never boils...)

https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-summary-covid-19-cases.html#a2

Then I see the international figures here. (But bear in mind, random testing and death rate statistics suggest that in the USA the true figure is two or three times as big!)

https://news.google.com/covid19/map?hl=en-CA&gl=CA&ceid=CA:en

This page shows new cases.  It looks like Iran's already in a second wave.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

It's Victoria Day, and the warm weather has arrived.  We're now opening the living room windows, and today I mowed the lawn for the first time this year.  I also brought out my summer hat.  John finished relaying the floor of the big second-storey room that used to be mine, and it was fun helping him align the individual boards so the whole thing would be flush!

Thursday night the book club met and discussed Leaves of Grass.  Only a few people came, but the book was a real revelation for me!  Walt Whitman was a rare original.

I now have over 5000 followers on Twitter, a number that exceeds people I follow.  That means I can be more lenient in following more Tweeters, since my maximum is now something like 5500!

I finished rewatching the third season of Sailor Moon, and now I'm on the last arc of Dragon Ball, with Son Goku doing nth-degree training up above the clouds with Mr. Popo.  Some people think Popo is racist, but I find him pretty cool.

Peaky Blinders is getting to be a little much.  It's the kind of show where we see Churchill painting with a nude model. (I could hear them thinking, "What can we throw in that's attention-grabbing?") One Youtube comment said, "I got lung cancer just from watching the show." Not only do the characters smoke a lot, there's generally a smoggy industrial atmosphere!

Online Meetups

Whereto answering, the sea,

Delaying not, hurrying not,

Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,

Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death,

And again death, death, death, death,

Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous'd child's heart,

But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,

Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and leaving me softly all over,

Death, death, death, death, death.

--a rather Povian verse from Walt Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

Today I hosted the first online event for my Meetup groups.  My History Meetup discussed the world in 1900, and it felt pretty timely.  I actually came on an hour early, but Subha from Korea made the same goof and we had a good talk waiting for the others to arrive.  In the weeks to be come I'll be hosting the book club online and even have a watch party for a historical movie.

I've really been getting into Walt Whitman's poetry! (I was worried about finishing it in time for next week's Meetup, but I'm well on schedule.) His sea poems are vivid, and he wrote some of the finest poems about old age.

Just finished rewatching the King Piccolo arc of Dragon Ball. (Now it's time to return to Sailor Moon.) That arc is the series' best of all!  It involves the evil alien King Piccolo out to reconquer and destroy the world, who's killed three of Goku's friends so they want to find the dragon balls to bring them back to life and Goku wants to destroy Piccolo, but Piccolo got the dragon balls and rejuvenated his superpowers and then killed the dragon...   Tribesman Yajirobe is a funny sidekick for Goku.  The part where they go through an icy underground maze with a spirit who plays mind games, to get a drink of ultradivine water, is especially imaginative.  And the subplot about Tenshinhan's need to take on Piccolo in order to atone for his past misbehaviour is dramatically strong.

We've started watching Peaky Blinders on Netflix.  It stars Cillian Murphy as a numbers racketeer in Birmingham, England a century ago dealing with communists and the IRA as well as the police.  The music's oddly anachronistic, like in Boardwalk Empire.

Bits and pieces

I'm ashamed of myself, taking so long between posts on this blog!  Why don't I feel motivated?

I've found some more virtual Meetup events.  On Saturday nights I do a virtual karaoke.  I don't have a handheld mike and the audio has trouble, but I sing five songs at each event.  And on Sunday mornings there's an event where we talk military history.

I've returned to watching Dragon Ball, now the third season with the second worldwide martial-arts competition. And I bought and read an Ebook of the first chapters of the manga version of One Piece.

It's less than two weeks to the virtual Book Club, so I'll have to get Leaves of Grass read. (I had to google the word "eidolon"--it's a sort of spirit-image.)

John finished remodelling the kitchen, so now he's renovating the big second-floor room that he'd previously been keeping all his tools in.  He pulled up all the floorboards, and I helped him drive out all the nails, which means hammering them on the sharp side to push them up enough for a hammer claw to do the rest.  When that's finished, we can make it into a guest room and move in the excess furniture now in my and Moira's rooms.

Today there were some snow flurries! (The big temperature drop gave me another headache.) I remember when I was growing up in New Brunswick, there'd be snow in May once every several years.

I'm now in the Orcs and Goblins chapter of the online Elvenar game.

I now have over 4800 followers on Twitter.  Which means my ceiling of Tweeters I can follow has finally been raised a bit above 5000!