DRACULA & FRANKENSTEIN

We were lucky in Toronto:  after sobering weather Monday, Sandy largely passed us by.

Tonight being Halloween, I went to see the double feature of DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN at the Fairview Cinema near Don Mills station. It was an event in the new Classic Movie Meetup.  The Fairview has a special screening room for small audiences, and they may be renting it for future events if enough people are interested.  In a few weeks they plan to show Hitchcock's VERTIGO; unfortunately, it's on the same day I'm going to an opera screening. (In theory I could attend the opera in the afternoon and the movie in the evening, but in practice I'd get a huge headache.)

The two movies we saw were restored versions of two Universal horror classics from the early '30s.  That was in the first years of talking pictures, and they're both a bit slow and talky like many films of that time, DRACULA especially.  But FRANKENSTEIN has some great set pieces (the birth, the fiery windmill climax), and they both have some good lines, like Dracula's "I never drink... wine." I spotted two actors who were in both movies:  Dwight Frye as Renfield/Fritz and Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing/Baron Frankenstein.

On the way home I was chatting with Cecilia, a Brazilian who lives near my neighborhood.  She's been in Canada less than a year, but she already speaks pretty good English.

Still reading Herodotus

I've resumed reading Herodotus' history.  I couldn't remembered where I'd left off, so I started in the middle of the fifth book.  After a great deal of rereading, I found that I'd got all the way into the sixth book!  (I remembered most of what I reread.)

I'm now close to the end of the seventh book.  The fifth book is about the rebellion against Persian rule of the Greek cities on the west coast of Asia Minor, led by the foolish Aristagoras.  The Athenians were careless enough to send a naval expedition in support of the rebels, leading to Persian retaliation, and the sixth book is about that retaliation:  Persia's first attempt, under Darius, at conquering Greece, leading to defeat on the Plains of Marathon.  The seventh book, which I've almost finished, is about the second Persian attempt under Xerxes, leading up to the Battle of Thermopylae.

As always, Herodotus has an eye for a good story.  Near the end of the sixth book, there's the story of Hippokleides wooing Kleisthenes' daughter. (Back then courtship meant winning over the father.) Hippokleides was thought to be a leading candidate among the army of suitors until Kleisthenes threw a party for them.  Let Herodotus tell the rest:

"As the drinking progressed Hippokleides, who was already commanding much attention from the others, ordered the flute player to play a dance tune for him.  The flute player complied, and while I suppose Hippokleides pleased himself with his dancing, Kleisthenes, as he watched, was annoyed at everything he saw.  After pausing for a moment, Hippokleides ordered that a table be brought to him; then he stepped up on the table and first danced some Laconian steps, and then some Attic ones, too.  But the third thing he did was to turn upside down and, with his head resting on the table, gesticulate with his legs waving in the air.  Now during the first and second of these dances, Kleisthenes restrained himself and did not blurt out his thoughts, although he felt somewhat disgusted at the thought that Hippokleides might still become his son-in-law, but when he saw him waving his legs around, he could no longer contain himself and said, 'Son of Teisandros, you have just danced away your marriage!" And the young man replied, 'For Hippokleides, no problem!'... And that is where the saying came from." (He's referring to an Athenian catchphrase, "For [insert your name], no problem!"

That's right, there's breakdancing in Herodotus!

Coro Verdi

I'm a baritone in the Giuseppe Verdi Chorus (its Italian name is Coro Verdi), which rehearses Monday nights--except in summer-- at the Columbus Centre near Dufferin & Lawrence.  It's conducted by Giuseppe Macina, also the man behind the Toronto Opera Repertoire.

In recent times we've been presenting two operas in concert form every year, but this year we've cut back to one.  I prefer it that way:  it'll give us more time for folk songs and such.  The opera we're doing this year is Verdi's MACBETH.

For the first month or two this year we rehearsed MACBETH, but now it's time to prepare for our Christmas concert.  My favorite among our Christmas pieces is Pietro Yon's "Gesu Bambino." We also do stuff like "The Little Drummer Boy," in which the men keep repeating "Prum, prum..." for the first verse, then "Prum, pum-pum..." in the second, and in the third verse it gets complicated, with stuff like "Prum, puddly-pum..." (That song always reminds me of TRU, Robert Morse's sad one-man show about Truman Capote, in which he talked about Christmas a lot and they played that song near the end.)

A lot of people were absent tonight, what with the weather already getting raw as Sandy approaches.  Also, some people didn't know what we'd be rehearsing and didn't bring their Christmas music. (I've solved that problem by carrying all my Coro Verdi music in the same bag.  I have strong arms.)

Cliches

Movies have their own notorious set of cliches, especially genres like the western ("Head 'em off at the pass!") and the horror movie (the sluttiest girl dying first, the virgin surviving). But what really bugs me is movies that use TV cliches!

One example is PRETTY WOMAN.  In the first scenes, when we see Julia Roberts working the streets in miniskirt and thigh boots, she's wearing a blond wig.  Later on, in the scene where we learn that she's really a "nice girl" underneath, the wig comes off and we see that her true hair is different.  TV shows will often use a change in appearance to mark a parallel change in character, or in this case mark a change in how we're expected to view the character. (That sort of thing makes it easier for inattentive people to follow what's happening.)

It shall come as no surprise that PRETTY WOMAN was directed by Garry Marshall, who started out making sitcoms like HAPPY DAYS and never really stopped.  Now there's a director who knows his cliches!  I'll bet that when he was starting out some old-timer sat him down and explained all the cliches to him. (Sort of like in the baseball movie BULL DURHAM, where Tim Robbins couldn't think of anything to tell an interviewer beyond "It was really OUT THERE!" so Kevin Costner taught him to say things like "I just want to be good for my team," and "I'm taking things one day at a time.")

Another example is in Spike Lee's THE MO' BETTER BLUES, which starts with Denzel Washington and his jazz band being unhappy because their manager (Lee) made a bad deal for them.  But we don't see Lee making the deal; he made it before the start of the movie and we only hear of the deal and see its consequences.  They sometimes do that on sitcoms because dramatizing someone making a bad deal is too complicated and it's easier to just have people say what happened. (This happened more than once with JJ on GOOD TIMES.)

While I'm at it, another TV cliche may happen when an episode ends with a breakup, a dramatically convenient way to end an episode.  The show's structure, however, may require the relationship to continue, but reconciliations are a lot harder to write than breakups.  So one solution is to wait an episode or two and simply show the two of them back together with no explanation.  In other words, they simply FORGET about the breakup.  I've seen this happen on shows as good as UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS and THE SOPRANOS!

OTELLO

Each year I see several high-definition broadcasts of performances by New York's Metropolitan Opera.  I see them at the Sheppard Grande cinema near the Sheppard subway station.  I got a Scene card so I can buy tickets in late August earlier than the regular people, while there are still good seats. (I'm glad they started selling tickets to individual seats:  the good seats used to go to those who got into the auditorium first, except that some people would reserve seats for friends who hadn't yet arrived, which was unfair.)

Today I saw the Met production of Verdi's OTELLO.  It's one of the truly powerful operas.   Iago has a great aria in the second part, Otello in the third, Desdemona in the fourth.  I found Iago's aria especially disturbing. ("I'm evil because I'm human... I've absorbed the primordial slime of existence... That's what I believe.") I also liked the dancing in the drinking number.

One problem with these showings is that some of the people see themselves as in a theatre rather than a cinema, and get angry if you make the sort of noises moviegoers are accustomed to.  I've learned to only grab popcorn during breaks or applause, but once someone complained when I slurped a drink!

I used to go to the Canadian Opera Company a lot, but to tell the truth I've stopped going now that I have Met performances to go to instead.

Senate reform

I don't usually talk about similar subjects on consecutive days, but I've had a really big headache today.

If I got a chance to reform the Canadian Senate, I'd introduce a scheme where 60 seats would be federal and 40 provincial.

Out of the 60 federal seats, 20 would be assigned after each federal election in proportion* to the overall popular vote.  Each senator with a federal seat would effectively have a term of three parliaments.

Each province would receive 4 of the provincial seats, to be assigned after each provincial election in that province in that same proportion* to the province's popular vote.  A senator with a provincial seat would have a term equal to those in the provincial legislature.

What could be interesting is adding a few extra seats.  Each of the three territories would get a Senate seat, to be chosen at the time of territorial elections.  And there could also be a seat for the First Nations, and even one for non-status Indians.  Other possibilities are a seat for Canadians living overseas, Canadian children (because they can't vote), and even Canadians who don't vote!  These seats would provide representation for people with no influence over the House of Commons.

They can't take away my dreams...

(*=or as close as possible)

Proportional Representation

I'm a supporter of Fair Vote, an organization trying to introduce proportional representation in Canadian elections.  I thought up an scheme I'd like to see adopted.  My scheme would divide parliamentary seats into three categories.

Category A (about 70% of seats) would be seats chosen in the same "first past the post" way as before. (The three Territories, which each have one seat, would see no change.)

Category B (about 25%) would be a full quarter of each province's seats,  allotted to the different parties so that the total of A and B would be distributed in proportion* to the popular vote in that province.

Category C would be the rest of the seats.  Ontario would receive four seats in this category, Quebec three, BC and Alberta two each, and every other province one each.  These seats would go to the party with the largest nationwide popular vote, except in provinces where a party scored a landslide and its A seats alone were greater than its proportional share of A and B seats.  In that case, these seats would be distributed between the other parties to allow their full proportion of A and B. (If their totals are still below their proportional share, they'll lose out in equal* number.)

(*=or as close as possible)

To show how it would work, I'll first take the number of seats each province had in the 2011 election and divide them into (A/B/C).

Ontario:  106 (76/26/4)
Quebec:  75 (54/18/3)
BC:  36 (25/9/2)
Alberta:  28 (19/7/2)
Saskatchewan: 14 (9/4/1)
Manitoba:  14 (9/4/1)
Nova Scotia:  11 (7/3/1)
New Brunswick:  10 (6/3/1)
Newfoundland:  7 (4/2/1)
PEI:  4 (2/1/1)

Now I'll imagine the electoral results under this system. (I'm assuming that the parties would win the A seats in much the same proportion as they actually did with all the seats.)

Ontario:  Con 52 (52/0/0), NDP 27 (16/9/2), Lib 27 (8/17/2)
Quebec:  NDP 43 (43/0/0), BQ 15 (3/11/1), Lib 8 (5/2/1),
Con 9 (3/5/1)
BC:  Con 17 (14/1/2), NDP 11 (8/3/0), Lib 5 (2/3/0),
Green 3 (1/2/0)
Alberta:  Con 18 (18/0/1), NDP 4 (1/3/0), Lib 3 (0/3/0),
Green 2 (0/1/1)
Saskatchewan: Con 8 (8/0/0), Lib 1 (1/0/0), NDP 5 (0/4/1)
Manitoba:  Con 8 (7/0/1), NDP 4 (1/3/0), Lib 2 (1/1/0)
Nova Scotia:  Con 5 (3/1/1), NDP 3 (2/1/0), Lib 3 (2/1/0)
New Brunswick: Con 5 (4/0/1), NDP 3 (1/2/0), Lib 2 (1/1/0)
Newfoundland:  Lib 2 (2/0/0), Con 3 (1/1/1), NDP 2 (1/1/0)
PEI:  Lib 2 (2/0/0), Con 1 (0/0/1), NDP 1 (0/1/0)
NWT:  NDP 1  Yukon:  Con 1  Nunavut:  Con 1

Total result:  Con 128, NDP 104, Lib 56, BQ 15, Green 5

(Actual result:  Con 166, NDP 103, Lib 34, BQ 4, Green 1)

THE MAD MAGICIAN

"I don't play monsters.  I play men besieged by fate and out for revenge"--Vincent Price

Well, I went to THE MAD MAGICIAN at the Revue as planned.  It's a 1954 3-D thriller with a Gay '90s setting, clearly intended to repeat Vincent Price's success in 3-D HOUSE OF WAX the year before.  It doesn't have the man playing with the bolo bat, but the script is more clever.  Price plays a magician who finds he's lost the rights to the contraptions he created, motivating a killing spree.  A master of disguise, he steals his victims' identities in a twist no doubt borrowed from Camus' existential novel L'ETRANGER. (Only steal from the best!)

The leading lady is Mary Murphy, whose main claim to fame was THE WILD ONE the same year.  She had the immortal goofy line "My father was going to take me on a fishing trip in Canada once." This was the era when the big studios reciprocated their unlimited access to Canadian markets by inserting references to Canada into lots of scripts.  Another example is the Western BEND OF THE RIVER, where Jimmy Stewart says about a flock of birds, "They come from Canada."

And of course there are the 3-D gimmicks, like when Price concludes a magic performance by pointing his wand at the camera and having it squirt water. (Movies of the '50s were full of such corny phallus symbolism.  I remember the scene in the Doris Day vehicle CALAMITY JANE where a soldier had been tied to a tree by Native Americans, but not in the conventional way:  he was sitting with his legs forming a V-shape, with the tree inside the V-shape's corner!)

Query:  What happened to the bag containing a human head that was last seen heading to a police station?

A decent Canadian

I recently heard about a British Columbian called Jack Hallam who announced that his will includes a $700 bequest for Omar Khadr.  That's the kind of Canadian who makes me feel some pride for my country.  He's a gay atheist, not the sort who sympathizes with Islamic fundamentalists, but he recognizes that we must take responsibility for what the Canadian government does in our name to a fellow citizen.

Speaking for myself, I don't know what happened during that 2002 firefight.  Some people insist that Khadr couldn't have thrown a grenade to kill that US medic, but I wasn't there.  What I do know was that Khadr was only 15 at the time, and had been even younger when his family enlisted him in the Taliban fight.  Some African child soldiers who killed many people are now being rehabilitated far from prison because we recognize similar special circumstances in their case.

Some people want to view Khadr's Gitmo confession as the last word about his guilt, but it's clear that the Americans played dirty pool in obtaining it. (Canadian agents played some dirty pool too.) As for his trial, it's clear that Khadr was pleading guilty under duress, just like Stalin's enemies in the Moscow show trials of the 1930s.  The Canadian government disgraced itself when it dragged its feet and delayed Khadr's repatriation till a year after Washington was prepared to allow it.

Of course, some people have ridiculed Hallam.  It's too bad that some people see things in terms of the Khadr family's collective guilt.  I hope that people like Hallam will be a good influence on Omar and he won't see Canadian or American people as collectively guilty for his mistreatment.

Netflix

Since last February we've subscribed to the Canadian branch of Netflix downloads.  It's convenient for watching TV series and only costs the same as a few DVD rentals per month.  Yet I feel jealous because the Canadian selection is a lot smaller than the American version.

One series my sister Moira and I have been watching on Netflix is BREAKING BAD.  It's a real classic about a high school chemistry teacher opening a meth lab.  My parents and I have seen all four seasons of the late-'70s spoof sitcom SOAP, which was often broad but had a good cast. (Billy Crystal is the most famous today, but Katherine Helmond and Richard Mulligan were particularly notable.)  I've also been watching PRISON BREAK, which is something of a guilty pleasure for me.  The first season, in particular, has great narrative drive.

Lately, I've started watching HELL ON WHEELS, a western about building the Union Pacific railway just after the Civil War.  It's produced by AMC, which has been making a lot of interesting shows:  others are MAD MEN and the aforementioned BREAKING BAD.  This is a very violent show, and not just in the conventional "A shoots B" way; there's a great deal of hate and vengefulness.  The main character is a Confederate veteran hunting down and murdering the Union veterans directly responsible for his wife's murder.  Another character, the robber baron building the line, is played by that Irish actor Colm Meany. (I loved his line in THE VAN when he was learning to fry chips and was asked for an example of a simile: "Me chips are burnt as fuck!" The Irish have a great way of twisting the English language around.)

Netflix also has a lot of interesting documentaries.  I've also started watching a biographical series about Churchill.

JEKYLL & HYDE at the Revue

This afternoon I went to the Revue Cinema on Roncesvalles Street, which is celebrating its centenary.  It's a miracle that these repertory screens are still around today!  When I lived in Toronto thirty years ago I came to think of the Dundas West station as the station near the Revue. (I also identified Bathurst with the Bloor, College with the Carleton, Bay with the Cumberland, Royal York with the Kingsway...)

I saw the first presentation of the new season of silent movies at the Revue, with live piano accompaniment by William O'Meara! (The only thing that beats a live piano accompanying a silent movie is a live orchestra, which is how I saw Murnau's SUNRISE at London's Royal Festival Hall back in 1995.) First they showed two shorts:  DW Griffiths' EDGAR ALLEN POE, and the second chapter of the serial A WOMAN IN GREY, which ended with Arlene Pretty about to be knifed...

The main feature was John Barrymore's 1920 version of RL Stevenson's DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.  It was a bit elliptical about the evil things Hyde did.  I've never read the book but I ought to someday. (Stevenson got the idea from the real-life story of an eighteenth-century minister who moonlighted as a highwayman.) Freud must have had a field day with it!

Wednesday night the Revue is showing an early Vincent Price horror movie THE MAD MAGICIAN.  I definitely want to see that one too!

Walkies!

I'm a member of dozens of groups at meetup.com .  Of course, the number whose events I attend is quite a bit smaller.  I used to go to board game events a lot, but not so much lately.  One type of event I often go to is walks. (Walking is my main exercise.)

Today I went on a walk of haunted Toronto sites sponsored by Newcomers Explore and Appreciate Toronto, connected to Culturelink, an organization that helps accustomize immigrants to this city.  The walk went from the Keg building near Jarvis and Wellesley to the Old City Hall (now a courthouse) on Queen Street, and was about haunted sites.

They had a few immigrants talking about the different places we were passing to improve their spoken English, but despite the bullhorn their voices were a bit too quiet for me to follow. (If I felt that way, how did the other immigrants who speak English as a second language?)

Along the way we passed by a group protesting the private member's bill to ban abortion.  And at the end of the walk I noticed a group of Syrian-Canadians protesting the Assad regime.  One of them told me that Hafez Assad had managed to turn the country's various cities and tribes against each other, but his son Bashir has managed to unite all of Syria against his regime.

On the way home, I passed by the Zombie Walk, which was bigger than I'd have expected.  One guy was dressed as an undead pope!

Posting at The Huffington Post

I write a lot of posts at THE HUFFINGTON POST.  I use the handle Fearless Freep, after the no-show daredevil in the Bugs Bunny-Yosemite Sam cartoon HIGH DIVING HARE. (That's the one where Fearless Freep is going to do the fabulous high-diving act in Bugs' show, but he doesn't show up so Yosemite Sam insists that Bugs do it instead, but Bugs keeps tricking Sam into doing it...) For my avatar I have a photo of JS Woodsworth, first leader of the CCF, forerunner of the present-day NDP and pioneer of Canadian socialism.

Unfortunately, because of the website FREE REPUBLIC right-wing trolls have been nicknamed "Freepers," so people see my handle and assume I'm right-wing (especially when I criticize Obama!). And some people think my avatar is of Lenin or Freud.  So I added a mini-bio calling myself "A lefty with an avatar of JS Woodsworth." (They can google Woodsworth's name.)

Some issues get me posting a lot, like gay civil rights (I'm not gay myself, but civil rights is something I believe in), Omar Khadr (the child soldier given a show trial that disgraced both the US and Canadian governments), and Bradley Manning (the little traitor being prosecuted for exposing the big ones). But just lately I haven't had much to post about.  What on earth can I say about the Obama-Romney debates?  It just doesn't mean much to me.

My parents have taken to reading my posts, which has made me a bit more conscious of what I write.  It isn't that they ever disagree with me, but knowing that they're looking at it has somehow got me wondering if I'm making myself look silly.

CIVILISATION

Since last weekend we've been watching Kenneth Clark's 1969 "personal view" documentary series CIVILISATION, which I first saw when I was a kid.  It's fascinating stuff.

Kenneth Clark came from a wealthy Scottish family that made its fortune manufacturing thread, and became director of the National Gallery when barely 30. (One of his sons became a Conservative MP and is known for his rakish diary; the other became a filmmaker and his encounter with Marilyn Monroe became the movie MY WEEK WITH MARILYN.)  I find that Anglicized Scots like him have a way of becoming more English than the English. (Other examples:  Tony Blair, Colin Firth, the Queen Mother...)

This series is a history of Western civilization as seen through its art.  That means mostly visual arts like painting, sculpture and architecture, though there's also some time for theatre, essays and music.  One thing that impresses me is the way cultures of the West have often "failed upward," as in the Renaissance happening so soon after the Black Death. (Oddly, Clark skipped over the Black Death, as well as Spanish culture so far.)

Clark was a pedant of the "old school": you don't see people like him on TV these days.  He narrates the series with a restrained diffidence I found curious in childhood, leavened with some dry wit.  He's full of observations like that atonement has done as much for art as megalomania and self-glorification.

This year's TOR

I'm singing in the Toronto Opera Repertoire chorus again this year.  We're putting on Offenbach's TALES OF HOFFMANN and Rossini's THE BARBER OF SEVILLE. (There are several really small male soloist roles in HOFFMANN, more acting than singing, and I might be cast in one!)

We usually do one opera with a big role for the chorus and one where their presence is smaller, and HOFFMANN definitely has the bigger chorus part of the two.  So we've been concentrating on that one so far; we'll only be starting BARBER next week.  I'm actually a bit behind so far this year:  I was in London during the first rehearsal, and had to leave the second early because I was still dealing with jet lag. (I'd flown home the day before.)

Tonight we had an acting class for choristers, which is always fun. David Roche and Tita Griffin preside. (Giovanni Menardi, who'd just had a hip operation, came in on crutches to give us a class on pronouncing Italian and French.) They talked about the HOFFMANN plot, and we ended up splitting into sub-groups and making conversation as characters in a scene from the opera.

I was looking up the story behind HOFFMANN on Wikipedia, and it's pretty interesting.  He was an actual romantic writer living in Germany early in the nineteenth century, and he wrote himself into  his stories as the main character. (He also wrote the stories that the ballets NUTCRACKER and COPPELIA were based on, and some early science fiction.) I've seen it performed, both in the 1950 British movie directed by Powell & Pressburger and in the recent Met production that was broadcast in cinemas.  Offenbach died before its premiere and there are several different versions, but the muse was really smiling on him during his last work!

Goodenough College

I spent eight months at Goodenough College in 1995.  That's a residence for international graduate students located around Mecklenburgh Square in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London, where I was researching my Ph.D. thesis on the British community in the Chinese treaty port of Chongqing. (I was fortunate that my sister Margaret had stayed there the year before:  her connection helped me get in.) I did most of my London research at the Public Records Office in Kew (consular reports), though I also did some at places like the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

They have two main residences:  William Goodenough House (where I stayed, which is nicknamed Willy G.), and London House.  It occurred to me that London House was like Chongqing's foreign merchant community, being mostly single people, while Willy G., with many married couples and families, was more like the foreign missionary community.  They also have a hotel-style Goodenough Club, where I stay whenever I visit London.

When I revealed to my friend John George that I have a Ph.D., he was really impressed and said I should make more of it.  But it really doesn't mean so much to me.  When it was over I felt like the scene in EASY RIDER where Dennis Hopper says "We did it!" but Peter Fonda says "We blew it." The thesis wasn't as good as I wanted it to be--I was too defensive--and I was lucky to pass.

But the eight months I spent at Willy G. were the best eight months of my life!  Besides my research work, I had time to get to know a great city full of history and culture, and even take part in several Willy G. activities--I helped run the video club--and get to know people.  I remember a moment when I was strolling through the University of London campus on a Sunday afternoon in the fall, and really felt at home. (Or maybe it's a composite of moments in my memory.)

Gold records

Youtube is a great channel for listening to music.  I have a coffee-table book titled THE BOOK OF GOLDEN DISCS, listing records year by year that sold a million copies or more up to about 1977.  Lately I've been going through the book backward from the last pages, listening to gold-record singles I don't recognize from the mid-'70s. (Some stuff I did recognize, of course.  I was happy to listen to Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now" again.)

A lot of this music was mediocre, of course, but there were quite a few "keepers," like Sweet's "Little Willy" and the Elton John-Neil Sedaka duet "Bad Blood." There was also stuff like Raydio's "Jack and Jill," which I remembered hearing before without knowing anything about it.  I also re-discovered Parliament's early rap album CLONES OF DR. FUNKENSTEIN, which I'd heard at a campus radio station. (One Youtube contributor managed to upload the whole album in a single post!)

And then there's the ear-worms, as the Germans call them.  Stuff that gets into your head and won't leave, Terry Jacks' "Seasons in the Sun" being a notorious example.  I discovered a perfectly ineffable Eurovision song by Brotherhood of Man(?) called "Save Your Kisses for Me." (Listen to it if you dare.) Another is "Get up and Boogie" by the German disco trio Silver Convention.  Less famous than their "Fly, Robin, Fly," its lyric consists of the title line repeated over and over, with an occasional "That's right" thrown in for variety.  Catch their costumes in the Youtube video--does any clothing item scream "70s" louder than the sleeveless pantsuit?

I've wearied of '70s music and now I'm going to start working forward from the front page and listen to the early hits.  I'm especially interested in the '30s song "Peanuts," because I remember Cary Grant singing the opening line ("Peanuuuuts!") in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS.

zip.ca

For the past eight years, we've been renting most of our DVDs through the mail, from zip.ca . (That's the Canadian equivalent of Netflix.) They send us as many as 16 discs over a month--with a maximum of six out at one time--costing an average of just over $2.00.

Its biggest advantage is its extremely wide selection.  I have a "queue" of about 400 videos that I want to see eventually, though over half of them are currently out of stock.  And my tastes are wide-ranging.  I've been watching a lot of classic TV shows like MISSION:  IMPOSSIBLE, some episodes of which I remember seeing 40 years ago. (My sister Margaret was in love with Leonard Nimoy back then, but not because of STAR TREK:  he was master of disguise Paris on MISSION:  IMPOSSIBLE for a couple of years.)

I also like Hollywood classics (recently saw THE GUNFIGHTER, with Gregory Peck cast against type), documentaries (including FRONTLINE productions on subjects like the Apollo 8 expedition), operas (just returned a Munich production of Richard Strauss' DER ROSENKAVALIER), MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, and the earlier seasons of DOCTOR WHO.  Stuff I've recently seen includes a collection of early avant-garde short films (I didn't know Man Ray made movies!), Nicolas Roeg's BAD TIMING:  A SENSUAL OBSESSION, and the Canadian THE SILENT PARTNER (the one where bank teller Elliot Gould short-changes robber Christopher Plummer and keeps most of the loot for himself).

The monthly cycles start on the 16th.  Usually I have an easy time viewing all 16 films and returning them by the 16th, so I'll get a full six sent out on that day.  But last month I was in London until the 25th, so I started with a nine-day handicap.  In addition, some of the later discs were sent from Ottawa or Vancouver and took longer to arrive than usual, so I couldn't even be sure that I'd be sent the full 16 in time.  But I expect they'll be sending the last one tomorrow (the 15th), so I should get my maximum requisition by the skin of my teeth.

Reading aloud

I'm the organizer of the Read Out Loud Toronto Meetup group. (I usually avoid the hassle of organizing these groups, but it was something I believed in.) We meet every Saturday afternoon at Butler's Pantry in Mirvish Village.  At past events we've read stuff by American writers and opening passages, and this time, with Halloween approaching, we did scary stories. (Next month we'll do poetry.)

Only three people showed up, but that meant I got to read more stuff than usual.  Jane read from Dante's DIVINE COMEDY the part where he's in the inferno's lowest circle.  Collette read one of the ghost stories in Robertson Davies' HIGH SPIRITS, and the part in Dickens' OLIVER TWIST where the undertaker and Oliver come to pick up a dead girl. ("She'll only disturb the worms, not feed them.") And I read the Robert Frost poem "The Witch of Coos"; the Poe story "The Oval Portrait"; the part in Mark Twain's HUCKLEBERRY FINN where his father gets the DTs and almost knifes him; and the Grimm Brothers story "The Willful Child," which goes as follows.

"Once upon a time there was a child who was willful, and would not do what her mother wished.  For this reason God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay on her death-bed.  When she had been lowered into her grave, and the earth had spread over her, all at once her arm came out again, and stretched upwards, and when they had put it in and spread fresh earth over it, it was all to no purpose, for the arm always came out again.  Then the mother herself was obliged to go to the grave, and strike the arm with a rod, and when she had done that, it was drawn in, and then at last the child had rest beneath the ground."

My grammatical pet peeves

On the subway today I saw a new advertising campaign by the McDonald's restaurant people inviting customers to ask questions about the food. (Speaking for myself, I don't ask questions I don't want to know the answer to.) One of them was, "How much preservatives do you put on your fries?" My solecism detector flashed red: "how much" shouldn't be used with plurals." You could ask "How many preservatives..." though then the question would be about variety rather than amount.  To ask about amount, you should say "How much preservative..." or "How much in the way of preservatives..."

An expression that bugs me is "one of the two or three most." Does it have a more specific meaning than a mere "one of the most"?  Only by a vague, trivial margin. ("One of the three most" or "the second or third most," on the other hand, have a specific, measurable difference.) It seems to me something that people say to sound extra-specific, not to BE extra-specific.

I don't care for expressions like "I'm going to the front and talk to the general." Maybe it isn't actually ungrammatical, but it doesn't FEEL right to me.  I just don't like having "and" join a noun and an infinitive.  I recall that back in 1996 the US Congress passed "The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act," which had "and" joining a vowel and a noun, which is clearly ungrammatical.

BTW, I'm actually more comfortable with "Ain't I?" than with "Aren't I?"!