The TOR costumes arrived!

Today Malabar shipped the costumes for the TOR shows to the Bickford Centre.  I came over to help unpack them as I do every year, and that's always fun.  I sometimes get a glimpse inside the women's dressing room. (I've never seen the witches' cauldron, but they do have more full-length mirrors than us men.) I usually get the chance to try on my own costume, though this year the time was lacking.

I got to wear my costume in the evening, when we did a dress rehearsal of TALES OF HOFFMANN.  This year I get to wear the same costume in both operas. (In THE BARBER OF SEVILLE, the male chorus also have police uniforms.) The shirt feels so comfortable I wish I owned one of that material!  This year we don't have to wear knee socks, which are a bit of a headache for keeping pinned.

At the rehearsal we also got masks to wear for the Barcarolle scene. (While Pablo was rehearsing Hoffmann's aria in that scene, Giuseppe told him, "This is a whorehouse, give us more dick!") I got a pink cat-style mask to wear and had a frustrating time tying the strings behind my head before I figured out that it's better to tie them before putting it on.

Today was also my birthday. (I was born on February 5, 1962, the same day as the birth of actress Jennifer Jason Leigh and a rare combination of solar eclipse and planetary conjunction that had some astrologers predicting the end of the world.) The whole TOR chorus sang "Happy Birthday to You" for me.  We ate Chinese food and my fortune cookie said, "You will be showered with good luck." I'll believe it when I see it.

Recent DVDs

The other day I saw the first episode of the DVD of the series LEGACY, where Michael Wood visits the sites of ancient civilizations and draws lessons for the present world.  I've always enjoyed Wood's documentaries, on subjects ranging from Dark-Age England to the Trojan War to India to western art. (Last year I saw a show on Netflix where he retraced Alexander the Great's routes of conquest.) This is another vivid one.

For a while I've been watching DVDs of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATRE 3000, where they show cheesy movies and insert snarky comments.  I recently saw their masterful treatment of JACK FROST, an awkwardly-dubbed English version of a colorful but surreal Russian fairy tale production, from back in the 1960s.

I've also seen another DVD of short avant-garde films from the pre-1950 era, a collection of 1979 pop music clips from THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, some more episodes of MISSION:  IMPOSSIBLE and GUNSMOKE, one of the musical specials Barbra Streisand made for TV in the mid-'60s, and a couple of documentaries from PBS' THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE about the 19th-century laying of the first telegraph cables across the Atlantic Ocean, and the World War II construction of the Alaska Highway through the Yukon. (Canadians only got mentioned briefly.)

We've received the last of our 16 monthly discs from zip.ca and the next ones won't arrive for a couple of weeks.  But I still have three left to see:  an episode of the 1950s country-music variety show TOWN HALL PARTY, an expressionist German silent movie of OTHELLO starring the great Emil Jannings, and SHORT INFINITY, a National Film Board documentary about a community on of the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Questions of netiquette

Around fifteen years ago, I used to post in the forums at mrcranky.com a lot.  There was no moderation and I met several interesting people.  There was one who was rather thin-skinned, and eventually he stopped writing posts there, but continued to "lurk," reading other people's posts.  Some people say it's a violation of "netiquette" to keep lurking in a thread that you aren't contributing to.  But speaking for myself, it's no skin off my face if someone reads my posts without posting himself.

On one occasion, however, this ex-poster sent me an email taking issue with something I had posted, leading to a quarrel.  This seems objectionable to me:  someone posting in a thread can only write for the other people posting there.  If you can't reply by posting there, let it ride. (It wasn't like I'd been writing about him.)

A year later, it happened again.  I sent this person an email in an attempt to be friendly with him, and in his reply he attacked me over something I'd written there.  This resulted in another quarrel, and we haven't communicated since.  What particularly bothered me was that a few months before, after an earlier incident, he'd returned to the site and made a rather theatrical promise to stop lurking. (I should have guessed he didn't mean it.) I hate losing friends!

Some years back, I was organizing the Karaoke Meetup in Toronto. (That ended after an event where I thought five people were coming, but I was the only one who showed up.  Those cold January nights will do that!) One person attended an event I hosted, and I seem to have done something rude then.

This person was also a member of a Movie Meetup that I belonged to, and a short while later she posted a message saying that she was going to see a certain movie at the Cinematheque and inviting the other members to join her.  I was going to see this same movie so I sent her a message saying I'd like to see it with her.  She responded that the invitation didn't apply to me because of my "distasteful" behavior at this earlier event.  I replied by asking what I'd done, adding: "I wish I'd been told earlier." Crickets. (That's net slang for "No answer.") I skipped the movie.

So who needs the manners lesson here?  Does she think that if she doesn't tell me what I did, I'll search through the recesses of my memory and manage to figure it out myself?  Alas, all I can do is assume that she's out of her tree and that my behavior was perfectly polite.

LES MISERABLES

This evening I saw Tom Hooper's movie of the musical LES MISERABLES at the Varsity.  I haven't read Victor Hugo's book, but Moira tells me it's pretty shameless.  I saw a pretty good 1936 movie of it with Frederic March as Valjean and a witty Charles Laughton as Javert (in contrast to Anthony Perkins in the 1978 TV movie, who played Javert with unrelieved grimness).

As for this movie, meh.  The music--I've never seen the stage musical--strikes me as kitschy, with a general feel of sameness, though I do have a soft spot for "Bring Him Home." (It's Giuseppe's favorite LES MIZ song too.) The live singing feels rather slight.  Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter are pretty funny as the crooked innkeepers.

Trivia note:  The world's two shortest telegrams resulted after Hugo sent the LES MIZ manuscript to his publisher.  He sent a cable consisting of "?" and got the response "!" On the other hand, the novel has what may be literature's longest published sentence (thank goodness for cut & paste):

"The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuating circumstances, but also as worthy of esteem as that father had been of blame; possessing all private virtues and many public virtues; careful of his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs, knowing the value of a minute and not always the value of a year; sober, serene, peaceable, patient; a good man and a good prince; sleeping with his wife, and having in his palace lackeys charged with the duty of showing the conjugal bed to the bourgeois, an ostentation of the regular sleeping-apartment which had become useful after the former illegitimate displays of the elder branch; knowing all the languages of Europe, and, what is more rare, all the languages of all interests, and speaking them; an admirablerepresentative of the “middle class,” but outstripping it, and in every way greater than it; possessing excellent sense, while appreciating the blood from which he had sprung, counting most of all on his intrinsic worth, and, on the question of his race, very particular, declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; thoroughly the first Prince of the Blood Royal while he was still only a Serene Highness, but a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; diffuse in public, concise in private; reputed, but not proved to be a miser; at bottom, one of those economists who are readily prodigal at their own fancy or duty; lettered, but not very sensitive to letters; a gentleman, but not a chevalier; simple, calm, and strong; adored by his family and his household; a fascinating talker, an undeceived statesman, inwardly cold, dominated by immediate interest, always governing at the shortest range, incapable of rancor and of gratitude, making use without mercy of superiority on mediocrity, clever in getting parliamentary majorities to put in the wrong those mysterious unanimities which mutter dully under thrones; unreserved, sometimes imprudent in his lack of reserve, but with marvellous address in that imprudence; fertile in expedients, in countenances, in masks; making France fear Europe and Europe France! incontestably fond of his country, but preferring his family; assuming more domination than authority and more authority than dignity, a disposition which has this unfortunate property, that as it turns everything to success, it admits of ruse and does not absolutely repudiate baseness, but which has this valuable side, that it preserves politics from violent shocks, the state from fractures, and society from catastrophes; minute, correct, vigilant, attentive, sagacious, indefatigable; contradicting himself at times and giving himself the lie; bold against Austria at Ancona, obstinate against England in Spain, bombarding Antwerp, and paying off Pritchard; singing the Marseillaisewith conviction, inaccessible to despondency, to lassitude, to the taste for the beautiful and the ideal, to daring generosity, to Utopia, to chimeras, to wrath, to vanity, to fear; possessing all the forms of personal intrepidity; a general at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes; attacked eight times by regicides and always smiling; brave as a grenadier, courageous as a thinker; uneasy only in the face of the chances of a European shaking up, and unfitted for great political adventures; always ready to risk his life, never his work; disguising his will in influence, in order that he might be obeyed as an intelligence rather than as a king; endowed with observation and not with divination; not very attentive to minds, but knowing men, that is to say requiring to see in order to judge; prompt and penetrating good sense, practical wisdom, easy speech, prodigious memory; drawing incessantly on this memory, his only point of resemblance with Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon; knowing deeds, facts, details, dates, proper names, ignorant of tendencies, passions, the diverse geniuses of the crowd, the interior aspirations, the hidden and obscure uprisings of souls, in a word, all that can be designated as the invisible currents of consciences; accepted by the surface, but little in accord with France lower down; extricating himself by dint of tact; governing too much and not enough; his own first minister; excellent at creating out of the pettiness of realities an obstacle to the immensity of ideas; mingling a genuine creative faculty of civilization, of order and organization, an indescribable spirit of proceedings and chicanery, the founder and lawyer of a dynasty; having something of Charlemagne and something of an attorney; in short, a lofty and original figure, a prince who understood how to create authority in spite of the uneasiness of France, and power in spite of the jealousy of Europe, — Louis Philippe will be classed among the eminent men of his century, and would be ranked among the most illustrious governors of history had he loved glory but a little, and if he had had the sentiment of what is great to the same degree as the feeling for what is useful."

How do you define a religion?

I was thinking about the definition of a religion, and decided it has the following features:

1.  Oral or written traditions.

2.  Group activities and rituals.

3.  A professional priesthood.

4.  A behavior code.

5.  A theory of the creation and of the afterlife.

6.  A sense of mysticism.

And I define it so that something is a religion if it has at least five of the six features.  Something like Confucianism is close, but it has only four features.

That's one of those abstract things I sometimes think about.  I've been thinking recently about three-dimensional geometry, and Platonic and Archimedean solids. (They're the three-dimensional figures formed with regular polygons as their faces.  The most famous example is the cube.)

My diary decade

Before I started this blog, I wrote a diary.  I started it at the beginning of 2003, when I was not quite 41.  At first I was fanciful enough to address my writing to a non-existent 13-year-old girl called Dinah.  After I saw GANGS OF NEW YORK, I wrote: "Dinah, I know you want to see anything with Leo di Caprio in it, but I can understand your mother not wanting you to see it." But such fancy can only go so far, and I soon reverted to a more conventional approach.

Every day I'd write down what I'd had for dinner, simply because it was a guarantee that I'd have SOMETHING to write about every day. (Now I understand why Samuel Pepys talked about food so much in his diary.) And I'd often write about my dreams.  My writing will show that I often dream about my old home in Sackville, New Brunswick.

In the early years I wrote quite a bit, as much as six pages a week.  But in more recent years I slowed down and wrote just a couple of pages weekly.  I originally started this blog back in 2007 and wrote it off and one for about a year, then let it lapse because I couldn't think of things to write about.  It was when I was visiting London last September that I decided to resume the blog, since I felt I had a lot to write about now.  But lately I've been worrying about repeating myself:  I've written so much that it's hard to remember whether or not I've already written on a specific subject.

Joyce Murray

This evening I went to a Joyce Murray campaign event at Scallywag's.  She's the Vancouver MP running in the federal Liberal leadership race, who supports creating an electoral alliance with the NDP and the Greens.

Joyce Murray appeared and talked a lot about the importance of a non-Conservative alliance.  Most of the people there were grits, but there were also some New Democrats like me and at least one Green. (Some of those attending emphasized fighting climate change, which is also a big concern for me.) Thomas Mulcair says working with the other opposition parties isn't a priority with him, but he's party leader, not king!  I just hope this grassroots movement gets critical mass in the next two years, before the next federal election.

Afterward I went to Book City and found some more discounted books. (Most of them had a list price of $25 to $30, but were being sold for less than $10.) I bought Gore Vidal's BURR (sure, he was glib, but I've heard very good things about his historical novels); Mark Kurlansky's THE LAST FISH TALE, about the fishing town at Gloucester, Massachusetts; LATIN LOVE LESSONS, about Rome's amorous poetry; MUTINY ON THE _GLOBE_, a first-person account about a deadly 1824 mutiny on a Pacific whaler (led by the author's brother); Daniel Boorstin's THE SEEKERS, a history of world philosophy (I've read his the DISCOVERERS and THE CREATORS); Dava Sobel's THE PLANETS; a history of Australia; an illustrated book about modern art, and another of fairy tales.  I'd like to read some of them, and even if I don't we can sell them online.

Reagan the "moderate"

Something that bugs me these days is American liberals using the "Reagan the moderate" talking point.  They think they're being clever when they say that today's Republicans are so extreme that they'd reject Ronald Reagan.  Actually, they're being weak.  I won't deny that the Republican party has been getting disturbingly extreme, yet this extremism is Ronald Reagan's legacy more than any other man's.

Don't get me started on Reagan.  The Iran-Contra scandals showed what crimes a US president can get away with when Congress and the Washington press don't do their job.  Congress made a crucial mistake in 1987 when they spared Reagan impeachment, guaranteeing that his crimes would be repeated.  But it's too convenient to put all the blame on a safe target like Congress.

Back in the spring of 1987 the US news media responded to Iran-Contra by launching a big attack on the Democratic candidates in the 1988 presidential race, labelling them "the Seven Dwarfs" a year before the primaries! (Actually, it was one of the more interesting Democratic races, because one of the dwarfs was Jesse Jackson, but I digress.) The Republican candidates didn't experience the same pile-on, despite not being so much better than their Democratic rivals.  In some cases this one-sidedness resulted from straightforward pro-Republican bias, but more often it reflected a contemptible phenomenon that I call safetargetism.  Your typical Washington reporter clearly calculated that attacking Democrats would put his own position at less risk than attacking Republicans like Reagan.

The continuing conservative praise of Reagan is ignorant, but it's what I expect.  What really bothers me is the cowardly deference that too many liberals still pay to this monster.  It used to be that Washington would have a big White House scandal every fifty years:  the Grant administration in the 1870s, Harding in the 1920s, Nixon in the 1970s.  Now it's happening every ten years:  Nixon and Watergate in the 1970s, Reagan and Iran-Contra in the 1980s, Clinton and Whitewater-Monicagate in the 1990s, Bush Jr.'s war crimes in the 2000s.  This is what happens when presidents are allowed to escape legal accountability for their actions, as in Nixon being pardoned by his successor, Reagan being "pardoned" by Congress, and Obama sparing his predecessor legal action in the name of "looking forward, not back." Such cowardice means that future crimes will be worse.

DICKENS IN AMERICA

I've started watching a fascinating 2005 BBC series called DICKENS IN AMERICA. (Moira borrowed it from the library so we'll have to see all twelve half-hour episodes in a week.  Myself, I've already seen four!) It's about British actress Miriam Margolyes, who's played Dickensian characters in stuff like the 1988 adaptation of LITTLE DORRIT, retracing the route Dickens took in his famous 1842 tour of the United States.

That tour, of course, was the subject of Dickens' book AMERICAN NOTES. (His criticisms of some things in the US caused resentment among Americans, but he reserved his real vitriol for his satirical novel MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT.) Not quite thirty, his early books had already made Boz famous as far away as the US:  when the new steamships arrived in America carrying the magazine serializing THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP, people onshore called out "Is Little Nell dead yet?" MM compares him to the Beatles arriving in the US in 1964.  His attitude toward the US is remarkably ambivalent:  he admired the idea of a republic free of Britain's class consciousness and open to new ways, but he didn't always admire the actual results.  British people today still feel some of that ambivalence.

In this series, MM goes through the same places as Dickens one at a time.  Dickens crossed the Atlantic on the Cunard steamer BRITANNIA, while MM takes the humongous QUEEN MARY 2 in the first episode. (The latter ship's captain pointed out that the earlier ship could have fit inside his craft's biggest dining hall.) In the next episodes she travels through Boston, New England and New York City.  Later on, she's going to follow him through Canada!

Some American should make a PBS documentary series following Mark Twain's route on the 1860s tour of the Old World that led to his book THE INNOCENTS ABROAD.

DAUGHTER OF THE REGIMENT

Today I saw the DVD of the Donizetti opera DAUGHTER OF THE REGIMENT.  That's the one where Marie, a foundling adopted by a whole French army regiment, gets her live saved by a foreign peasant called Tonio and they fall in love, but she turns out to be the long-lost niece of a Marquise (actually her daughter, it later turns out), who takes her off to her castle to turn her into a lady of quality...

This version, translated into English, is a 1974 production, staged outdoors in a Virginia state park part of a summer festival and videotaped by the PBS station in Washington, DC.  The costumes were from Malabar in Toronto, which also provides the TOR costumes! (The closing credits misspelled it as "Malabor," and omitted the "c" from the publisher Schirmer's name.)

Most importantly, Marie was played by Beverley Sills in her first televised opera performance. (Sills describes Marie as "Lucille Ball with high notes.") When she came out the audience broke into wild applause like when Henry Winkler's Fonzie made his entrance on HAPPY DAYS.

Also, I saw a DVD of some early episodes of THAT GIRL, the sitcom with Marlo Thomas as an aspiring actress in New York City. (At the start of the episode some character, asked whom he'd chosen, would point at MT and say "That girl!" then the show's title would appear below her gaping face.) It's pretty dated, the kind of show where she gets scared by a mouse and when she first arrives in NYC her agent finds her a part right away.  It's only a tiny role on a kiddie show where she plays a mop that gets pushed around a floor, but still!

FREAKS AND GEEKS

"Your butt was calling to me"--Seth Rogen, FREAKS AND GEEKS

My latest Netflix TV series is the one-season wonder FREAKS AND GEEKS which I've seen before on DVD.  It's a classic high school show about a geeky freshman brother trying to fit in, and his older sister who's determined not to, set around 1980. (The show appeared in the 1999-2000 season.) James Franco and Seth Rogen got their start as two of the sister's only friends.

I like Joe Flaherty as their Father, who says things like "When I was in high school I had a friend who smoked.  Do you know what he's doing now?  He's dead!" (It's a shame that Flaherty didn't have as big a career as most of the other SCTV performers:  in my book he was the funniest of all.) But my favorite character is the anti-social Kim (Busy Phillips). I recall that "Kim Kelly Is My Friend" and the Halloween episode were masterpieces.

Meanwhile, I got started on a new online game called DYNASTY. It's about an heir restoring his father's ruined business empire in the 1930s.  But so far I'm just a farmer buying up properties in a nearby suburb.

I also looked at a DVD of Bollywood music videos from India.  Some of them were pretty strange!

Statues of TV characters

I travelled to New York City by bus once. (It wasn't very comfortable, but on the way in through New Jersey I spotted some of the locations where they filmed THE SOPRANOS.) Outside the city's big bus depot they had a statue of Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden with the inscription "Bus driver.  Raccoon lodge treasurer.  Dreamer." Quite appealing.

They've erected several statues of TV characters around the US. (I think some company that airs classic shows has been sponsoring them.) There's Mary Richards waving her cap in Minneapolis, Fonzie in Milwaukee, Bob Newhart in Chicago, and Samantha in BEWITCHED in Salem, Massachusetts.  The last one, making a connection between a real-life tragedy and a TV comedy, strikes me as tasteless.  Even Canada has a statue of Al Waxman in KING OF KENSINGTON in Toronto's Kensington Park.

I've been thinking about all the other TV characters who could use statues.  The ones best suited are those identified with a particular city or neighborhood.  I can see J.J. in GOOD TIMES in Chicago's housing projects area, Freddy Prinze in CHICO AND THE MAN in a Hispanic section of Los Angeles, Archie Bunker (in his chair, with a cigar and can of beer) in New York's Bedford-Stuyvesant, Kotter and the Sweathogs in Bensonhurst, Crockett and Tubbs of MIAMI VICE in Miami, Sam Malone of CHEERS in Boston, Frasier in Seattle, WKRP's Dr. Johnny Fever in Cincinnati, even Dabney Coleman in BUFFALO BILL (with his distinctive hand wave) in Buffalo.  Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones in LONESOME DOVE could be erected anywhere on the Great Plains, perhaps at the National Cowboy Museum.

But why stop at TV?  I can see statues of movie characters too.  There could be Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade of THE MALTESE FALCON in San Francisco, Judy Garland (with the posture of a trolley car passenger) in St. Louis, Marlon Brando in ON THE WATERFRONT on the Hoboken shore (I see him twenty feet tall, holding a longshoreman's hook), Al Pacino as Serpico in New York (perhaps in the neighborhood where Serpico was shot in the face?), Blanche Dubois in New Orleans, Gregory Peck in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD somewhere in Alabama...

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Today I saw the DVD of Michael Hoffman's 1999 film of Shakespeare's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, with a cast including Rupert Everett as Oberon the fairy king.  Everett is an actor who interests me:  I've been seeing a lot of his films on DVD, even the trashy 1983 miniseries PRINCESS DAISY where he was the heroine's evil stepbrother.

This version has an interesting cast, including Michelle Pfeiffer and Kevin Kline as Bottom. (James Cagney's Bottom was the best thing in Max Reinhardt's rather slow 1935 version, which I saw last year.) Stanley Tucci's Puck is counter-intuitive but witty.  Personally, I find Calista Flockhart goofy.

This version has a handsome, original look--it's set in Italy toward 1900, with the lovers riding bicycles--and some nice opera music.  No doubt they were inspired by Kenneth Branagh's MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.  But at times it tried too hard to make Shakespeare "accessible," with a mud-wrestling scene and some not very necessary nudity. (Back in the 1990s it was the fashion to insert nudity in Shakespeare movies:  see also OTHELLO and RICHARD III.)

Of course, maybe I was ill-disposed to it because I was feeling sick. (Hope I feel better tomorrow.)

Back at the TOR

The TOR resumed rehearsals a couple of weeks ago.  The first two weeks were only Tuesday, but with the performances approaching we're now rehearsing on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. (Next week will be Thursday instead of Wednesday.)

We're now not just learning the singing but going on the stage and getting our movements straight.  For the tavern scenes at the beginning and end of TALES OF HOFFMAN, we get long pipes and metal mugs for props.  In THE BARBER OF SEVILLE the chorus only sings a few times, so Beatrice has us onstage without singing in a couple more scenes.  For one, the men are pretending to be musicians accompanying the Count's serenade.  I pretend to play a violin, and the half-kneeling is a bit of a challenge for me. (I half-kneeled last year during the Vilja song in THE MERRY WIDOW and the year before during the "Bruderlein und Schwesterlein" number in DIE FLEDERMAUS.) I may need a single kneepad.

When we were rehearsing the HOFFMANN scene with Olympia the dancing doll, she was wearing a fancy wig but Giuseppe decided that she looked like Bette Davis in the Grand Guignol film WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?  Which reminded me of the NEW YORK TIMES capsule description of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? which said "Plenty."

Back when I occasionally read parts of the TIMES other than the crosswords, I liked some of their movie capsules. (I think some were written by Howard Thompson.) On THE DIRTY DOZEN: "Entertaining as a blow-torch." TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT: "Swell first chapter, the rest not bad." GUNGA DIN: "Plenty of both." STAR WARS: "All aboard." The three-story movie YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW: "The first and third parts are wonderful, it's number two that's the clunker." FLUFFY: "Dweadful." THE GODFATHER: "Minestrone and dynamite." MY FAIR LADY: "Not to be rude, but what was all the shouting about?" MOMMIE DEAREST: "You won't be bored."

Coasterland

I've started another of those cute kid-sized Zynga games whose apps you can get on Facebook.  This one's called Coasterville.  It's a bit like Cityville, but it involves building an amusement park.  You earn money, ship goods and collect thrills to build attractions and outfit food-selling carts.  I'm seeing how far I can get without spending real money to get special bucks.  And if I do spend real money, we'll see how long that lasts and whether I end up acquiring more. (When you buy those bucks the first time, they give you a special deal, but it costs more when you buy more.)

I've got up to level 20 in the game Pet Rescue Saga.  As I play that game, I keep thinking of the movie NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE, maybe because the pets are like animals stuck in a house. (I also keep thinking of the book LITTLE WOMEN, which I've never read.) I have a feeling that John Landis sold his soul to the Devil when he made ANIMAL HOUSE:  some directors just give me that vibe.  Another example would be Roman Polanski.

Lately, I've been getting the feeling that some of the things I'm now writing in this blog are things I've written earlier. (There are now too many entries for me to go back through to prove or disprove it.) I'm starting to wonder if I only have a finite number of things to say.  Maybe there's a way to put tags on entries to categorize them so I can check more easily, but I'm still too lazy to figure it out.

New York City

I've visited New York City a few times, and I'd like to do so again sometime, notwithstanding ROSEMARY'S BABY. (Moira says her only reason for visiting would be to have a big New York breakfast, and there are places where she can get that in Toronto.) But I always feel like I've only scratched the surface:  I'd like to find the non-touristy places that aren't so well known.

Of course, there are well-known sights that I'll keep coming to, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  My favorite part is the section with the American art:  some of it I've recognized from Ken Burns' Civil War documentary.  I enjoy the footpath on the Brooklyn Bridge, and I like Central Park too. But there must be a lot of interesting stuff in the outer boroughs like Brooklyn. (I'm curious about the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood because I think ALL IN THE FAMILY was set around there.) I guess I should read something like the Lonely Planet guide.

I suppose you'd have to live there a while to really know the place, like when I was lucky enough to live in London in 1995. (But would it be worth the hassle of living in New York City?  Fran Leibowitz points out that when New York newspapers ask people on the street "What would you do if you won the lottery?" they answer "Leave New York!")

And I'd like to visit Los Angeles someday, just to see Disneyland (especially Main Street USA).

BTW, the other night I dreamed of meeting the actress Laura Dern at the Confederation Centre in Charlottetown, PEI.  I said to her, "Any day when I meet Laura Dern is a good day!" Which it would be.

ROSEMARY'S BABY

"This isn't a dream!  It's really happening!"--an unsubtle Mia Farrow line in ROSEMARY'S BABY

This afternoon I saw Roman Polanski's ROSEMARY'S BABY, for the second time, at the Bloor. (I considered seeing an earlier showing of the Maysles brothers' classic documentary SALESMAN, but decided it was a bit too downbeat for me.)

I didn't much care for the movie the first time I saw it and I still don't.  It's very much of its time (1968), about big-city paranoia and a creepy New York apartment building, not unlike all those horror movies involving a creepy haunted house.  I'm not attracted to movies about satanism:  THE EXORCIST left me cold.  I guess I'm more afraid of the evil within us.

I'll admit that Mia Farrow's performance is rather stunning of its kind.  But I didn't care for her costar John Cassavetes:  he was another of those actors whom I can see acting.  And Polanski's the kind of director who can make a bouquet of roses look sinister!

True fact:  Mia was married to Frank Sinatra, who wanted him to costar with him in THE DETECTIVE.  But the ROSEMARY'S BABY production got behind schedule and Mia had to choose between walking off the movie and bowing out of her husband's vehicle.  Sinatra gave her an ultimatum:  Make my movie or I'll divorce you! (Nice guy, huh?) But Paramount production executive Robert Evans showed her footage of her scenes that had already been filmed, and she finished it and sacrificed her marriage. (Evans tells the story in his memoir THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE.)

The movie was so long that I was late getting home.  John and Kathrine had brought over dinner and they'd already eaten, so I went out to KFC.  Though to tell the truth, they always bring vegan food and I'd probably have sneaked out to KFC afterward anyhow.

BEWARE OF MR. BAKER

To his interviewer: "Don't be an 'intelligent' dickhead!"--Ginger Baker

Today I saw BEWARE OF MR. BAKER at the Bloor.  It's a perversely entertaining documentary about Ginger Baker, a pioneering rock drummer who's kept crash-landing through life. (The title comes from a sign he posted on his property in lieu of "Beware of the dog"!)

Baker is the kind of guy who made millions from a recent reunion tour of his 1960s group Cream then squandered it on polo ponies!  And he's still pugnacious after all these years. (He socked the documentary director on the nose with his cane.) But in his time he was a musical genius, inventing the drum solo and discovering Afro-western fusion music years before anyone else.  If I could magically get the talent to play one musical instrument at genius level, I think I'd choose drums.

The documentary interviews a lot of musicians, including his '60s bandmate Eric Clapton. (If Clapton is God, Baker must be Lucifer.) If they're still friends it's because Clapton's stayed away from him.  And they also interviewed Johnny Rotten of Sex Pistols fame:  when I was a teenager, he was one of my few heroes.

Last night I had another night of extreme dreams and slept around the clock.  Among other things, I dreamed of being up on a roof and not knowing how I got there.

THE HOBBIT

"It's his excessive consumption of mushrooms.  They've addled his brains..."--THE HOBBIT:  AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

Today I saw AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY, the first movie in Peter Jackson's prequel trilogy of Tolkien's ersatz folktale THE HOBBIT.  It was mild, conventional fun despite the rather slow pace, especially in the early scenes.  I kind of enjoyed their LORD OF THE RINGS movies, though some parts I liked more than others. (I felt the same way about the books.)  One quibble I have is that the goblins had too great a visual resemblance to the orcs, causing confusion.  Also, was the Shire modern enough for MAILBOXES?

There are some curious parallels between Tolkien and TH White's Arthurian series THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING.  THE HOBBIT and THE SWORD IN THE STONE were both published in the 1930s and have the feel of British boy's adventures from an era when the Empire was still largely unquestioned.  But LORD OF THE RINGS and White's three later books were both published in the 1950s and their greater complexity in some ways reflects the grim idealism of the postwar era.

Another curious thing is that Tolkien was Catholic.  I couldn't help noticing that many prominent British authors in the 20th century were in that nation's Catholic minority. (Other examples: Hilaire Belloc, GK Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Agatha Christie, Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess.)

Once again, I was in such a hurry that I forgot my house key.  But this time the door was left unlocked.

THE GREAT GATSBY

On Tom Buchanan: "'Now don't think my opinion on these matters is final,' he seemed to say, 'just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you'"--THE GREAT GATSBY

After finishing WHAT A YEAR! I decided to read THE GREAT GATSBY again. (I read it twice, when I was 19 and 24 respectively.) I guess I'm still interested in the 1920s.  And a new movie of this oddly unfilmable novel is coming out soon, and Matthew may make it the subject of a book club event in his Meetup group.  And I want to recite part of it when ROLT has an event involving love-related writing.

We've sold our copy online, so I found a cheap Penguin edition at Book City near the Bathurst station.  I also picked up some well-discounted books:  an issue of GRANTA about the American view of foreign countries, an illustrated guide to the history of ancient Greece, and Studs Terkel's survey WORKING. (I enjoyed HARD TIMES and 'THE GOOD WAR', his oral histories of the Great Depression and World War II.)

Fitzgerald's writing is delicate and sharply observed.  Yet in a self-pitying moment he wrote, "There are no second acts in American lives." Yet all the most remarkable American lives are distinguished by their second acts:  even his own life and writing had an interesting second act in the 1930s. (I may have posted that before, but it would take forever to confirm.)

THE HOUSE I LIVE IN

"If you're a casual drug user, you're an accomplice to murder"--Nancy Reagan

Today I saw Eugene Jarecki's documentary THE HOUSE I LIVE IN at the Bloor. (The title comes from a Paul Robeson song performed over the closing credits, in which the "house" is the US.) It's about the War on Drugs and all its human casualties, including some in the family of a maid who worked for Jarecki's family.

Jarecki's made some fine documentaries before, like CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS (about a child-abuse witch hunt--the clown brother was the most interesting character) and WHY WE FIGHT (about the military-industrial complex), and this is another good one.  It made me feel both sad and angry.  There's intelligent commentary by people like David Simon, creator of THE WIRE, an HBO series about drug cops in Baltimore.  As I know from reading WHAT A YEAR!, the questions now being raised about the War on Drugs were also being raised about Prohibition back in 1929.

I also saw a DVD (for the second time) of a PBS documentary about the country-music pioneers the Carter Family.  What haunting melancholy music they made!

Another Huffpost moderation outrage

THE HUFFINGTON POST recently ran a report on ex-president George Bush Sr. being released from the hospital.  The accompanying posts were a gush of sentimental praise for him.  But I couldn't help thinking of his most famous quote: "Read my lips--no new taxes!" It's precisely the Republican Party's fidelity to his principle that's produced the US federal government's current fiscal crisis.

But the posts I read were like this one: "Look here!  This Lib is wishing President Bush continued health improvement!  Why?  Because as an American, I wish nothing but the best for Presidents, past and present.  I afford the office respect.  Speedy Recovery President Bush." Another post had the temerity to respond with the question "Why?" so I wrote one saying: "Because too many Americans treat presidents like kings." And the Huffpost moderators wouldn't publish it!  I can confirm that it wasn't an accident because I tried to post it later and it was blocked again.

No wonder the posts were all sentimental praise. (When one poster called him "decent," I did manage to publish the cryptic reply, "Decent is as decent does.") You know, it isn't like I used the expression "shut up" this time.  So sad to learn that the Americans who treat presidents like kings include moderators at THE HUFFINGTON POST.

Back to choir practice

Today Coro Verdi had its first rehearsal in the New Year.  With the Christmas concert finished, we've returned to rehearsing Verdi's MACBETH. (We spent a lot of time on the Cutthroats' Chorus.) I don't like to boast, but it's a fact that John George and Giovanni like to sit next to me because I'm a fast learner.

Giuseppe is worrying about not having enough singers, especially sopranos.  TOR has lots of sopranos, but as a rule he doesn't lean on the TOR chorus people to join his other group.  We're going to move rehearsals to the Villa Colombo building sometime, but not just yet.

Today I also finished WHAT A YEAR!  In the last chapter Joe Alex Morris wrote "For better or worse, Americans who died in 1929 had never heard of..." then recited a long list of phenomena that he expected 1956 readers to be familiar with.  I knew most of them, though not everyone remembers Gina Lollobrigida or Cinerama.  There were a few I had to look up, however.

Dave Garroway:  first host of THE TODAY SHOW. (That's one of those names that sound vaguely familiar to me.)

Economic royalists:  FDR's 1936 term for robber barons.

Dacron:  a brand of polyester.

Indirect lighting:  A lighting system where flourescent tubes along the top of a living room's wall reflect their light onto the ceiling.

Fala:  FDR's terrier.

Sulfanilamide:  a germ-killing elixir that caused mass poisoning in 1937.

I'm still trying to figure out why he included Nashua.

DJANGO UNCHAINED

"My good man, I'm simply trying to ascertain..." "Speak English, goddammit!"--DJANGO UNCHAINED

Today I saw Quentin Tarantino's slave revenge saga DJANGO UNCHAINED at the Empress Walk.  It was pretty fun but way too long.  (On top of my sitting through almost three hours, the TTC had a problem so I was an hour getting home!)

Directed in Tarantino's customary Jacobean cartoon style, it borrows from spaghetti westerns and '70s blaxploitation like Fred Williamson in THE LEGEND OF NIGGER CHARLEY. (Think Tarantino uses the N-word a lot?  Back then they put it in TITLES!) Even the dentist's wagon with the giant tooth is borrowed from Erich Von Stroheim's silent classic GREED.

I like many of Tarantino's movies, though they can be off-putting.  INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS left a rather bad taste in the mouth for all its brilliant elements. (Brad Pitt was a hoot, especially his tin-eared "Bon giorno.") Maybe it's just that some scenes were so real and convincing--especially the beginning-- and others so over the top, that they didn't go together.

On the subject of slavery dramas, I've always thought the '70s miniseries ROOTS to be overrated.  It struck me as cheesy and relentlessly obvious, with scene after scene played to the rafters.  Sure, several of the black performances were impressive, but Maya Angelou and OJ Simpson gave embarrassing performances even for non-actors, and the white cast was mostly weak. (Edward Asner, normally a superb actor, played the slave ship captain as if he had a severe hangover.) For a truly great miniseries, see Larry McMurtry's LONESOME DOVE.

ROLT January

Today was January's ROLT Meetup event.  We had a record turnout of nine people.  The weather was unusually mild for January so we decided to sit outside, but as the event went on the weather got worse.  Someone suggested a different locale but we'll see.

Our topic was Canadian writing. (I titled the event "The Maple Leaf Forever.") I read part of a chapter from Mazo de la Roche's JALNA, with Renny worrying about being in love with his brother's wife, then going out to the stable and trying to save a dying foal.  Jane read part of a CODCO script. (That show was the predecessor of THIS HOUR HAS 23 MINUTES.) Someone read part of WO Mitchell's WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND, someone read poems by Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen, and someone read part of the Stephen Leacock sea-story parody "Soaked in Seeweed." (That's the one that ends with "I died.  I buried myself.") Moira came and considered reading an Alden Nowlan poem, but decided against it.

I was going to make the February topic writing on love, since that's the time of St. Valentine's Day.  But Moira preferred writing on science, so I've decided to combine scientific writing with science fiction.  I'm considering future topics like biography & memoirs, travel writing, city life, closing passages, and a second poetry event since the first was so popular.

VERTIGO

"Come here!" "No, you'll muss me"--romantic banter in VERTIGO

Saw Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO for the third time, with Matthew's Movie Meetup group at the Yonge & Dundas Event Screen.  There was some confusion about when to meet so I ended up getting there an hour early and waiting in the lobby. (Oh well, I got some more of WHAT A YEAR! read and had something more to blog about.)

VERTIGO is one of those movies that improves with repeat viewings.  Indeed, you have to see it two or three times to appreciate it. (I can well believe that its initial reviews were not so good.) It's the one where detective James Stewart gets hired to put a tail on Kim Novak, who says she's possessed by the spirit of a girl who died a century before, but all is not what it seems...

It's a disquieting portrait of romantic obsession. Many people consider VERTIGO Hitchcock's masterpiece. (Myself, I'd choose NOTORIOUS.) Stewart and Novak have an eerie chemistry, helped greatly by Bernard Herrmann's haunting music and the San Francisco locations.  Has any movie made better use of that city?  I ought to see BELL, BOOK AND CANDLE, a romantic comedy with Novak as a witch out to put a spell on Stewart, not unlike in this movie.

In 1976 Brian de Palma, working from a Paul Schrader script, directed a curious reworking of VERTIGO unsubtly titled OBSESSION.  That one had Cliff Robertson as a New Orleans businessmen whose wife (Genevieve Bujold) and daughter get kidnapped, then drown in the Mississippi River where their bodies are never found.  Twenty years later he meets a young woman the same age as his daughter would have been, also played by Genevieve Bujold...

Dreams

I sometimes have vivid dreams.  Last night I dreamed of pitching a movie script that started with a schoolboy finishing a school essay about predicting the weather, then finding that someone had changed it to talk about raising your hands to create a storm vortex above you.  Then he found out about this parallel universe where people had such power over the weather, and met a group of scholars from that world eager to learn from him, including a big expert whom I suggested could be played in a Sacha Baron Cohen cameo.  Then I started telling the story to Antonio Banderas, but stopped and apologized, saying "You must hear a lot of movie pitches!"

I also dreamed of roller skating along a long road that ended in a channel being dug down a slope for a waterfall with a lot of streams that would cancel each other out and dissipate, with big flakes of gold visible here and there.  And I dreamed of being in the futuristic world of the movie SOYLENT GREEN, except that I was in the area of Seattle while the movie took place in New York City.  And I dreamed of a jungle tribesman who came to the big city for the Olympics, didn't fit in and became a fugitive, and of having a girlfriend in the Royal Family, and of bicycling downhill on a slope that got faster and faster, and of ending up in a science fiction movie with Greg from THE BRADY BUNCH, and of going on a tour of the world except that we only spent a short time in China before flying to Vancouver where I was trying to figure out the time back in Toronto.

I dreamed all that last night.  Some nights are more vivid than others.

Movie trivia contest

Tonight I went to a Movie trivia contest hosted by Sash of the Toronto Friends Social Group Meetup.  I was careless with the time and got Father to drive me to the subway station so I'd be there in time, but I should have realized it would start a lot later than scheduled.  It isn't the first time I've inconvenienced Father when I didn't have to.

I finished third and chose a serving of cookies & cream cake for my prize.  I also met a CBC science reporter who ultimately finished first.  I actually finished first in these contests once, and I'm sure I'll do it again one of these months.

I'm pretty good with movie trivia, and even noticed a couple of mistakes in Sash's questions:  ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK came out in 1982, not 1981; and Rooney in FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF was a vice-principal, not a principal. (I heard someone floated a proposal for a Ferris Bueller sequel, and I'd like to see one where Ferris is a fortysomething unemployed welfare bum who can't read or add and now says, "I shouldn't have skipped school." Rooney, meanwhile, has become Secretary of Education.)

I wish I knew how to quit Candy Crush Saga.  I've said that it was addictive, and Pet Rescue Saga is too. (Did I mention I've been careless with time?) I'll just have to find a new game twice as addictive...

Back to the opera

Today was the first post-New Year's rehearsal for the TOR.  Performances start next month, and now we're going on stage!  I remembered to bring my checkbook to pay $50 of additional expenses, and my ticket money. (My parents and sister are seeing both shows, so I sold six tickets.) But I forgot to bring indoor shoes, so I went on stage in my sock feet.

We were rehearsing TALES OF HOFFMANN, and did the opening and closing scenes set in a pub.  We also did the greater half of the scene with Olympia, but didn't get to the scene with Giulietta. (The  chorus isn't in the scene with Antonia.) For the pub scene we get to hold metal mugs and long pipes.

I mentioned before that there were a few cameo roles that I was being considered for.  It turns out that they decided not to include them.  Part of me felt relieved at not getting the extra responsibility--I was too polite to admit it, of course--but I felt stupid about being the last to find out.

Speaking of Hoffmans, in the afternoon I saw Dustin in the William Goldman-John Schlesinger thriller MARATHON MAN at the Young&Dundas.  It's one of the older movies they've been showing on the Event Screen there.  That's the one where Nazi Laurence Olivier keeps asking Hoffman "Is it safe?" before torturing him with dentist equipment.  I'd read that it was crude, and it was. (Did the book make more sense?) Frankly, I only saw it so I'd have something to write about here.

Recent DVDs

I've been watching some more uncommon DVDs through zip.ca.

The Best of GUNSMOKE:  I remember watching some of the later seasons of that "adult western" on Sunday mornings in the '80s.  Now I've started a video collection of selected episodes from all over its 20-year run. (THE SIMPSONS has been on for a longer time, but this show made more episodes!) I've only seen the earliest ones, including an episode with Charles Bronson.

THE RED SKELTON SHOW:  I got a disc with some early episodes of that show, which I watched faithfully in its last seasons.  He was a comic genius, and well do I remember characters like Freddy the Freeloader and Clem Kadiddlehopper. (The disc also has some episodes of Groucho Marx in YOU BET YOUR LIFE.)

OF TIME AND THE CITY:  An eloquent Terence Davies memoir of his postwar Liverpool youth, combining narration with archival footage of the city and eclectic music.

CLASSIC EDUCATIONAL SHORTS:  The latest disc in a series of classroom films, this one is commercial films for salesmen and clients.  The film about the blender was so well made that I wanted to go out and make a blender recipe!

I'll soon be seeing some early avant-garde films, a couple of Luis Bunuel productions, and a documentary about the American West in the 1860s!

New computer games

It looks like I'm finally finished with Evony.  I've brought all the non-residential buildings up to level nine and completed the wall defences, and this time I'm not really interested in conquering territory or starting new cities.

Now I've started on the game Megapolis, yet another city-planning game along the lines of Simcity and Cityville.  What can I say?  I love to plan virtual cities.  But I don't know how long I'll last this time.

I've tried bubble-blasting games, but I can't really get into them.  On the other hand, I've discovered an addictive strategy game called Candy Crush Saga.  It involves an array of candy in different colors:  jelly beans are red, lemon drops yellow, lozenges orange, gobstoppers blue, jujubes purple, and the green ones are mints or something like that. You have adjacent candy pieces trade places to get three in a row, then they disappear and some new ones come down.  If you manage to arrange four or even five in a row, you get pieces with special powers.  The part I don't like is that when you lose a game they show a little girl weeping, and I always feel bad for letting her down.

I also found a strategy game called Pet Rescue Saga--from the same company, of course--which involves dissolving sets of adjacent blocks of the same color. (You can make columns disappear with an occasional pyrotechnic rocket.) If you can dissolve a column all the way down to the bottom, the pet on top will be rescued!

I discover all these games by looking at the game apps my Facebook friends are using.

THE SEARCHERS

"MOUNT!  M-O-Y-N-T MOUNT!"--Ward Bond in THE SEARCHERS

Today I went to see the John Ford western THE SEARCHERS with the Classic Movie Meetup at the Fairview Cinema's screening room. (There were seven of us.) That's the one where rootless Confederate veteran Ethan (John Wayne) visits his settled Texas brother and family, who get murdered in a Comanche raid, except for little niece Debbie--what a '50s name!--who gets kidnapped and adopted by the tribe, so he goes off on a long, relentless pursuit...

What a powerful movie THE SEARCHERS is!  That's one classic that's everything they say it is.  John Wayne is at his antihero best as the obsessive, frightening loner motivated by hate and vengeance.  Watch as he holds Debbie up by her armpits at the beginning:  he'll do the same at the end.  There's a great shot when he sees some other whites-turned captives-turned Indians.

Another character of interest is Martin (Jeffrey Hunter), the part-Indian youth adopted into the brother's family who joins Ethan's search, leaving behind sweetheart Vera Miles, but ends up anxious to prevent Ethan from killing Debbie when he finally finds her.  Ethan treats him remarkably badly, never letting him forget his prejudice against half-breeds and even using him as bait in a deathtrap!

THE SEARCHERS is a rare western with a sense of tragedy. (Clint Eastwood's UNFORGIVEN and that AMC series HELL ON WHEELS also come to mind.) Sure, the comic parts are pretty broad, but the total effect is compelling, even beautiful.

I went home with Cecilia from Brazil again.  I taught her the word "thief," which is one of those words that foreigners are slow to learn: "stealer" would seem more natural.  I'd been telling her about WHAT A YEAR! and how JFK's father was a big investor who sold out before the 1929 crash and later was put in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate Wall Street, on the principle, "It takes a thief to catch a thief."

WHAT A YEAR!

Last week I finished the political issue of LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY.  Since then I've started reading a book I picked up at a new used-book store a few blocks west of here.  It's WHAT A YEAR!, a book about the US in the year 1929, written by Joe Alex Morris in the '50s.

It's an entertaining work of popular history, similar to Frederick Lewis Allen's ONLY YESTERDAY:  AN INFORMAL HISTORY OF THE 1920s, which I read about a decade ago.  It was the year of the big stock market crash, of course, but there was lots of other stuff happening.  That was the year when Albert Einstein became world-famous with his announcement of a unified theory of physics or something.  It was also a time when Prohibition was becoming more and more controversial, Charles Lindbergh was the big hero of the day, Hollywood had just converted to sound films, Herbert Hoover began his ill-fated presidency, and silliness was common.  The popular new toy was the yo-yo. (I've also learned that the expression "Oh, yeah?" originated in the 1920s.) Lots of photo illustrations too.

I have a big headache.  I'm running a bit short again, but this time I'll just let it be short.

THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE

Just saw the documentary THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE with a Meetup group at the Bloor.  It's pretty disturbing:  the NYPD basically grabbed the first suspicious teenagers who turned up and pressured them into false confessions. (It reminded me of the treatment of Omar Khadr.)

We had a discussion about it afterward.  I thought it was really contemptible of Ed Koch to refer to "the alleged rapists," then add, "We have to call them 'alleged,' because of the regulation." (I've thought little of Koch since he pushed his support for the death penalty to get elected at the time of the Son of Sam murders.)

It was co-directed by Ken Burns, whose documentaries I've usually liked, though they can be sententious. (I was a bit disappointed by his World War II documentary THE WAR:  it started out well, but by the final chapter they'd ended up playing it safe and turning it into a "tribute" to wartime America.) I've seen his THE CIVIL WAR many times over the years.  It's very eloquent, though it lets Shelby Foote dominate perhaps too much:  I would have liked more of Ed Bearss.  I've also enjoyed Burns' documentaries on subjects like Mark Twain and Thomas Hart Benton.

Meanwhile, the parents and I have been downloading movies from Netflix.  In the last week we've seen two big, colorful Cinemascope productions from Twentieth Century Fox in the '50s:  A MAN CALLED PETER and LOVE IS A MANY-SPLENDORED THING. (Our big widescreen TV, which we got about a year ago, is suitable for such epics.) Unfortunately, the latter movie starred the terrible actress Jennifer Jones, miscast as a half-Chinese doctor babbling greeting-card profundities.  And last week we saw Terence Davies' stunning film of Terence Rattigan's '50s play THE DEEP BLUE SEA:  if you can't see it in a theatre, be sure to see it on a widescreen TV.

Emancipation Proclamation

THE HUFFINGTON POST has been a bit slow for me lately.  After the deal that averted the US "fiscal cliff," I posted: "Time once again for liberals to present a defeat as a victory..." but I don't feel like saying much about that.

Then last night there was a column about Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which became official 150 years ago at New Year's. I know quite a bit about the Civil War and wrote several posts in that column's forum.  I think some people were impressed by my perception.

Here's the longest post I wrote:

When Lincoln originally proposed the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet in July, 1862, he encountered less resistance than he feared, but one secretary--William Seward?--warned him that he should delay its announcement until after a Union battlefield victory, or he might be seen as grasping at straws.

Lincoln agreed and waited.  In a famous letter to a New York newspaper the following month, he said that he'd be willing to save the union by freeing all of the slaves, by freeing none of them, or by freeing some and not others.  In fact, this was his way of preparing the public for the Emancipation Proclamation. (Of course, the Emancipation Proclamation freed almost no slaves immediately, but most of them in the long run.)

In September the Confederate invasion of Maryland--a slave state but still Union territory--culminated in the battle of Antietam/Sharpsburg.  In terms of casualties, it was a bloody standoff.  But it was followed by a Confederate retreat back into Virginia, and the Northern newspapers did their best to present it as a Union victory. (There were also some minor Union victories around that time.) This was close enough for Lincoln's purposes, and he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, which became official at the end of the year.

***

When a subject like that comes up and I can write a lot about it, I get so excited I can't sleep!

New Year's

"I blew another year"--Charlie Brown

Last night was New Year's Eve.  As is my usual custom, I retired well before midnight, earlier than I usually do. (Noise out on the street wakes me up at midnight.) But in the morning I slept in as late as I usually do.  I just don't feel like getting up.

Over the Christmas break, I finished the latest season of MAD MEN--not enough Betty for my taste--and saw the latest season of CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, one of my favorite TV comedies ever:  I think my favorite character is Jeff's wife Susie, especially when she launches into profane rants.  I liked the episode where Susie and Jeff's dog was about to be put down so she sent him and Larry to buy this brand of frozen yogurt for its last meal, but on the way back Larry took a bite from it, then Jeff took a bigger bite, which bugged Larry so he took a second bite, and Jeff did the same, and the pissing match ended with the whole thing eaten!

Sunday of last week I saw 56 UP at the Bloor:  it's the latest installment in the British 7 UP documentary series that's been profiling a group of English people every seven years since their childhood.  (I've been watching it since 28 UP.) Just today I saw the 3D release of MONSTERS INC., for the first time.  Pretty cute.

Last Saturday I had dinner at Golden Thai restaurant with my Aspergers Meetup group. (We went to Spring Rolls nearby for dessert.) I went to another Karaoke Meetup at BarPlus afterward.

Do I have any New Year's resolutions?  Well, I quit the jigsaw puzzle app:  I enjoy them but I might spend the rest of my life doing them!  Maybe I should wake up earlier, but I need to increase my motivation...

My diary decade

About ten years ago I started writing a diary. (Call it mid-life crisis.) I started out with the quirky approach of writing to an imaginary 13-year-old girl called Dinah.  When I saw GANGS OF NEW YORK, I wrote: "I know you want to see any movie with Leo DiCaprio in it, but I can understand your mother not wanting you to see this one." But that approach was unsustainable and I soon reverted to a more conventional approach.

This diary was a chance for me to write longhand regularly.  I'd always write about what I'd eaten for dinner because I'd always eaten something and it gave me something to write about every day, if only something small.  I figure that's why Samuel Pepys wrote about food so much.

I haven't written as much in recent years.  There was a time when I'd write every day, or at least six times a week.  But in the last year I wrote once or twice a week so I could be sure each entry would fill a whole page.  I stopped writing it when I visited London this September, and turned to this blog when I returned.

I may have to take a break from this blog for the rest of December (I haven't been feeling much energy), or just write irregularly.  But I hope to return to posting every day in the new year, which is barely a fortnight away!

AIDA

Today I saw Giuseppe Verdi's AIDA yet again at the Met simulcast.  It's one of my favorite operas.

It's the one where Aida and Radames love each other but Aida's a captured Ethiopian princess in Egypt's royal palace and Radames is a general whom the Egyptian king sends to defeat an invasion by Aida's father King Amonasro and Aida's mistress Princess Amneris loves Radames too and Radames achieves a big victory and captures Amonasro and the King makes Radames get engaged to Amneris and Amonasro pressures Aida into pressuring Radames into revealing which route the Egyptian army is taking and Radames agrees to desert and elope with Aida and unintentionally reveals the military secret and Amneris catches him and the priests convict Radames of treason and sentence him to be buried alive and Aida hides in his tomb and they face death together and Amneris prays to her gods to grant her peace.

It's one of Verdi's late works, composed a few years after the Risorgimento, and with its critical view of nationalism surely reflects the master's mixed feelings about Italian unification. (Sure, Verdi's name became an acronym for "Victor Emmanuel, king of Italy," but his own sympathies were republican.) I keep wondering if the Egyptian priests are symbols of the Catholic Church, but maybe I'm reading too much subtext into it.  

It has one of the great opera finales:  Amneris praying for peace sometimes gets me teary-eyed.  One thing I like about Verdi's dramatic sense is the way he'll take an unsympathetic character like Amneris and give him or her a moment of grace, in a rather Catholic way.  Other examples are Germont singing "Di Provenza il Mar il Suol" in LA TRAVIATA, di Luna's "Il Balen di Suo Soriso" in IL TROVATORE, and Macbeth's "Pieta, Rispetto, Amore" (all baritone songs I've been learning to sing).

MAD MEN

Now we have another mid-month gap between zip.ca DVDs, so I rented the fifth season of MAD MEN for a week.  It's an unusually intelligent, existential show about a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the early and mid-1960s.  It's funny--watching that show, I can see everything that was wrong with that time:  the casual racism and sexism, the stifling conformism in much of the middle class, the heedless drinking and smoking, the littering!  Yet I still feel the emotional pull of nostalgia for that time.  People today may feel superior to the pre-1968 era, but I sense that we aren't so superior today.

When you think about the show's premise, it can seem almost as bleak as Matthew Weiner's previous series THE SOPRANOS.  Sterling & Cooper reminds me a bit of Never-Neverland, with Don Draper as Peter Pan and Joan as Tinker Bell.  You have a group of original writers, artists and thinkers basically whoring their talents to sell various products and overcome the general public's sales resistance.  Yet that wasn't completely new:  artists like Michelangelo created their great religious imagery basically to "sell" the Roman Catholic Church.

I think my favorite character is the glum, unpredictable senior partner Roger Sterling. (I was surprised to learn that John Slattery is only my age.) In one episode when they tried to work with a Japanese company he caused a big scene and made an issue of the Pacific War that he'd served in.  I got a feeling that World War II was the only time when he really felt alive.

Classical music Meetup

Another of my Meetup groups is Toronto Friends of Classical Music.  Mary, the organizer, gave me the designation "Attendee extraordinaire" because I've been a member for years, going back to when she took over.

Tonight we had an event at the Mad Bean coffee house on Eglinton Avenue West, hosted by assistant organizer John D.  The subject was Beethoven, whose 242nd birthday is this Sunday.  He played for us his CDs of the Egmont Overture, the second and fourth movements of the Seventh Symphony and part of a late string quartet. (He brought new high-quality speakers.)  He also played a CD someone else brought of Glenn Gould playing the Pathetique Sonata.  But nobody else brought music to play.

I'm running short again.  I'm still not over that cold.  I've been playing that jigsaw puzzle app a lot.  We've been eating stew the last two days, and I wish there'd been more potatoes.  I still haven't finished writing out the TOR lines I'll have to have memorized soon.  I've been watching a DVD of French and German avant-garde silent movies from the 1920s and '30s, but I have a feeling I won't understand any of them.  Now I read that they didn't prosecute HSBC for money-laundering because they're afraid they'd bring down the whole financial system--maybe the financial system will collapse anyway!

SERPICO

Today I saw the DVD of Sidney Lumet's SERPICO, for about the third time. (I didn't get it from zip.ca but rented it from nearby 2Q Video.) It's a fine true-life story about Frank Serpico, a New York cop who exposed corruption among plainclothesmen.  I think there was actually a cop who broke the code of silence before Serpico, but they wrote the book about him because his story was more dramatic, what with getting shot in the face and such.

SERPICO, released in 1973, is one of those realistic New York movies of the time that prided themselves on unfancy, "gritty" realism.  The 1970s, especially the early years, was a good time for original, realistic American movies, partly because the studios were relatively uncertain about what they should be offering the public.  Al Pacino is in great, often funny form as the principled but sometimes difficult title character.  There's a lot of sharp dialogue. ("Frank, let's face it, who can trust a cop that won't take money?") I'm sure it was a big influence on the TV series HILL STREET BLUES, especially the show's undercover cop Mick Belker.

What got me interested in seeing it again was the Bradley Manning trial.  Both of them had to deal with a code of silence protecting criminal activity and superiors who preferred to cover it all up.  And both did the people a great service by showing what needed to be shown.

Another persistent cold

I've had this cold for about a week.  When I get a cold, I have a sore throat first, then nasal congestion, then finally a headache.  I'm still in the headache stage.

The last few nights I've been going to bed around 7:00, then waking up at 10:00 or 11:00, then staying up to well past midnight.  Then I sleep till about noon.

This isn't a good day for blog-writing.  I have a few subjects to write about, but I just can't work up the concentration.  I can barely even watch videos.

Just now I feel like Linus in that PEANUTS episode where he started writing a school composition about what he did on his summer vacation: "I played ball, and I went to camp." Then he said, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight... Four hundred and ninety-two words to go!"

The effort of making these posts long enough always makes me think back to when I was fifteen taking high school courses by correspondence.  The one who marked my history lessons was always making me do them over because I was too brief.  The reason that I was too brief was because they never told me how long I was supposed to be. (They only decided after I'd written it.) Frankly, "Do over in more detail" is something any idiot could say.  That period of correspondence courses is not something I look back at nostalgically.

Jigsaw puzzles

I've had a cold for the last few days. (I had to miss Coro Verdi's Sunday concert at Villa Colombo Sunday, but we're doing it again next week.) I've been killing time on the computer, so I've been looking for new games to play on Facebook.

As for my current games, I've lost interest in Farmville 2.  Raising crops can only occupy me for so long.  I started Cityville 2, but lost interest in that too.  I've recently got into Evony and Stormfall, strategy-building games similar to Kingdoms of Camelot and Glory of Rome.  And I'm still faithful to Hot Shot.

I found a new Facebook game that allows me to play online jigsaw puzzles.  Some expert said that Aspies don't like jigsaw puzzles, but I enjoy them somewhat. But I wish I could do them so that they didn't show me what the complete picture was beforehand, so it would be a complete surprise.

This got me to thinking about the jigsaw puzzles we had when I was young.  We had a couple of maps of Canada in jigsaw form.  I also recall one of a canoer waking up in the morning and seeing a huge moose leaning over him, a rather disquieting image.  And we had a huge British puzzle, whose shape was round rather than rectangular, showing half a dozen old English inns. (We must have got it when living in Brighton in the mid-'60s.)

The one thing in THE NEW YORK TIMES worth paying for

I subscribe to the NEW YORK TIMES crossword puzzles.  But I just do Friday and Saturday:  I skip the Monday to Thursday puzzles, because they're too easy. (They put the easier puzzles early in the week, and they gradually get harder toward the weekend.) I used to do the Sunday crossword just in case it was one with rebuses, but I've got out of the habit lately.  As for the second Sunday, I do the diagramless every six weeks.  The puns and anagrams puzzle is a bit too easy for me, and the acrostic takes to long for the reward.

Back in 1992, the TIMES honored their first Sunday crossword's 50th anniversary by reprinting several from over the decades.  The ones from the early years were really tough!  I'd like to get a reprint of their early Sunday crosswords.

As for the rest of that newspaper, don't get me started.  The TIMES has been in decline for the last three decades, since A.M. Rosenthal was in charge.  They have the disease of thinking of themselves as "liberal enough," so when Judith Miller publishes stories promoting the coming invasion of Iraq, they think they're proving how balanced they are.

I remember one sentence from a SUNDAY TIMES "Week in Review" article back in 1988: "In countries that hated America eight years ago, American is chic today." I was impressed by the sheer condescending laziness that makes such an assertion possible. (The Sunday paper got a bit of flak back then when the editor admitted that an up-to-date "Week in Review" was less important than an up-to-date sports section.)

Another thing I recall was a report from the newspaper's Chile correspondent dismissing Chile before Pinochet's military takeover as "a backward banana republic." Never mind that Chile before 1973 was fairly developed and politically stable by South American standards.  This is redundant rhetoric (aren't all banana republics backward?) better suited to THE NEW YORK POST than to the TIMES.  But of course, it proves how "balanced" they are...

Was there once a time when I was capable of buying the SUNDAY TIMES?  It's a barely portable ripoff.  I don't even read it at the library anymore.  Nothing to miss.

"In the beginning..."

Today was ROLT's December event.  I chose children's writing as the theme and called it "In the beginning..." Almost a dozen people said they were coming, but only five showed up. (My sister Moira came for the first time, and enjoyed it.)

Unfortunately, I've had a cold for the last few days so I couldn't read as much as I intended.  I did manage to do Humpty Dumpty's poem from THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS. (Its last line is "I tried to turn the handle, but--") Coincidentally, Jane read a couple of other Lewis Carroll poems:  "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter.")

There was a new member called Sebastian, who's an East Indian from Fiji.  He read us a fine story he'd written himself, about a Fiji family with a small sugar cane farm and two bullocks, and even handed out copies!  For next month I think we'll do Canadian writing.

Running short again!  This reminds me of some thirty years ago when I was briefly living in England, where there was a TV critic with a weekly column in one of the Sunday newspapers.  There was also a mediocre cop show called BERGERAC.  One Sunday, at the end of his column, this critic wrote: "If I had more space I'd write about BERGERAC.  I've been meaning to do that one of these weeks." (Ouch!)

If I were really, really rich...

I mentioned that I was watching THE GRAND TOUR a TV documentary series following art critic Brian Sewell around Italy as he talks about the experiences of young eighteenth-century British grandees there.  He's very hard to please:  he didn't like Chianti wine, dismissed the Vesuvius crater as boring, and pettifogged that the modern version of the Turin Academy was showing something they wouldn't have shown the Grand Tourists (peasant dancing to hurdy-gurdy music).  But the show is entertaining despite his efforts.

One place he stopped at was the sixteenth-century Bomarzo gardens near Rome.  That actually wasn't a Grand Tour stop; interest in that place only developed in the twentieth century.  But who cares?  It's a piece of ground where some Orsini noble commissioned a whole set of grotesque, imaginative stone statues: stuff like a grimacing head whose mouth is big enough to step into.

Which brings me to the question of what I'd do if I were really, really rich.  I'm not interested in fast cars (can't drive), fancy clothes or big mansions, but I would travel a lot.  When I was about four in the mid-'60s my father, a physics professor at Mount Allison University, spent a sabbatical year in Brighton, England.  That was about the time when Brighton was a big Mod centre, though none of us remember anything about that.  Anyway, we sailed there and back on the Greek Line ship Arcadia. (The return, I recently found out, was its last voyage before being scrapped.) I'd like to cross the Atlantic by ship again.  Also there are a few places I'd like to visit in my lifetime like Madrid's Prado art gallery and the pilgrimage mountain Tai Shan in northeastern China.

But I was also thinking, if I had the money I'd create a new Bomarzo.  One of my statues might be of Glooscap, the Hercules-like hero of the Micmac, a native people in eastern Canada, showing him sailing away on a whale as they say he finally did. (Whale-riding is found in a lot of cultures:  even Herodotus had a story about someone riding a dolphin.) Or I might have some famous Canadian explorers like Humphrey Gilbert (gesturing his palm toward heaven just before his ship was lost) or Lief the Lucky.  Or theatrical heroes like King Lear (raging on the moor), or opera heroes like Rigoletto.  Just so long as they're larger than life.

I've finished Herodotus!

Yesterday I finally finished Herodotus' history.  This edition also has several appendices and an introduction, but I mostly skipped over that part.  The eighth volume is largely about the sea war, culminating in the Battle of Salamis; the ninth and last is about the later land war, culminating in the Battle of Plataya.

You know those cheesy war movies where the sergeant gets orders to gather his men and retreat, and he says "The HELL we'll retreat!"? There's a scene like that in Herodotus' book from just before Plataya.  In that version the non-retreaters relented when they realized they were on their own.

There's also a story near the end about how the Persian Emperor Xerxes fell in love with his brother's wife, and married off his son to the wife's daughter, then his fancy turned to his niece, then his jealous wife blamed the brother's wife and had her disfigured, then the brother ran off to a remote province to start a rebellion, then the Emperor's army caught up with him and killed him.... They should make that into an opera.

Seriously, the first place I remember reading about the Greco-Persian Wars was in a comic book where Uncle Scrooge and his brood used a time machine to land on the Plain of Marathon just as the Battle was about to start...

Now I've returned to the politics issue of LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY.  My next big book will be the first volume of Mark Twain's century-delayed autobiography, which I've heard reads like a blog.

I also finished the first season of HELL ON WHEELS yesterday on Netflix.  It's a powerful show, with an effect that builds cumulatively. One line goes, "Choose hate.  It's easier." A quibble: How did the surveyor's widow manage to stay so gorgeous while living on the frontier? (Such visual license I can live with, of course.)

Geeks like me

Today I had lunch with my Aspergers Meetup group at Spring Rolls just south of Yonge & Bloor.  Tiffany, who lives in Hamilton, was in Toronto so she had an event.  The others visited Allen Gardens first, but Bev and I weren't up to that and met up with them at the restaurant.  Too bad it wasn't a day earlier when the weather was far milder.

The food is pretty good there:  I ate Malaysian spicy chicken fried rice.  At these events I tend to talk to Bev more than anyone else:  we're the two oldest people in the group.  She's twice as passionate about Bradley Manning as I am. (We've been talking a lot about that case at THE HUFFINGTON POST the last few days.  I wrote of the bit in SERPICO where Al Pacino's girlfriend told the story of a king who was the only one in the kingdom who didn't drink from a well that made people crazy, so they thought he was the crazy one instead, until he drank too and they decided he'd come to his senses.)

In the evening I went to another Aspie event at the Geneva Centre.  I used to go to an Aspergers support group there because I wanted to meet people, but then I decided I could do it through other means like Meetup.

Anyhow, this event involves a psychologist called Jonathan Weiss who got a research grant and wants to work with us Aspies on things like "mindfulness." We'll see how that works out.  I've worked with a psychologist before:  Liljana Vuketic interviewed me in researching her doctoral dissertation, and paid me $200 which I promptly squandered on books.  BTW, they've now stopped calling it Aspergers and just call it high-functioning autistic spectrum disorder, or something like that.

Children's encyclopedias

When I was little we had Harwyn's THE ART LINKLETTER PICTURE ENCYCLOPEDIA FOR BOYS AND GIRLS, originally published in 1961.  I read somewhere online that many of the artists who illustrated it also worked on EC's notorious horror comics.  I remember being creeped out by the picture of Macbeth gleefully preparing to knife the king, and I guess that had an EC sensibility.

We also had Bobley's ILLUSTRATED WORLD ENCYCLOPEDIA.  The entry on communism is a McCarthyite classic.  Under the sub-heading "What makes people communists?" it says "In democratic nations, a communist is often a person with a sort of mental illness..." The item about rivers says "They can be damned [sic]..." (Was that REALLY a typo?) This edition had a last-minute addendum about the just-elected Richard Nixon.

And we had a 1930s edition of the British encyclopedia THE WORLD BOOK. (The entry on flags showed the Third Reich's swastika flag.) It had a special volume focusing on the British Empire's dominions.  It was an incomplete set:  the volume covering Irw to Mis somehow got misplaced.  It had a last-minute addendum about the new king George VI.

And then there's THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE.  That started out being published in Britain around 1910 with the title CHILDREN'S ENCYCLOPEDIA, and Grolier published it in the US with its new title.  THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE has gone through many revised versions, but we had the first Canadian edition from the 1920s, substantially the same as the original British version, though it added some stuff about World War I and some specifically Canadian items. (I think there was a photo of Moncton, the city we lived closest to.) Mother's family bought it when she was a little girl.

THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE in its early versions had an earnestly didactic style, not quite as manipulative as more recent counterparts.  It was a 20-volume set, divided into lots of categories like "The Book of the Earth," "The Book of Things to Make and Do," and "The Story of Famous Books." "The Book of Wonder" had the "Wise Man" answering questions like "Did any of the Apostles visit Britain?" and "Will the last man die gasping for air?" a question characteristic of the time. "The Book of Life" had a section called "Alcohol, the enemy of life." (This was the age of Prohibition, of course.) And it had a lot of children's stories with some remarkable illustrations:  I think Sir Arthur Rackham worked on it.

The pleasant mount

I'm not a big fan of cemeteries.  My old home in New Brunswick was fairly close to the local cemetery, but I rarely visited it.  Even when the subway between St. Clair and Davisville stations carries me past Mount Pleasant Cemetery, I tend to avoid looking at it.  But I have visited that place several times with Meetup groups.

I've got to know some of the sights in Mount Pleasant cemetery:  the Massey and Thompson mausoleums, Mackenzie King's grave, the Stavros tomb (it's a little much), the Salvation Army's memorial to the EMPRESS OF IRELAND shipwreck, and the lane with a whole lot of millionaire mausoleums like the Eatons.  I've also discovered a few things for myself, like opera soprano Teresa Stratas' family plot (at least I think it's her--the epitath refers to music), and the graves of journalists Norman Depoe and Larry Zolf.  I'd like to find a grave I've heard of there where the eccentric deceased chose a completely unmarked boulder as his headstone.

Saturday I visited it again as part of the Urban Explorers Meetup organized by Vik. (We also went southeast to the Discovery Walk loop, which took us past the brick works.  On the way back, we took a wrong turn and had to take a precarious path, which was actually pretty fun.) Vik told us about some of the prominent trees there, and mourned a weeping willow that was a victim of a recent storm. I quipped, "They should have a cemetery for trees!"

In China they have something called "tree burial," where they cremate you and plant a tree over your ashes.  I think I'd like to have that done with my body:  I like the idea of having a living monument.  On the other hand, Zoroastrians in India put you on a high tower and feed you to the vultures:  a very eco-friendly method, for what it's worth.

THE MASTER

Last night I finally went to see Paul Thomas Anderson's THE MASTER at the Revue.  This time I had the wits to walk south from Dundas West station instead of waiting for the streetcar.

I'm not a big Anderson fan.  I liked BOOGIE NIGHTS, but I couldn't take more than a few minutes of MAGNOLIA or PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE. (Moira liked MAGNOLIA, so maybe I should try it again, or maybe not.) THERE WILL BE BLOOD I found oddly off-putting, though Daniel Day-Lewis was worthy, if not as appealing as he got to be in LINCOLN.

Didn't care much for this one either.  Before I saw it, Moira--who hadn't even seen the movie--predicted that I wouldn't like Joaquin Phoenix' performance, and she was right!  I don't know where she got the gift of prophecy.  He was rather annoying as the cult newcomer:  I could see him "acting." (He might get an Oscar nomination.) Philip Seymour Hoffman was better as the cult leader:  watching him just felt more comfortable.

I'm sometimes attracted to movies like this because of the 1950s setting, another example being Terence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE. (Watching that movie was like doing a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces are missing.) But this film could have been called "The World Is Full of Idiots."

Hoffman sings the song "I'll go no more a-roving" during an ORGY scene! (That reminded me of all the classic music A CLOCKWORK ORANGE ruined.) At least, it was sort of an orgy: the women got naked, but there didn't seem to be any sex happening.  Not as self-important as the EYES WIDE SHUT orgy, but pretty slight.

It's the kind of movie that his this dialogue exchange: "I'll quit boozing." "Say it again." "I'll quit boozing." "Say it again." "I'll quit boozing." "Say it again." "I'll quit boozing."

("We'll quit repeating our lines." "Say it again.")

Query:  In the scene where Phoenix sees Hoffman's boat for the first time, they're playing chacha music.  Did they have that as early as 1950?

Two months!

I've now been posting daily for two months without interruption. (It looks like I only posted 29 times in November, but that's because last night's post was published after midnight.) I'm getting an appreciation for ministers who manage to come up with a sermon every Sunday, week after week.

Blogger.com gives me an overview of how many views each post receives.  I usually fluctuate between ten and twenty or so, but when I wrote about THE HUFFINGTON POST Wednesday, that got fifty views!  That's what brings in the troupers. (I'm tempted to write about popular subjects all the time, but I have my integrity...) My post with recipes for fettucine alfredo and gingerbread also got a lot of views.

I'm still writing down subjects for future posts.  One I haven't got around to is the children's encyclopedias I knew in my youth.  And now that I've mentioned it, I'll have to write about it before long rather than keep my audience hanging.

I've run short again.  Should I mention that we ate tacos last night? Or that I was a long time getting to sleep last night because I felt happy?  Or that I dreamed about being an actor and having to deliver lines while running down a stairwell?  Or that because it's now December I'm going to start taking my Cipralex daily instead of four times a week so winter won't get me depressed?  Or that I've run out of razor blades and haven't got around to getting new ones yet? (I planned to stop using the last one at the end of the month, but nobody will die if I use it one extra time...)

HUFFINGTON POST moderators, are you reading this?

I was going to post about the movie THE MASTER tonight.  I got on a streetcar and went to St. Clair & Dufferin to take the bus south to the Bloor subway to Dufferin station, then go west to the Dundas West station, then take a streetcar south on Roncesvalles to the Revue Cinema.  I could have walked to St. Clair & Ossington and taken the bus south to Ossington station, but I figured that the Dufferin bus was more frequent and less likely to be delayed.

As it turned out, the Dufferin bus did have a fairly long delay, so when I reached the Dundas West station I already had little time to spare.  Then there was ANOTHER delay on the part of the Roncesvalles streetcar, and I couldn't get to the cinema on time, so I went home. (I wasn't so sure I wanted to see THE MASTER, but I'll definitely have to see it now that I've made you readers curious!)

What shall I write about instead?  Yesterday at THE HUFFINGTON POST I read a post saying "Many posters say the Dems won the election.  The Repubs, however, were given a strong House majority.  No one won, so each side needs to bend." So I wrote a reply: "Of course, the Republicans lost the popular vote and had to win through gerrymandering..." (I like putting an ellipse at the end of my post.  Gives it a bit of ponderous style.) So someone replied to me: "I live in a reality based world.  Redistricting is reality.  Whining is unbecoming."

Such snark I can't take lying down, so I replied to him: "In other words, 'We cheated and won, so just shut up.' (Same as Bush v. Gore.)" But the Huffpost moderators blocked this reply, and I later figured out that the words "shut up" automatically get a post blocked, even in the context of quotation marks. I confirmed this when I rewrote the post with "say nothing" in the place of "shut up," and it wasn't blocked.

Moderators, you need to make a public announcement of all the terms that'll automatically get you blocked. (I wish they'd send a message saying something like "You can't post this because it includes the words "shut up.") I know that a lot of the people who post at the site are bothered about their posts being blocked for reasons they have no idea of.