Musical weekend

This weekend was Open Doors, but for a change I didn't bother visiting anything.  My time was pretty well spoken for.

Saturday afternoon I saw the Met production of Massenet's Werther (from the Goethe story) at the Yonge & Eglinton, starring Jonas Kauffman and Sophie Koch. (Sophie Koch played Charlotte while someone else played Sophie, which confused me a bit.) It was shorter than usual and ended at 15:00.  The greatest aria was based on an ancient poem by Ossian!

That evening I was going to attend another Philosophy Dinner Meetup, but cancelled in the morning.  (I had a bit of a headache and didn't want to push it.) Instead I rented the DVD of Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine and watched it again with Father.  On second viewing, it seemed more grim than funny, not unlike Inside Llewyn Davis.

Yesterday afternoon the Columbus Community Choir did a concert for a family event that our patron Tony Fusco organized at Villa Colombo. (I missed the dress rehearsal Thursday night, something I'd normally never do, to see The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.) In addition to conducting us, Beatrice sang Bizet's "Habanera" again.

I've started deepening the ditches in our garden.  Maybe it isn't strictly necessary, but I throw the ditch soil, which tends to be topsoil, into the garden's centre to counteract the general outward movement when I'm spading, and prevent a depression in the middle.

Lately I haven't been reading the Canadian section of The Huffington Post much, but tonight I checked it and found two issues that had me posting a lot.  One was a report of Omar Khadr's family being sued by the family of the guy he's accused of killing. (I hesitate to say "convicted" what with the show trial he received.) The other was a few articles about New Democrats being unhappy with Andrea Horwath.  I fear that everyone on the left will vote Liberal to defeat Hudak, who'll win a majority anyway and will only have to deal with an overwhelmingly Liberal opposition:  the worst of both worlds.  I still haven't figured out where the St. Paul's NDP campaign headquarters will be, or even who the nominee is.

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME

"You mean they were doing sex?"--The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Last night I went to the screening of the National Theatre production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at the Event Screen. (I read Dale Haddon's book almost ten years ago.) It was a wonderful, imaginative adaptation.  That A-level exam question, proving that three sides of length n^2+1, n^2-1 and 2n formed a right triangle, was easy for me. (The actor came back after the curtain call to explain his proof.)

I made the play into an Aspergers Meetup event.  Bev was going to come, but she had to cancel at the last minute.  That was a pity:  I haven't seen her for months.  One other Aspie did show up, but he left during the intermission.  Really, when watching people like the kid in this play, I can't think of myself as an Aspie.  My problems seem tiny compared to theirs.

Afterward I went to Paula's Karaoke Meetup at the Monarch, not far from the Royal cinema.  I sang "Old Man River" for the first time, and "Black Velvet Band."  "Old Man River" was in a frustrating key:  when I sang it low the bottom notes were too low for me, but when I sang it an octave higher, the top notes were too high!

Today I had that dental appointment with Dr. Hrabalova.  I went to her new office northwest of St. Clair station.  She's now in a complex with a whole lot of dentists, and you can pay with a credit card.  There are several names on the door, but not hers as yet.  I got an old filling replaced, and a small new filling.  Of course, the hard part is waiting for my nerve to unfreeze afterward, which takes hours.

I've finally got started spading the garden.  I've done a whole ring on the outside, and now there's just a round area on the inside to do, along with deepening the ditches.

The Last of the Mohicans is getting exciting in the second half.  The other day I read a chapter with a canoe chase.  When they saw this unusual Indian I guessed right away that it was the psalmist!

AN AMERICAN IN PARIS

Gene Kelly to Leslie Caron: "With a binding like you've got, people will want to look inside the book!"--An American in Paris

Last night I saw An American in Paris, Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli's classic Gershwin pastiche, at the Event Screen. (I originally saw it on an airplane thirty odd-years ago.) It's a more glamorous depiction of Paris than, say, The 400 Blows, and Leslie Caron belongs in the Cute Hall of Fame, with Oscar Levant's sourpuss for welcome variety.   Alan Jay Lerner's script is often corny by today's standards, and the Nina Foch character embodies a cliche of that time:  a man had no future with a woman who had more money (and power) than him.

Of course, it's a great visual achievement, showing what MGM could do with the old three-color Technicolor system.  Especially handsome is the famous climactic ballet number, photographed by John Alton, who's also famous for photographing Anthony Mann film noirs like T-Men and Raw Deal in black&white with shoestring resources! (Cinematographers could have wide range:  William Daniels, who photographed all of Greta Garbo's movies, won his Oscar for The Naked City.)

Victoria Day weekend came and went and I hadn't started the garden. (Uh-oh Spaghetti-Os!) Tuesday I finally took the first step and spread on the compost.  Yesterday afternoon I went out to Fiesta Gardens and bought three varieties of seed potatoes.

Last week Moira said that Donald Sterling, the sports tycoon whose racist comments got exposed, reminded her of Tommy Lee Jones.  He reminded me of someone else, but I couldn't remember who.  A few nights ago I finally recalled that he reminded me of Christopher Plummer!  To make sure I'd remember to tell Moira this, I left my slippers on my desk, something I don't usually do.  And it worked.

Lately I've got into the habit of writing these posts late at night.  But I'm writing this post in the afternoon because our internet connection was acting up last night.  Father finally fixed it this morning by turning the system off and on.  I wish I'd tried that.

Vicky's Day

"You fight harder than you fuck!"--300:  Rise of an Empire

Yesterday afternoon I saw the sequel 300:  Rise of an Empire at the Scotiabank.  I didn't care for the first movie, which seemed to be aimed at 13-year-old boy who wishes he were a badass.  But I've read Herodotus and was curious about how they'd show the Athenian story.  The result was pretty bizarre, and like the original best for the battle scenes. (Though the gimmick of slowing down the action at crucial moments soon gets old.) I saw it in 3D, which I still find pointless.

Yesterday Donald came over for dinner and we had Indian food, which is what Moira really wanted for her birthday.  It seemed even spicier than usual.  Today we had more of it. (Moira thinks the spicy flavor actually improves when you reheat it!)

Today was Victoria Day, so no memoir slam or choir practice. In the afternoon I went on a Walking Meetup in the Cedarvale Ravine.  Paula's dyed her hair blue, and I greeted her with "How are things on Mars?" We're good enough friends that she didn't mind.  When we passed under the Bathurst Street bridge (or was it under the Spadina Road bridge?) there was a graffito of Ralph Wiggum, the little nose-picker on The Simpsons, holding a sword dripping blood.  Some of us posed for pictures next to it, and I posed so that he seemed to be plunging it into me! 

As soon as I've finished The Last of the Mohicans, I'm going to borrow Spoon River Anthology from the library.  I found the opening poem "The Hill" online, and wrote a Scots translation of that one too.  The repeated line "All, all are sleeping on the hill" became "Aw, aw ur sleepin' oan th' brae."  I suppose I'll translate that into the other languages too.

Nancy sent us feedback about our mock auditions.  She mentioned that I didn't smile for the camera, something I've never been good at.  But I wasn't so bad overall.  I think the next time they do this I'll RSVP "no," not because I dislike auditioning but because it just isn't a priority to me.  Being a pro trying to be better than dozens of other pros does not appeal to me.

Mock auditions

At today's acting class we did mock auditions.  We all brought resumes and head shots.  My resume was pretty makeshift, though Nancy was amused that I included "Classes under Nancy Morrison." Some of it came out in red or blue ink, which was completely unintentional but rather attention-grabbing.  My head shot wasn't of the best quality, because our printer had ink problems. (I used the same image I use on websites like Meetup and Facebook, and here.) We were emailed a short commercial spiel on Thursday and expected to memorize it, but I really wasn't up to that.  Commercials aren't my future.

Nancy gave us a long talk all about the audition process.  Sometimes actors lose their nerve and don't show up for an audition, which is about the worst thing you can do.  When our time was up she finished the talk at the Victory Cafe, in the same room where I have the ROLT Meetup events!

She was impressed when I told her about my Scots version of "George Gray."  I've found a website at woohoo.co.uk where you can enter regular English and get it translated into accents like Scots and Irish and Jamaican. (It turns out that "marble" is "bool" in Scots, and "the sea" is "the brine.") Besides that dialect, I've now written French, Chinese and Japanese translations of the poem--blank verse is less difficult to translate--and ought to post them all on my translations blog.

Thursday night I went on Betty Anne's art walk.  This month it was on Dundas Street west of Ossington Avenue, in the Portuguese area.  One place we went to was a used bookstore called The Monkey's Paw, which has a vending machine where you put in two dollars and get a random book! (We were a big crowd, and I'll visit it again when there's more room.) We also saw an exhibit of paintings by Mitsuo Kimura, who has a really original look.  Afterward I tried to make the St. Paul's NDP nomination meeting, but it was over by the time I got there.

Yesterday Puitak and Gordon came over for dinner, to celebrate Moira's birthday.  I made fettucine alfredo (Moira would have preferred Indian food, but was afraid they wouldn't like it), and Moira said it was even better than usual:  maybe that's because we'd let it cool for five or ten minutes.  I showed Puitak my Chinese translation of "George Gray" and she liked it overall, but didn't care for my using "yanjiu" for "study":  that suggests "research."  I've decided "guancha" would be better, as it suggests "examine." Translation is my life!

Bereavement support

Last night Bereaved Families of Toronto had a special session for people who've lost their mothers, since last Sunday was Mother's Day.  On the way there from the subway I got caught in a downpour, which was suitable pathetic fallacy.  There were half a dozen people there and I was the only man.  Paradoxically, I was in a good mood. 

I had a lot to say in that session.  I mentioned how I'd become more aware of my father's mortality and cited a dream I'd had a few nights before where I was flying in a plane next to a window and Father was walking(!) beside it next to me:  I realized he'd fall to earth so I reached out to hold on to him.  It was at this meeting that I suddenly realized my new interest in speaking Scots is an attempt to get closer to Mother's memory!  

People were impressed by all my cultural references.  I mentioned something I'd read (in John Hersey's The Call), that after your mother dies you sometimes become more like her,   then mentioned that in one of Mazo de la Roche's Jalna novels a fortune-teller told Renny that he'd get more of his grandmother than anyone else would. (He thought this meant her money!) I mentioned the fairy tale "The Pearl Princess," where the girl told her father she loved him like salt, and pointed out that losing a parent is a lot like running out of salt forever.  

I also compared myself to Roger Sterling in the Mad Men episode where his mother's death left him cold and flippant, but a bootblack he was friendly with also died and looking at the latter's shoe-shining equipment drove him to tears.  I rather envied Judith, who ended up in tears about her mother. (I still haven't wept, and the only person who has in my presence is Puitak when I told her.) We still haven't decided when to take Mother's ashes to Cape Breton, but August would be a good time for me since my acting class will be on hiatus then.  Right now her ashes are on top of a cabinet full of knick-knacks.

Tuesday night I went to Toronto City Opera's annual meeting.  All the people who participate in it are invited, but hardly anyone who isn't involved with directing it comes.  Even I only do on occasion.  Sandra gave a financial report:  we were in the black again this year.  The autumn fundraiser was disappointing, but the March gala largely made up for its shortfall. It turns out that the stage manager found some old equipment in the Bickford Centre's junk-strewn basement--I wonder if that's what the world will look like in the future--and saved a thousand dollars on our wireless communication!  Next year the fall fundraiser will be at the Bickford Centre.

At the meeting I finally noticed that Beatrice and Adolfo are a couple now.  I always seem to be the last to notice those things!

The guid scots tongue

Wait till Nancy sees my latest trick with the "George Gray" monologue!  Here's the original poem:

I have studied many times

The marble which was chiseled for me--

A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor.

In truth it pictures not my destination

But my life.

For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;

Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called on me, but I dreaded the chances.
And yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.

And now I know that we must lift the sail

And catch the winds of destiny
Wherever they drive the boat.
To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture 

Of restlessness and vague desire.

It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

My new idea was to redo the monologue with a Scots dialect! (Listening to Mark Cousins' Ulster accent got to me.)  That version might go like this:

Och, ‘tis many th’ time I hae stoodied

Th’ marble wha’s chiselled foor mae,

A boot wi’ a furled seel a’ rest in a bight.

In troth ‘tis nae a picture o’ my destineetion

But o’ me leef.

Foor loov was oofered mae, an’ I shronk from its disillusionment,

Sorra knocked oon me door, bu’ I was afreed,

Ambition called tae me, bu’ I draeded th’ chaunces,

An’ ye’ a’ th’ teem I hoongered foor maenin’ in me leef.

An’ noo I knoo tha’ we mun lif’ th’ seel

An’ catch th’ winds o’ destiny,

Where’er they dreev the boot.

Tae put maenin’ in yoor leef mee end in ma’ness,

Bu’ leef wi’ou’ maenin’s th’ toorture

O’ res’lessness an’ vague deseer.

‘Tis a boot y'arnin’ foor th’ sae an’ yet afreed.




Lately my interest in The Huffington Post has been on-again, off-again.  Last week I contributed a lot to a forum involving a report that the Massachusetts Supreme Court had okayed including "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, a decision I disapprove of.  What bugs me about this issue is all the "pragmatic" liberal who don't approve of the "under God" addition, but insist the issue isn't worth fighting over.



And just today, there was a forum involving the report that Chelsea/Bradley Manning may be transferred to a civilian prison for reassignment surgery.  Whenever there's a related forum I always post "Pardon for Manning and amnesty for Snowden, NOW!" (Another thing that bugs me is liberals who hope Obama will see the light at the end of his presidency and pardon Manning then.  They're asking for more disappointment.)

The best medicine

"I  kicked open the bottom drawer of her desk, let two inches of rye trickle down my craw, kissed Birdie square on her lush, red mouth, and set fire to a cigarette"--S.J. Perelman, "Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer"

Today was the latest ROLT event.  I made the topic funny writing and called it "The Best Medicine." (I had to explain the "Laughter is the best medicine" saying to an immigrant member of the group who wondered if the topic was medical writing!) The weather is warm enough for my summer jacket, and I walked to the Victory Cafe!  I'd made a reservation for six people back on Monday, but then a lot of people RSVPed at the last minute and as many as 11 people said they'd come.  But in the end the number who actually came was exactly six.

I read "The Day the Dam Broke" from James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times; S.J. Perelman's private eye spoof "Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer"; and the chapter from Mark Twains The Innocents Abroad where he described the tourists' activities during the long ocean passage.  Jane read a couple of scenes from the Codco scripts!  Next month the topic will be foreign languages translated into English.

I've been having some vivid dreams lately. (That must be due to the new anti-depressant medication I've been taking.) The other night I dreamed of visiting a mini-cinema back in New Brunswick(?), and of airplanes landing near Cape Tormentine, the cape near the route to Prince Edward Island.  I also dreamed of being in a plane in the air while Father was walking along outside the plane, so I was holding on to him so he wouldn't fall!

At the Spadina station they now have a bulletin thing that shows when the next buses are coming.  As a result, the other day when I came home from acting class I saw that I wouldn't have to wait for the Davenport bus, so I took it home and actually saved some time!  If only I'd mention that in my last post I wouldn't have run short.  But I'm running short here too.

THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY

The latest series we've been watching on Netflix is The Story of Film:  An Odyssey.  It's a 15-part history of the movie medium presented by Mark Cousins, who narrates with an Ulster accent.  He covers a lot of different auteurs and genres from around the world.  He offered no less than seven arguments for considering Alfred Hitchcock the greatest image-maker of the twentieth century (including Picasso!).

Thursday night I saw The Wicker Man with the Movie Meetup group at the Lightbox.  It's a 1973 thriller with Christian policeman Edward Woodward visiting a Scottish island and uncovering a pagan community led by laird Christopher Lee (as sinister as ever). Pretty creepy.

Friday night I saw the documentary Teenage at the Bloor.  It's about the emergence of adolescent culture in the first half of the twentieth century.  It ended in 1945, just as the story gets really interesting!  Someone said that childhood as we know it is a product of the nineteenth century and its mass literacy.  Well, adolescence is clearly a product of the twentieth century.  And I suppose "tweener" culture is a 21st-century phenomenon.  I liked the part about the German "swing kids" holding out against Nazi conformism.

I had to get up this morning earlier than usual for a dental appointment. (There was a sore spot between my two back molars on the upper left.) I could have got a filling right then, but I preferred to wait a couple of weeks because I wouldn't want to be recovering from the freezing during my afternoon acting class.

I ran out of things to write about so I went to the bathroom and clipped my fingernails while trying to think of a new subject.  It's time to clip my toenails too, but I'll wait till after I've finished writing this post.

I'm still short, so I read my email.  Nothing to talk about there.  So I'll just have to be short.

THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS

Having finished the latest Lapham's Quarterly, I've started reading James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novel The Last of the Mohicans.  Saturday, between the acting class and the philosophy dinner, I went to Indigo Books in Eaton Centre and picked up a copy for just five dollars!

On a whim, I decided to try and start another book club through Meetup.  This group I  conceived as one to focus on books over thirty years old--Lonesome Dove would get in under the wire--and I named it the Classic Book Club Meetup.  I also scheduled our first event, focusing on The Last of the Mohicans, about two months from now.  It'll be at Victory Cafe on Sunday afternoons, possibly every two months. 

My last effort at book club organization didn't get far, so I didn't have huge hopes for this one.  Yet it already has sixteen members, and nine say they'll be at the first event! (We'll see how many show up, of course.) Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist might be a good choice for the second event.  We might take turns choosing books.

The choir's next concert is in three weeks.  I won't be able to make the dress rehearsal, because it's on the same night that the Event Screen is showing the National Theatre production of Dale Haddon's Asperger novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.  I've made it into an event for the Autism Meetup, and several people are going, including Bev.

Anyway, we'll be doing some interesting new songs in the concert.  One is the Mexican folk song "Cielito Lindo." Another one, which we started the other night, is the Russian folk song "Kalinka." It's the sort of challenging song I like learning.  I remember hearing it in the movie The Loves of Isadora, in which Isadora Duncan (Vanessa Redgrave) visited the Soviet Union and danced with them to that song.

This afternoon Father and I finally got our old refrigerator up the steps from the basement.  We still need to bring it to the curb, but that should be easier.

Busy weekend!

Friday night I went on one of the Jane's Walks.  It started at 10:00 in the evening at Christie station, and we went south to Kensington Market, then east to the Grange Park, then south to the theatre district.  The guide was Nicholas, whom I'd met on a few Meetup events. (He was the one who remembered me, of course.) I thought of going on a Jane's Walk on Saturday morning because the St. Paul's NDP was making an event of it, but I wasn't up to it.

Saturday afternoon was the acting class.  We were learning about objectives, so Sharon and I did an exchange where I was resisting her demands for a raise. (I said things like "You don't need more money--you're a single woman!") I told Nancy I was interested in learning a comic monologue, which she doesn't usually recommend for beginners, but she thinks I'm ready!  Next door they were having auditions for singers in a musical, which was rather distracting.

Saturday evening I went to a Philosophy Dinner Meetup at the Bishop and Belcher.  The subject was democracy and its limitations, and I knew it would be an interesting discussion because Pam Chedore was coming.  I had the chicken korma.

Later that evening I went to the Karaoke Meetup at Kramer's.  Jonah used to bring us to the Gladstone Hotel karaoke every month, which I didn't care for because it was so popular you'd have a huge wait between songs, and we also had to get there early because of our reservation.  But karaoke has ended there, so now he's going to Kramer's instead, which has a huge song selection!  I felt tired, so I only sang one song, the Moody Blues' "Ride My Seesaw."

Sunday afternoon I went on a Walks with Profs Meetup.  We met at Victoria Park station then walked north on Kingston Road.  On the way we stopped at Tim Horton's, where I had a late lunch of chili.  Olga had actually run on part of the marathon that morning!  Granted that she quit early, but she still had enough energy left for walking.  Again I quit while I was ahead, and grabbed a bus when we got to St. Clair Avenue.

Sunday evening I saw the Hot Docs Film Festival documentary Khrushchev Does America, about the Soviet leader's 1959 visit, at the Lightbox.  It was really funny:  it isn't often you get a character like that as a world leader. (Boris Yeltsin was a character too, of course.) On the way out I met Gerald Hannon and told him I'd be in the opera again next year.

Orientation

Last night I went to an orientation session for volunteers for Olivia Chow's mayoral campaign. (An appropriate way to commemorate May 1.) It was at a Canadian Legion hall in the Lakeshore area.  They told us about how to develop our story and approach people on the street.  Really, I'm more of an office man what with my experience in several St. Paul's NDP campaigns.  In the form I filled out, I indicated that I was well suited to data entry. Seems I was visible on TV.

They had a bulletin board where you could post your reason for participating in the campaign.  One of them was from someone who'd been in the choir at Jack Layton's funeral and was impressed by his widow's courage.  I just wrote, "Bring back the LRTs!"

I don't envy Lakeshore residents.  Just around Lakeshore Boulevard it isn't so bad, but just a few blocks northward, in the Legion Hall's area, it's a dump!  There's some urban wasteland nearby with a stagnant pond that's already breeding flies.  And it isn't pedestrian-friendly:  I was late because I went west from Islington Avenue on the north side of Birmingham Street instead of the south side, and there was no crosswalk until I reached Kipling Avenue.  Some of these people will vote for a Rob Ford just because they hate the downtown.

I was going to see Beyond Clueless, a Hot Docs film about teenage comedies getting a midnight screening at the Bloor, but I was tired out. (I should have known that would happen.) Besides, I misplaced the ticket.

I'm almost finished the latest Lapham's Quarterly.  It  has part of a two-hour speech given by Hitler in 1937, with the following sentence (remember, it's a single sentence): "The greatest revolution which National Socialism has brought about is that it has rent asunder the veil which hid from us the knowledge that all human failures and mistakes are due to the conditions of the time and therefore can be remedied, but that there is one error which cannot be remedied once men have made it, namely the failure to recognize the importance of conserving the blood and the race free from intermixture and thereby the racial aspect and character which are God's gift and God's handiwork."

A Billy Wilder double bill!

"I've met some hard-boiled eggs in my time.  You're twenty minutes!"--Ace in the Hole

Sexy Banter: "Are you going to get down off your motorcycle and write me a ticket?"--Double Indemnity

Last night I saw two classic movies at the Revue directed by Billy Wilder, both of them for the third time.  Wilder was a great director, though according to a memoir by Frank Sinatra's valet, he was rude to servants, which seems to me one of the worst things you can be.

The first one was Ace in the Hole, a noirish melodrama-black comedy with Kirk Douglas as a big-city reporter stuck in Albuquerque (Breaking Bad country!), who learns of a relic hunter trapped in a cave-in inside a sacred First Nations mountain, sees his ticket out of the sticks and delays his rescue so he can milk the story.  It all ends badly, of course, and I can believe it was a box-office failure.  The company that sets up a carnival for the rubbernecks is called "S & M Amusement": even in the Production Code era they could get a lot past the censors!

Douglas was at his best playing antiheroes in the early 1950's, other examples being Champion, Detective Story and The Bad and the Beautiful.  Like Richard Burton, he comes across better in black and white movies like this one than in color.  Jan Sterling also has a good role as the relic hunter's discontented wife. (She reminded me of someone, and I realized she resembled a blond Katy Perry!) 

The second was the famous film noir Double Indemnity, with Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwyck plotting to murder Stanwyck's husband and get an insurance windfall.  Wilder's direction is remarkably expert, considering that it was only his third movie.  He wrote the script with the great Raymond Chandler, and it's full of sharp dialogue.  The affable McMurray is brilliantly cast against type. (He reminded me of the real-life affable felon Ronald Reagan.) I especially admire the moment when the murder happens, and we're shown a closeup of Stanwyck, clearly turned on.

The other day at The Huffington Post I wrote a post saying "AIPAC [Israel's Washington lobby] is certainly one of Washington's more powerful lobbies," and it got deleted!  When did obvious fact become offensive?

Hot Docs

Reporter: "People say you're a vulture for publicity." Alice Cooper: "What's wrong with that?"

Sunday night I went to the Hot Docs documentary Doc of the Dead at the Hart House cinema.  This screening wasn't sold out, so I managed to get a ticket when I arrived there.  While I was waiting for the film to come on, they kept repeating this piano theme three times a minute! (I measured the time with my watch.) It became a steady drip-drip-drip like Chinese water torture.  The documentary itself was about zombie movies and the whole zombie subculture, including zombie weddings:  it reminded me of the time I saw Toronto's annual zombie walk, which included an undead Pope.  They also discussed issues like zombies who can run fast vs. those who can't.  I guess I should see Night of the Living Dead someday.

Monday afternoon I went to the festival headquarters in Cumberland Terrace and bought a few more tickets.  I couldn't get into the documentary about the making of Top of the Lake or the one about the expert who says slums are the solution rather than the problem. (Sure hope I can find them on Netflix or somewhere.) Two of the three screenings I did get into were at the Bloor:  that place is huge and rarely sells out.  But there was a delay on the Bloor line between Yonge and St. George, so I ended up taking the streetcar west from St. Clair station and was pretty late.

Last night I saw Super Duper Alice Cooper at the Bloor.  As with Purple Rain, I sat near the balcony's back row.  The first half was uproarious. (I didn't realize that the incident of killing the chicken onstage--he says it was killed by the audience after he threw it out to them--happened in Toronto!) But the second half got more serious, talking about his battles with alcohol, then with cocaine.

Yesterday afternoon I finally went to the Jones library in the east end to explain I'd lost their book. (Before doing so, I took the opportunity to go to Wychwood library and get my library card renewed.) They're going to contact the other libraries and see if the book shows up within the system, which will take a couple of months.  Glad that's over with.

THE FRIENDLY PERSUASION

Daughter: "Mama's so strait-laced!" Gary Cooper: "I think I can loosen a few laces"--The Friendly Persuasion

Thursday night I went to the Poetry Meetup at Hart House and recited my translation of passages from Sophocles' Prometheus Bound. (It's actually drama, of course, but I think it works on the level of poetry.) Irene was there, whom I hadn't seen since we tried to start the theatre group a year ago.  She'd written a play of religious satire, but the others wanted to do a zombie play.  Then later on we started to develop a mystery, but that fell through...

Yesterday afternoon at the acting class, we did the Man on the Moon scene from memory. We're going to put the scene aside for now, though I think Nancy would like to come back to it sometime.  Linda and Chris were also doing a scene from Loraine Hansbury's A Raisin in the Sun.  Some of us arrive early just so we can chat with Nancy before the class itself.

Last night I went to a Karaoke Meetup at the Piper's, near our house north of St. Clair Avenue.  There were more people than I expected, and I waited two hours between songs. Jim with the sinus-clearing voice was there.  The poor waitress was stuck handling the bar and all the tables by herself!

This afternoon I saw William Wyler's wonderful The Friendly Persuasion, for the third time, with the Classic Movie Meetup at a screening in the Central in Mirvish Village. (We also got a buffet lunch, which is no great shakes but that isn't important.) Those Gary Cooper movies seem to get better and better with every viewing!  It's a compelling, often funny story about an Indiana Quaker family finding their principles put to the test during the Civil War.  It's easy to forget that Cooper often had a droll touch in movies like this one, and I also liked Dorothy McGuire as his wife.  Pity that whenever we see Anthony Perkins today we think of Psycho.  Pat Boone's theme song "Thee I Love" raised guffaws in the audience.

HUD

Paul Newman (being roused out of bed by his teenage nephew): "I sure do hope for your sake that this house is on fire!"--Hud

Last night I went to see Film 101 at the Event Screen.  They showed Martin Ritt's Hud from the novel Horseman Riding By by Larry McMurtry, one of my favourite writers.  I'd seen it before, but only on TV; photographed by the famous James Wong Howe, on the big screen it's a revelation!  Paul Newman's in rare form as the carousing, amoral ranch heir.  The scene where they have to shoot their whole herd to prevent the spread of hoof and mouth disease is still pretty shocking, though they didn't hurt any real cows in filming it  When Murray Pomerance asked for audience feedback after the movie, I pointed out the obvious comparison between that movie and Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, also based on a McMurtry novel.

Tonight at the Bloor I saw Afternoon of a Faun, a documentary about Chantaquil LeClerc, a great ballerina who inspired George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins but was crippled by polio in her prime.  Lots of Debussy music.  This was the movie's last night and I almost forgot to see it, but during dinner Moira mentioned something about Balanchine and that reminded me.  I owe her one.

I've been seeing quite a few movies at the Bloor lately.  I saw the trailer for Satan Came to Eden and the one for this movie several times, and lately I've been seeing the trailer for Teenage, a documentary about adolescent culture in the twentieth century, and The Missing Picture, about a Cambodian recreating the unphotographed Khmer Rouge autogenocide through miniature dioramas.  While I was there I also got a schedule for the Hot Docs festival, which starts tomorrow. (They have a documentary of Jane Campion filming Top of the Lake!)

Yesterday I was replenishing some medication at Shoppers Drug Mart, and I also bought a lot of post-Easter candy at a markdown.  It included some Ferrero Rocher, which I now think is my favourite candy, sold in an egg-shaped container.  They were selling chocolate in the shape of a high-heeled shoe, but I skipped that.

Tax time

"I wonder what you do all day?" "I run in and out of doors trying to stay out of the rain"--It Happened One Night

Yesterday afternoon I saw Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (for the second time) at the Event Screen with a big group from the Classic Movie Meetup.  It's a well-crafted populist comedy with a nice chemistry between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.  I liked the scene where Gable pretended to be a tough gangster to shut up a guy who was endangering their secret.

It was unusually warm today, so I opened my windows for the first time in months.  I also strolled down to Hillcrest Park, which attracted a lot of other people too.

I finally finished my tax return. (I would have done it Friday night, but I went to see Purple Rain instead.  Priorities first!) As usual, I didn't earn enough to qualify for paying taxes, even with the Aquilon Books profit being put in my name.  I'd do my taxes earlier, but I have to wait for Father to get up a financial statement for our used-book business.  I included receipts for my TTC Metropass subscription and my Ontario N.D.P. membership, but there wasn't much point:  I would have had nothing to pay anyhow.

We're still watching that series exploring Shakespeare on Netflix.  We've just seen Derek Jacobi talking about Richard II and Jeremy Irons discussing the trilogy involving Henry IV and V.  I don't know as much about Shakespeare as I should!

I've finally finished that book about 50 architectural ideas!  And I'm running short, alas.

PURPLE RAIN

Last night I saw the Prince vehicle Purple Rain (for the third time) at the Bloor.  It was part of the "This Film Should Be Played Loud" series, and I sat in the balcony near the back row.  There was a huge queue to the popcorn place--they sold a lot of beer--and I waited until the film started to get popcorn.  Fortunately, they preceded it was the video of the Batdance Prince did for the 1989 Batman movie, which was so long I had time to go and return before it was finished!

The movie is something of a guilty pleasure:  the concert scenes are pretty good, but the rest is on the crude side, with Prince a better stage presence than an actor.  Morris Day steals the show, of course, as Prince's shameless rival--I especially liked his numbers "Jungle Love" and "The Bird." Of course, I knew all that already.  The place was packed, and a lot of people had glow-sticks which they were waving during the final numbers.  Safer than matches, I guess.

Today was my acting class.  There were a record eight people there!  The two new people both did an animal impersonation, as everyone does when they start out, and two others were new enough to elaborate their earlier ones. I did the "George Gray" monologue completely by heart.  We also did the "Man on the Moon" scene again.  It turns out that Andy Kaufman is telling the truth about his cancer, though Nancy let us think otherwise so we'd be natural in the scene.  Next week we're going to do the scene one more time, from memory, which shouldn't be hard for me since I have just a handful of lines, none of them very long.

Sometime I should start learning a new monologue.  This time I'd like to do something comic.  Back when I was taking drama classes in the Toronto District School Board night school program, some people said I had natural comic timing.

This is Easter weekend, so Monday will be unusually idle for me.  And next week they'll be selling chocolate at clearance prices! (Someday I want to find that store in the Junction that sells fair-trade chocolate.)

Queen Street art walk

I didn't go out at all on Tuesday what with the cold weather.  At times like this I get headaches and can barely do one thing at a time. (I'd stopped wearing a warm blanket around the computer, but have temporarily resumed.) I hardly went out at all until this evening to join Betty Anne for her latest art walk.  This time it was along Dundas Street around Dufferin Street.  I intended to be on time, but as usual I was on the late side:  blame the slow Dufferin bus service. (Though I'm grateful that we have buses at all!)

The walk started at PM Gallery where we saw some pictures by Amanda Clyne of ethereal women, which reminded me of Edvard Munch.  Then we went to a Japanese-themed boutique called the Blue Button Shop; the Art Metropole, which sells art publications and "multiples"; and a Sky Glabush exhibition at MKG127, including an elaborate pencil sketch of a Baha'i information booth.  We got some snacks from Hogtown Cure, but didn't go in because they were busy gutting a pig.

I finished From the Earth to the Moon, which ends with the spaceship launched and seen orbiting the moon.  Jules Verne continued the story in a sequel titled All Around the Moon, which I'll have to pick up sometime, no doubt online from Chapters-Indigo like the first book. (The Classics Illustrated comic I vividly remember was based on both books.) I also read the introduction, which mentioned that they've been designing unmanned spacecraft that can be launched in the cannon style of this book, at a far smaller cost than rocketry!

Now I've resumed reading the revolution issue of Lapham's Quarterly.  It looks like a particularly good one!

It finally occurred to me to give over one of my twelve cherished Safari bookmark spots to blogger.com .  With several new blogs that'll be a convenient change.  I've also given a spot to comics kingdom.com .  One of the websites I dropped was youtube.com .  I can just type the letter "Y" and it'll come up quickly!  The other was my email page, because with the Mavericks update of my computer operating system, I can now get it on non-Safari software.  Now the computer makes a noise whenever I get a new email, and I'm no longer letting big backlogs accumulate.

Two Meetups

This afternoon I hosted the latest ROLT event.  I tried to do science fiction again, with the clever event title "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow..." But only three people showed up. (Why not repeat your mistakes?) Also, because I only reserved our place at the last minute we didn't have our usual room but a louder area.  I'm glad I was careless with just a small group:  I'll be sure to reserve earlier with larger groups.

I read a passage from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, about the battle with the giant squid.  The Nautilus crew normally speaks an Esperanto-like language, but a sailor who gets carried away in a tentacle reverts to his native French and yells "Au secours!" which makes a big impression on the French hero.  I also read a passage from Arthur C. Clarke's novelization of 2001:  A Space Odyssey, imagining the state of the world in 2001. (His world population estimate of six billion proved accurate.) And I read Clarke's story "Encounter in the Dawn," about an encounter between spacemen from a technologically-advanced planet and savages from a primitive one, which influenced 2001 greatly.

Craig read Mina Loy's futuristic poem "Lunar Baedeker," while Christina preferred to listen. (I always tell such members, "The world needs more people who listen.") For next month I'm going to do humorous writing again.

In the evening I had dinner with a Karaoke Meetup group at Milestone's just south of Empress Walk.  I ate Chicken Harissa, whose name I remember because it rhymes with Clarissa. (It was a spicy Middle Eastern dish that included quinoa and chickpeas.) 

Afterward we rented a karaoke booth and got in two hours of songs.  I was one of the only people who could handle the remote control, because it was similar to the ones at Bar Plus.  I saw a video with Katy Perry shooting fireworks out of her bosom! (I couldn't make that up.)

PRINCE IGOR

Today I saw another Met opera at the Yonge & Eglinton:  Borodin's Prince Igor, based on a mediaeval Russian poem.  I'd never seen it before, though I've certainly heard the famous Polovtsian Dances.  It's the one where Prince Igor goes out to battle the Polovtsians from the steppes despite an inauspicious solar eclipse and gets routed and ends up a guest-prisoner of the khan and back home his brother-in-law Galitsky tries to usurp his throne but another khan invades and devastates the place and the Prince escapes and returns home and everyone celebrates.

The second act, set in a poppy field, was pretty confusing. (It's taking place in his head, see?) But the next act had a great Galitsky:  in the scene where he threatened his sister (Igor's wife), they clearly had a history.  There was a superb party scene too.

They mentioned the operas the Met will be transmitting, and they sound promising.  They're doing quite a few that I've worked on at the Toronto City Opera or at the choir:  Carmen, Macbeth, Merry Widow, Marriage of Figaro, Tales of Hoffmann.

Margaret and her oldest daughter Sarah are visiting from Kingston.  They came to shop for a prom dress for Sarah and she found one in sapphire blue.

I haven't run short like this for a while.  Anything for variety!

"The Second Cup on Yonge Street"

I would have gone to see my MP Carolyn Bennett today with the group from Fair Vote to present our petition for proportional representation.  But I went to the wrong branch of The Second Cup to meet the group.  The place was set as The Second Cup near Yonge & Heath two months ago (there were some delays), but I thought it was the one near Yonge & Davisville.  A few days ago the guy arranging it reminded us to meet on "The Second Cup on Yonge Street." Well, that could be a lot of places!  I wish I could have gone directly to the constituency office, but I'd forgotten where it was and he didn't remind us.

These things are really frustrating for me! (Moira asked me, "Are you still taking your medication?") It reminds me of when I started university 35 years ago.  They had an initiation for people to enter the freshman class, but fortunately it was just a scavenger hunt.  However, they changed the place at the last moment and the only signs to show the right place were posted in the dining halls.  I was a townie so I missed out.

Then 20 years ago or so the Joint Center of Asia-Pacific Studies was having a Christmas party or something at this Thai restaurant downtown.  But I came too early and the others came too late.  I tried to explain the reservation group I was part of, but I was dealing with a waiter who couldn't speak English!

I still felt annoyed when I went out this evening to see the documentary Satan Came to Eden at the Bloor.  It's about some Germans who moved away from civilization to a remote island in the Galapagos and the homicidal end result. (They'd been reading too many Karl May westerns.) It reminded me of a Werner Herzog movie.

Today I managed to read sixty pages of From the Earth to the Moon!

It's funny with this blog.  Last week I went six days between posts, but this week I've been finding something to write about every night.  And I haven't padded it out that much!

FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON

"Now when an American has an idea he looks for another American to share it.  If there are three of them they elect a president and two vice-presidents.  If there are four they appoint a secretary and their staff is ready to function.  If there are five they convene in a general assembly and their club is formed"--From the Earth to the Moon

"And yet they were planning only to send a projectile to the moon.  This is a rather brusque way of establishing relations, even with a satellite, but it is in very common use by civilized nations"--ibid.

Yesterday I finished The Innocents Abroad.  There's still the foreword and the afterword, but they won't take long.  I'm also close to finishing that book about fifty architectural ideas.

So now I'm starting a new book.  I chose Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon because I read the Classics Illustrated comic book version when I was a kid.  It's about a group of Americans being shot to the moon from a giant cannon, with lots of scientific information about the moon, though with nineteenth-century limits.  Verne knew how to write adventure stories with a little-boy appeal along with the science and technology stuff.  I read over forty pages just today.

From reading to writing:  I've started some new blogs. (If blogger.com has a limit on how many blogs one address can open, I don't think I've reached it.) I now have a total of five, including this one and memoirslam.blogspot.ca .  They're "Poems" at jjmatthewspoems.blogspot.ca ; "Translations" at jjmatthewstranslations.blogspot.ca ; and "Fairy Tales Retold" at jjmatthewsfairytales.blogspot ca . I've posted my first Dumbass adventure ("The Golden Goose") at the fairy tale blog, and my translation from Greek of a few parts of Sophocles' Prometheus Bound at the translation blog.  But I'll have to write some poems before I can post them at the poetry blog. (I've started work on a Cinderella poem.)

And now I've included two quotes from the book, breaking my usual limit of one per post. (Rules are made to be broken.)

Spring changes

Spring has come, and that can mean putting things in order.  We just finished assembling a new filing cabinet. (Father did most of the work, but I would have helped more if he'd just asked me!) There's a long story behind it.

A few years back, I noticed that Father had a small filing cabinet for receipts and stuff from our used book business.  I mentioned that I'd like to have one to store some of the comic strips in my collection.  So Father went out and bought one--except that what he bought was a chest of drawers, not something you could hang file folders inside.  If he'd taken me with him, I would have told him that wasn't what I wanted, but he tends to do things on his own.

In the end, Father said that he'd give me his cabinet and use the new chest in its place.  I wasn't happy that he'd be using a less suitable filing place on my account, but there was nothing I could do but accept this arrangement.

For a while I did store my comics in it, but last September it was arranged that the original filing cabinet would go to Margaret's home in Kingston.  Did I agree to this?  For the life of me I don't remember, so I'll assume I did.  But now I had no place to put those comics.

We've been rearranging things since Mother's death, and Moira couldn't see why I didn't just use the chest of drawers to store those comics.  It was hard to explain to her that this wasn't what I needed.

My room is pretty full, so we've placed the filing cabinet in the upstairs hallway. (We also have an extra bookcase there.) It fits perfectly in a corner next to the stairs to the attic room.  As for that chest of drawers, it's still empty! But for how long?

Another spring change is that I went out and bought new shoes, since the sole was starting to come off one of my old ones.  I bought them at Walmart, which makes me feel guilty, but I couldn't figure out where else to go.  I also bought a new pair of slippers there.  By referring to "spring changes," I've managed to make the filing cabinet and the shoes into a single subject!

JOHNNY HAZARD

It's been a while since I made any changes with the strips I follow every day at the King Features website. (It's now called comics kingdom.com .) My main interest is their classic strips, of course. The other day I noticed that they've started carrying Johnny Hazard, so I added that to my favorites list.  It started just a few months ago, so I got caught up pretty quick.

They're carrying Frank Robbins' adventure strip from its beginning in 1944.  The title character is a USAF pilot fighting the Nazis, and he's a rebellious badass.  The first story had him escaping from behind enemy lines in a stolen Messerschmidt--I think maybe they couldn't find the first week--and now he's on a particularly dangerous mission to supply weapons to partisans to support a big Allied operation.  The mission is complicated by the presence of Brandy, a blond photographer who wants to land to photograph the partisans...  All this is in the dailies; the Sundays are more comic.

Later on Johnny becomes a postwar pilot going on big adventures around the world and eventually becomes an agent for an organization called WING.  It has some nice artwork: I liked reading the strip from the mid-1970s in my Menomonee Falls Gazette collection.  And the dialogue has lots of wartime slang. ("Flying coffins!")

Among the other classic strips, the current Rip Kirby story has him and Desmond rescuing a prince and his baby son from a prison behind the Iron Curtain.  The Cold War was always a bit too complex for adventure stories, and I would have thought Rip Kirby was too smart for Cold War stuff.  The Cold War worked better as implicit subtext, like in the current Flash Gordon stories where he's battling the Skorpi empire that's threatening the earth from afar.

I'm seeing all this on my computer with its Mac OSX operating system, which I just updated to something called "Mavericks." (Did Don Draper suggest the name?) I can no longer use the zoom-in and zoom-out feature.

HEIMAT

This past week I've spent watching Edgar Reisz' German miniseries Heimat.  It's about 14 hours long, and we had it out of the library for only a week.  I watched about two and a half hours a day, which is why I haven't been posting here.  Fifteen years ago I saw the first half. (It was vaguely familiar to me, and I confirmed I'd seen it before when I saw the scene where three top-level Nazis get invited to the big house.  I also remembered stuff like the guy disarming bombs.)

The show's a pretty stunning depiction of life in a village in Germany's Hunsruck region before, during and after the Nazi era.  Granted that the second half, set after 1945, isn't as good as the first.  It's like with Gunter Grass' novel The Tin Drum, where the third section, also set in the postwar period, wasn't as good as the first two, and was omitted from the movie version. (Everything after the Nazis is bound to seem anticlimactic.)

You wouldn't think I'd have any time for movies, but I managed to see two documentaries at the Bloor.  Friday I saw The Great Flood, a documentary of pre-sound footage of the Mississippi flood of 1927.  Then this afternoon I saw Errol Morris' Donald Rumsfeld documentary The Unknown Known. Scary guy!

I ordered a copy of The Innocents Abroad from Chapters-Indigo online.  I splurged on postage, and it arrived the next day.  I only had a hundred pages left and it'll be finished soon.  I've checked the TTC lost & found, but the book hasn't shown up there.  Maybe they've returned it directly to the library.

How I ruined my day

Today was the first warm spring weather here, and I brought out  my spring jacket. (The day before I started wearing my non-winter shoes.) I went to Wychwood library on my way to the memoir slam and picked up the new copy of The Innocents Abroad.  At the memoir slam we wrote about December and "Any last requests?" And on the way home I left the book either on the streetcar or the subway.

Tomorrow I'll be going to the TTC Lost & Found office to see about the book.  What's frustrating is that I'll have to wait a bit longer before resuming reading it. (At least it's bound to get to either me or its original library branch.) Maybe I can buy a copy.

This reminds me of how Mother left her purse in a restaurant a few times, to her great embarrassment.  Am I turning into her? (Someone said that some people respond to their mother's death by becoming more like her.) Did I say all this last December when I lost my binder?  I wish she were around so I could tell her the comparison.

The warm weather made it a good time for the choir's spring concert.  Father wasn't up to going, but Moira made it.  Carrie Parks (the blond Carrie, not Carrie Grey) sang "Song to the Moon" and "Climb Every Mountain" from The Sound of Music.  And Adolfo played the Intermezzo from Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana (the Raging Bull music).

Now "Amigos Para Siempre" is going through my head.  Curse you, Andrew Lloyd Webber!

RUSALKA

"All sacrifice is useless"--Rusalka

At last week's acting class I did things like a scene from the movie Man in the Moon, where Andy Kaufman brings his friends together early in the morning and tells them he has cancer. (He doesn't.) This week's class I missed, because I preferred to see a Met opera in its digital screening at the Yonge & Eglinton, a new location for me.  I have four others coming up, all in successive months.

I saw Dvorak's Rusalka, with Renee Fleming in the title role. (I saw it before on a DVD of a Czech TV production, which I think was shorter.) It's most famous number is "Song to the Moon," which Tetyana sang at the gala concert and Carrie Parks is singing at this Monday's choir concert.  No doubt it'll be going through my head for a while, like the "Women, Women" number from The Merry Widow that the men sang in the gala concert.

Rusalka is a reworking of "The Little Mermaid": it's the one where a lake nymph falls in love with a human prince and becomes human to be with him, but he forsakes her, leaving her doomed to be eternally undead.  It's a pretty sad story--the prince sees the error of his ways too late and abandons his own life--but has some quirky light touches. (In Czech culture they manage to give light touches to tragedies.) The forest set was phenomenal:  the backdrop resembled a classical painting.

It occurred to me that the prince in Rusalka was a bit like the husband in the Danish show Borgen, who left his wife for another woman then ended up dumping the second woman too.  Some men just don't know what they want (until it's too late!).

P.S.:  After publishing this post I had to edit it right away, because its heading was RASULKA!

Hiatus

This morning, after going to Sunnyside Restaurant for an unusually heavy breakfast with Moira, I returned The Innocents Abroad to Deer Park library (a day overdue again!).  I'd tried to renew it, but someone placed a hold on it, so I placed a hold on another copy at a more remote branch and will resume reading it once that arrives.

While waiting for its arrival, I'll start reading the latest Lapham's Quarterly, whose subject is revolutions.  Every issue has a map of the world illustrating its theme just after the table of contents, and this one showed the locations of over two hundred revolutions, rebellions, coups and wars of independence through history.  I was patient enough to find the location for every entry in the chronological list! (Names like the January Rebellion are hardest to find.) Now I look forward to going on Wikipedia and reading about the Ragamuffin War and the Green Corn Rebellion.  I'm also reading an interesting article in Harper's about how the Colorado River basin's water resources are being relentlessly overtaxed.

I just got about two-thirds of the way through the book:  the tour has just reached Samaria.  Mark Twain didn't think much of the Holy Land, characterizing it as desolate and impoverished.  The first time I saw the book quoted was as a high schooler attending a United Nations Seminar at Mt. Allison University.  One of the booklets they gave us was a work of Israeli propaganda called Myths and Facts. (Is my memory playing a trick, or was the author future CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer?) The title reflects its running structure.  Myth:  the Arab position followed by Fact:  the Israeli position.  They quoted The Innocents Abroad to argue that the place was a dump before the Zionists took over.  Sort of like America before the First Nations were robbed of their land.

For future reading, I've been buying books at the Chapters-Indigo website.  In my quest to read all the Classics Illustrated novels, I bought three French books: Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, Edmond About's The King of the Mountains, (about 19th-century tourists getting kidnapped by a Greek bandit--it's funnier than it sounds), and Erckmann and Chatrian's Waterloo.  The last is a two-book volume which includes The Conscript, which Waterloo is a sequel of.  I bought them because I've read the comics version of all three.

I also bought a collection of Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction short stories.  Next month's ROLT event will be about science fiction, and I plan to read either his The Sentinel (the official source material for Stanley Kubrick's 2001:  A Space Odyssey) or Encounter at Dawn (an unofficial source).

I think my posts are getting longer!  That's a good sign.

Two movies about kids

Natalie Portman (nursing the bloody nose her father gave her): "Is life always this hard, or is it just when you're a kid?" Jean Reno (passing her a handkerchief): "Always like this"--The Professional

Today I saw two movies, something I don't usually do but today was the only convenient time for both.  In the afternoon I saw Wolfgang Petersen's The Neverending Story (for the second time) at the Royal, where I haven't been for years!  I first saw it thirty years ago in its original release, and I'm glad I did so before reading Michael Ende's book:  the book was so wonderful that the movie would probably have suffered in comparison.  As it is, it's a handsome, skilful adaptation, though the bit at the end where Bastian, flying the luckdragon, uses it to buzz the bullies who were chasing him at the beginning was particularly cheesy.  The early scene where Atreyu's pony drowns in the Swamp of Despair (echoes of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress!) is unusually honest for the juvenile genre, both in the book and in the movie.

In the evening I saw Luc Besson's The Professional, for at least the third time, at the Event Screen where they were showing it as part of a popular-demand series. (The series' previous film was V for Vendetta:  there must be a lot of Natalie Portman fans out there.) The first time I saw it was at the Euclid cinema 19 years ago--I also saw Heavenly Creatures there--and I think that's the same place that became the Royal.

The Professional is the one where New York moppet Natalie Portman survives her whole family's murder by crooked drug cop Gary Oldman and gets adopted by immigrant hit man Jean Reno, then insists on becoming his apprentice!  I have to admit it's a guilty pleasure for me:  the script is often in dubious taste and doesn't always make sense. (Several weeks after the murders the crime scene is still undisturbed, police "Do not enter" ribbons and all!) Oldman chews, digests and regurgitates the scenery, though his overacting is kinda fun. ("Bring everyone." "Everyone?" "EV-E-RY-ONE!!!")

On the other hand, Reno is the coolest of the cool. (As the spy agency boss in Besson's La Femme Nikita, I think he was the real reason for the movie's success.) The exchange I quoted above is also remarkably honest:  no "It gets better" nonsense from this guy!

BREAKING BAD

Walter White on cooking meth: "I was really good at it....  I felt alive!"

This evening I saw the last episode of Breaking Bad on Netflix.  It was a phenomenal show!  Moira saw these last episodes when she was at Margaret's house last year, so now I can talk about them with her.

I was talking about Bryan Cranston in my acting class:  Moira says he's the kind of actor who can do two things at once.  And I'm glad Anna Gunn won an Emmy:  her performance was the underappreciated one.  Some people despise Skyler as an "enabler," but it's a very complex role. (Moira says she has nice legs, as I'm sure a lot of actresses do.)

I haven't been watching so much on Netflix recently.  I've been meaning to watch the second season of Hell on Wheels and the last season of Prison Break, but I still haven't got around to them.  Moira and Father have been watching the American version of House of Cards, but I'm only interested in the British version, which Netflix also has, so I'll be seeing that someday.  Mostly, I've been watching Cheers! with Father, and we're now in the fourth season when Woody Harrelson had just replaced Nicholas Colasanto.  That's a show with sharp writing!

Gala concert

This evening Toronto City Opera had its fundraising gala concert.  I was in the chorus that sang the Slaves' Chorus and the Brindisi and I had it all memorized. (The Spoon River Anthology poem I'm still working on.)

We had a wide range of numbers.  Tetyana sang "Song to the Moon" from Dvorak's Rusalka, which I'll be seeing the weekend after next.  Carrie Parks sang Musetta's waltz from Puccini's La Boheme.  Some women sang a quartet (or was it a trio?) from Verdi's Falstaff while some men did that "Women, Women" number from Lehar's The Merry Widow.  There was also a French song that sounded like something Edith Piaf sang (though it wasn't one of her songs), and one of those Neapolitan songs that Caruso sang.

Someone whose name I forget sang the Laughing Song from Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus.  When we were doing that show at the opera five years ago or so, I was playing the Farmville game.  So Fledermaus music always reminds me of Farmville.

The Japanese girl sang Luigi Arditi's "The Kiss," which was in one of those piano books we had when I was young, though I couldn't find it in my recent search.  I remember that brother John wrote under that title "in concert." (Back then KISS was the big rock band of the moment.) Under the waltz "Over the Waves" he wrote "Ugh." Under "Soldier's Chorus" from Gounod's Faust, he wrote "We've got your number," referring to a Monty Python skit.  And under Anton Rubinstein's "Romance" he added "is dead." At my suggestion, he also put "So is" in front of Rubinstein's name!

Beatrice announced that next year we'll be doing Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera and Mozart's Don Giovanni.  I'd been unsure before, but now I think I won't take a break next year.  I'm interested in the Verdi, which I've done with the choir, and I did the Mozart in my first season ten years ago.

I baked gingerbread for the reception after the concert.  Among the other stuff, I liked Yvette's egg and tuna mini-sandwiches.

Acting class

Saturday I had another acting class.  For the first time I performed a monologue that I found at a website called "Ace Your Audition." It's the poem "George Gray" from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, which is a bunch of poems of dead people telling their story.  George Gray's story is how he was always afraid to be adventurous while he was alive and he gets to regret it now.  When I performed it the first time Nancy asked me to do it again slower and I said, "Ghosts aren't in a hurry." For some reason they found that really funny.

Now I'm working on memorizing the poem for future classes.  I've also been working on memorizing the Slaves' Chorus from Nabucco for the Gala concert this Thursday, and I've just about completed that task.  The Drinking Song from La Traviata was easy to memorize since I've done it before.

Speaking of acting, on Sunday night I saw the documentary Liv & Ingmar at the Bloor.  It has Liv Ullmann telling the story of her personal and professional relationship with Ingmar Bergman. (Much of the narration came from her autobiography Changes.) Happily, they had a lot of clips from the movies they made together:  LU and Max Von Sydow were two iconic faces.  It looks like Bergman drew on his personal dramas for much of his cinematic ones.

Old piano books

Down in the basement we have a trunk full of old piano books.  While Moira was away in the Dominican Republic, I decided to bring them up and have a look through them. (I think they got put away while I was living in England almost twenty years ago.) I believed there'd be some books I want to play now.

As it turned out, there weren't that many I wanted to play:  some of what I wanted to play I couldn't find there.  But I sorted them into different piles for the next time we look at them.  There was a pile for series books like John Thompson and Leila Fletcher.  There was one for study pieces.  There was one for duets, of which we had more than I expected.  There was one for non-piano music:  in our family, among several instruments, Margaret played the violin and John played the trombone.  And there was a pretty big pile of stuff that wasn't music related, including a couple of Dalhousie University yearbooks.  There was also a fancy calendar on the bottom that the damp got into, so we may as well throw it away.

I'd played the piano in my early and mid-teens, and I took the time to look through some piano books I remembered.  My memory turned out to be imperfect:  for example, that piano study they kept playing in that play Two Pianos, Four Hands turned out to be by Duvernoy, not Burgmueller.  I was a long time getting around to putting them back.

Our Yamaha piano is forty years old, but we've been keeping it tuned.  What music did I end up keeping upstairs?  There are a couple of pieces that I recall playing very well, and I want to play them again:  "The Policeman," from Healey Willan's Character Sketches of Old London, and the Arab Dance from a piano arrangement of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite.  I also held on to an old songbook which Mother's family probably got when she was a girl around 1930. (Or it might have been Father's family.) It has songs like "She Was Happy Till She Met You" and "She May Have Seen Better Days."

Two New York movies about actors

"A wiseguy is always right.  Even when he's wrong, he's right"--Donnie Brasco

Last night I went to Murray Pomerance's Film 101 series at the Event Screen and saw Mike Newell's Donnie Brasco for the third or fourth time. (I once saw the whole thing on DVD with Newell's voiceover commentary.) It's the one where undercover G-man Johnny Depp gets taken under the wing of Willy Loman-like gangster Al Pacino.  I love a good gangster movie, and this one's particularly good.  There was a loud quarrel in the audience at one point, but I never found out what that was about.

This evening I saw Sydney Pollack's Tootsie (for the third time) at the Yonge & Eglinton with a Movie Meetup group.  I thought of cancelling, what with the snowstorm, but our internet connection was off so I went anyway.  This is the one where Dustin Hoffman plays an obsessive actor who pretends to be an actress to land a soap opera role.  It's a slick blockbuster vehicle, though its message doesn't bear too much thinking. (Does it take a man in drag to teach a woman to be assertive?) Bill Murray has a good supporting role.

After seeing Tootsie I joined Paula's Karaoke Meetup group at the Fox & Fiddle near St. George station.  One of my songs was "With a Little Help From My Friends":  I was expecting the Ringo Starr version but got the Joe Cocker version instead!

GRAVITY

I saw Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity last night.  I assumed it was at the Revue because I'd got a pamphlet the day before from the building of my acting class and it showed the movie scheduled for then.  But it turned out not to be showing there, and I assumed I'd got a February schedule instead of March.  But it turned out I had a schedule for the Royal instead of the Revue.

Anyhow, I went and saw it at the Yonge & Dundas instead.  I took the subway south to St. Patrick station and a streetcar east from there, because the line was closed for servicing around Dundas station.  On the way there I was so caught up in reading The Innocents Abroad--he's now in Italy--that I missed my stop and had to get off and Osgoode station and go back north.  Then I missed the stop a second time and had to get off at Queens Park and go south again! (Third time was the charm.) I barely made the movie in time, but who wants to sit and wait?

The movie was pretty gripping in a middlebrow way, not unlike Robert Redford's All Is Lost. (It wasn't completely above cheesiness:  there was one shot of a spaceman's corpse next to a photo of him with his family!) I don't care for 3-D, not because it makes movies worse but because it rarely makes them better.  But I'll admit that this sort of movie is the right place for it.  Sandra Bullock looked a bit like Beatrice--especially her hair--and I mentioned this to the latter at this evening's choir practice.  That pleased her:  she likes SB.

The Auld Sod

Today was ROLT's March event.  The Auld Sod was focused on Irish writing.  There were six people there, including a couple promoting a genealogy-themed Limerick tour in August.  (Too bad Moira was at Club Med, and Jane couldn't make it either.)

I started off by singing "Danny Boy" a capella. (They said I had a nice voice.) I also read Michael McLaverty's "The Wild Duck's Nest" and "A Painful Case" from James Joyce's The Dubliners.  I concluded by reading the last couple of pages from "The Dead," also from The Dubliners.  One of us read a passage from Joyce's Ulysses that ended with "Yes I said yes I will yes," and there were also a couple of William Butler Yeats poems and a passage from an early chapter in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.  And a couple of people recited poems they had written.  I asked them whether they'd rather do science fiction or humor in April, and they preferred science fiction.

Remember when I talked about The Matrix last week?  There was a detail I intended to mention, but forgot. (I could have edited the post to add it, but why bother?) When Roger Ebert was reviewing the third Matrix movie on his TV show, he said it left him feeling sated.  Well, I felt sated after the first one!  I have yet to see either of the sequels.

Delays and moots

The weather has been getting milder, so the other day I stopped wearing long johns till next winter.  There may be another cold snap, but I don't really care.

Today I was going out to a Sanctuary church just east of Yonge and Charles, to try a new writing group Gary told me about at the memoir slam.  He's suggested a Meetup connection, and I'm thinking of making it another event with my second group, along with the Monday event.  But I'll have to go there at least once so I can describe it. (I'm not yet sure how it works.) I tried to go there last week, but I couldn't find the place.

This time I did some research online, and found the address.  But I got there late, and it turned out that the event was cancelled because too few people showed up. (I was late last week too, but since I couldn't find the place the timing was moot anyway.) I'll just have to go next week.

Another delay is with the Fair Vote group that's going to present a petition to MP Caroline Bennett.  We were originally going to meet her earlier, but the meeting was delayed to this Friday and I was afraid I'd have to leave the writing group early for that appointment.  But then the meeting got delayed again, this time to April, so that concern was moot too.  And since I didn't get to the other event either, it was a double moot! (Is "moot" a noun?  If not, I'm reinventing the English language!  You saw it here first, folks.)

THE INNOCENTS ABROAD

"All was bustle and confusion. (I have seen that remark before, somewhere.)"--The Innocents Abroad

Yesterday I started Mark Twain's first book, The Innocents Abroad.  It's an account of a tour he took of the Mediterranean world that he took with some high-class Americans in the late 1860s, long before regular cruise ships.  It's really, really funny.

I picked up the book after the memoir slam.  (The subjects were "Going to a play" and "August," and I found more to write about than the previous week, when the subjects were "Hangups" and "Unusual neighbours.") I'd finished The Pioneers and wanted something to read while I was on my way to get the book, so I borrowed from the Lillian Smith library a Loyola Press coffee-table book for children about saints.  Then I got The Innocents Abroad at the Deer Park library.  I also paid a forty-cent fine:  The Pioneers was due last Thursday so I renewed it, but I got around to it a day late.

Before going home, I also went to the Northern District library and returned The Pioneers directly.  I could have returned it at any branch, of course, but I preferred to save the library people the trouble of transporting it back to Northern District.  And I saved the energy that transportation would have taken:  maybe little things like that will save us from climate change.  Or maybe they won't.

The opera's finished

"No wonder she likes you!" "Who?" "Not too bright, though"--The Matrix

Last night I saw the Warshowski's The Matrix (for the second time) at the Event Screen.  The real reason I went was to get a sheet with the Event Screen schedule for March.  The movie's pretty fun, though I still didn't understand it.

This afternoon was the last performance of Carmen. (Two subjects in one post--I'm already eating my words!) Father couldn't make it, but Moira saw it and especially liked the Iranian playing Don Jose.  She also liked the way Carmen threw a girl out of her seat.  I finished The Pioneers just before the show started.

Beatrice came out just before the show started and mentioned the animated orange singing the Habanera on Sesame Street.  Afterward I told her, "I hope it was a Seville orange!" (Carmen being set in Seville, of course.)

Last night John, Donald and Kathrine came over for a combined birthday party for Donald (his was Wednesday), and Father.  We ate Indian food again, and there was enough left over for today.