"Feeling less hot, Dixon heard the band break into a tune he knew and liked; he had the notion that the tune was going to help out this scene and fix it permanently in his memory; he felt romantically excited. But he'd got no business to feel that, had he? What was he doing here, after all? Where was it all going to lead? Whatever it was leading towards, it was certainly leading away from the course his life had been pursuing for the last eight months, and this thought justified his excitement and filled him with reassurance and hope. All positive change was good; standing still, growing to the spot, was always bad. He remembered somebody once showing him a poem which ended something like 'Accepting dearth, the shadow of death.' That was right; not 'experiencing dearth,' which happened to everybody. The one indispensable answer to an environment bristling with people and things one thought were bad was to go on finding out new ways in which one could think they were bad. The reason why Prometheus couldn't get away from his vulture that he was keen on it, and not the other way round"--Lucky Jim
"A Blackfoot friend once told me that 'enfranchised' was French for 'screwed.' It's only funny if you're Indian. Even then, it's not that funny"--The Inconvenient Indian
I finished Lucky Jim a few days ago and started reading Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian for next month's History Meetup. It's pretty perceptive.
On Youtube I found a season of the BBC Great Railway Journeys devoted to Canada. The first episodes went between Halifax and Quebec City and there were some places I knew from my youth in the Maritimes.
For a change, my online music theory group met today, on Tuesday afternoon instead of Friday. And my online karaoke group met on Sunday afternoon!
"Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad"--Lucky Jim
"The mother had wished to prevent the father from, as she said, 'so much as looking' at the child; the father's plea was that the mother's lightest touch was 'simply contamination.' These were the opposed principles in which Maisie was to be educated—she was to fit them together as she might. Nothing could have been more touching at first than her failure to suspect the ordeal that awaited her little unspotted soul. There were persons horrified to think what those in charge of it would combine to try to make of it: no one could conceive in advance that they would be able to make nothing ill"--What Maisie Knew
On Monday (I think) we had to carry out dozens of buckets of water that had accumulated in our new cellar so John could work on the plumbing for our new shower there.
I finished the book about Afghanistan history so now I can focus on finishing Lucky Jim.
Thursday my History Meetup discussed Afghanistan. The following night the watch party showed John Huston's movie of Rudyard Kipling's Afghanistan-related story The Man Who Would Be King (which I'd read earlier in the week). I'd seen the movie before but forgotten how good it was! Sean Connery and Michael Caine have perfect chemistry.
Tonight I attended the Quiet Passion Literature Meetup through zoom.com . We read out loud the first pages of Henry James' What Maisie Knew. It was fun. (We may do D.H. Lawrence or Edith Wharton next week.)
Last Wednesday and Thursday nights I found two interesting Zoom Meetups discussing art and cinema.
Friday night I saw Anthony Mann's 1964 epic The Fall of the Roman Empire (for the second time) with my watch party. It's intelligent but often awkward. Unfortunately, the streamed version was letterboxed and at least half an hour shorter than the one I'd seen on DVD. I couldn't help comparing it to today's America: Livius (Stephen Boyd) was like Bernie Sanders--a bit too principled and not self-serving enough--and Emperor Commodus (Christopher Plummer) resembled Donald Trump. Nice elegiac music by Dmitri Tiomkin.
John's so clever! He arranged a system with a plank and a lifting blanket that's made it a lot easier to move Father from his bed to his chair. Now we've ordered a swivel he can stand on so he won't have to turn by himself.
Last weekend I had a big headache! It must have been from the changing weather.
I recently completed the third year of One Piece. After the Alabasta arc ended, the last dozen episodes were filler between the manga stories. The first ones were pretty good, but the last ones were an odd story about entering a time warp and finding children who'd entered fifty years ago.
I've almost finished the third of seven years of Dragon Ball Z. I'd have to say I prefer the first Dragon Ball overall. The second show is focused mostly on the fighting and the story's less fast-moving. At the climax of the Frieza arc, the planet Namek was going to blow up in five minutes but so help me, it takes over half a dozen episodes to get to the complete explosion! I've been watching the Garlic Jr. filler arc, and that's pretty weak (besides being a sequel to a DBZ movie I haven't seen). The bad guys take over Lord Kami's sky realm and release a chemical that turns most of the world into evil brainwashed zombies...
Now I've started the last season of Sailor Moon. This one introduces the Sailor Stars, three fetish-costumed girls with a remarkable resemblance to three guys in a boy band who go to the same high school(?) as Serena and friends. Serena's now transforming into Eternal Sailor Moon, who has white boots and a pair of wings! Fortunately, Sailors Uranus and Neptune are back.
Last Friday I showed the Sondheim musical Pacific Overtures for the Friday night History Meetup watch party. It improves with repeat viewings. (It opened in 1976, and it's like Sondheim's contribution to the Bicentennial: America as other people see it.)
We just saw Fear City on Netflix, a documentary about the New York Mafia in the 1970s and '80s and the efforts to destroy it through the RICO act. (They interviewed Rudolph Giuliani, whom I call Adolf Bullyani!)
"After no more than a minor swerve the misfiring vehicle of his conversation had been hauled back on to its usual course. Dixon gave up, stiffening his legs as they reached, at last, the steps of the main building. He pretended to himself that he'd pick up his professor round the waist, squeeze the furry grey-blue waistcoat against him to expel the breath, run heavily with him up the steps, along the corridor to the Staff Cloakroom, and plunge the too-small feet in their capless shoes into a lavatory basin, pulling the plug once, twice, and again, stuffing the mouth with toilet-paper"--Lucky Jim
This past week I've had a bit of an earache. I still have some trouble hearing.
Tuesday we got a new bin for removing our back yard dirt and managed to fill it in a single day!
Thursday I finally got my hair cut, for the first time since the lockdown started four months ago. My head feels lighter!
I've been following a page on Facebook that's posting episodes of Alfred Andriola's comic strip Kerry Drake from 1973. (I remember reading the Sunday episodes back then.) It's an underrated police procedural about a plainclothesman with a wife and four kids--quadruplets in the form of two pairs of identical twins, something extremely rare in real life--that's more realistic than Dick Tracy.
This strip had some clever stories, like one about a guy whose wife miscarried in a home invasion by his co-worker, so he decides to take the law into his own hands! And one involving Kerry's private eye brother Lefty, about a rich builder's son who falls in love with an untalented singer who in turn attracts the interest of an agent who eventually pressures her into helping him acquire evidence of the father's building substandard housing and bribing government inspectors so he can blackmail the guy...
I've finished the Arabasta story arc in the third year of One Piece. It's so complex that I'll definitely have to see it again! (Moira and I are watching earlier episodes on Netflix, where we're at the start of the second year.) I'm also watching Dragon Ball Z, and just got to the point where Son Goku turns into a Super Saiyan!
It finally rained yesterday. The air felt fresher afterward. The only problem was that today the dirt in the basement was a lot wetter and heavier--so was the the sand for the concrete. I moved a lot of dirt in the morning, but when we mixed concrete in the afternoon I got worn out and had to quit with one more batch to gather. (I was starting to think less clearly and was afraid of getting into an accident!) Fortunately, Moira managed to take up the slack for that last batch.
Nobody showed up for my book club discussing Sister Carrie on Thursday. But a few people came to see the movie version the following day.
Last Monday, to be different, I bought some frozen juice at the supermarket.
Tonight I got about nine people (including me) for the History Meetup discussion of the Dutch Empire.
I found a Youtube channel with clips of the music on the anime One Piece. It has some really brilliant background music by Kohei Tanaka and Shirou Hamaguchi!
Can't think of much to write about--this hot weather is getting to me!
"What the so-called judges of the truth or morality are really inveighing against most of the time is not the discussion of mere sexual lewdness, for no work with that as a basis could possibly succeed, but the disturbing and destroying of their own little theories concerning life, which in some cases may be nothing more than a quiet acceptance of things as they are without any regard to the well-being of the future. Life for them is made up of a variety of interesting but immutable forms and any attempt either to picture any of the wretched results of modern social conditions or to assail the critical defenders of the same is naturally looked upon with contempt or aversion"--Theodore Dreiser
We got the last dirt out of the cellar on Thursday, filled the bin on Friday and got it towed away Monday. Yesterday we got loads of sand and gravel, so today we started mixing concrete for the cellar! We're using a small mixer that's very noisy.
Mixing concrete is three-person work. I had the simple muscle job, producing buckets of sand and gravel from the piles. Moira had the precision job, measuring out cement and water in the right proportion. (Each batch needs four buckets of gravel, two buckets of sand and one bucket of the cement-water mix--I think.) John did the mixing and pouring, the noisiest job. When he was finished for the day, we had a surplus of one bucket of sand and two buckets of gravel, giving us a head start tomorrow.
Friday my watch party showed the Titanic movie A Night to Remember, which is way better than the shameless 1997 blockbuster. (I've always found David McCallum pretty cool!)
Finished Sister Carrie on Saturday. It's honest in a bleak, impressive way. My next novel will be Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim.
"Whatever a man like Hurstwood could be in Chicago, it is very evident that he would be but an inconspicuous drop in an ocean like New York. In Chicago, whose population still ranged about 500,000, millionaires were not numerous. The rich had not become so conspicuously rich as to drown all moderate incomes in obscurity. The attention of the inhabitants was not so distracted by local celebrities in the dramatic, artistic, social, and religious fields as to shut the well-positioned man from view. In Chicago the two roads to distinction were politics and trade. In New York the roads were any one of a half-hundred, and each had been diligently pursued by hundreds, so that celebrities were numerous. The sea was already full of whales. A common fish must needs disappear wholly from view--remain unseen. In other words, Hurstwood was nothing"--Sister Carrie
Last week we got the movable bin to remove the dirt from our cellar. (It's the same size as the one we used in the winter.) We've been filling it directly from the cellar--the pile in our back yard will come later.
The earlier dirt I'd been carrying directly from the back room to the back yard. But now we have a new system where it goes out through the basement, up the steps to the yard and then to the bin. (With the last part you have to carry it through the hot sun.) John digs up the dirt, Moira carries it up to the yard--along with Kathrine on the weekend--and I take it the rest of the way. At our best, we've been moving it pretty quick: it helps that I can often carry two buckets at once.
We've been doing this work in the morning hours, to avoid the hottest time of day. So I've been waking up earlier than usual--I hope I can make a habit of it! And I haven't had time for Sailor Moon or One Piece, but I'm still watching Dragon Ball Z. (In the story I'm now watching, Bulma, Kuririn and Gohan have taken a spaceship to the Dragon Ball planet!)
Today we finally moved the first load away, and got a new bin for a second one. We started loading this one too, but the weather was drizzly and we ended up stopping lest we get into an accident. (It made me appreciate the sunny weather earlier on.)
I've finished the book about Amsterdam, so now I can concentrate on finishing Sister Carrie.
"The misfortune of the Hurstwood household was due to the fact that jealousy, having been born of love, did not perish with it. Mrs. Hurstwood retained this in such form that subsequent influences could transform it into hate. Hurstwood was still worthy, in a physical sense, of the affection his wife had once bestowed upon him, but in a social sense he fell short. With his regard died his power to be attentive to her, and this, to a woman, is much greater than outright crime toward another. Our self-love dictates our appreciation of the good or evil in another. In Mrs. Hurstwood it discoloured the very hue of her husband's indifferent nature. She saw design in deeds and phrases which sprung only from a faded appreciation of her presence"--Sister Carrie
I'm now reading Russell Shorto's Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City for my History Meetup. It's an entertaining, well-written book! (Now I want to read Shorto's other books...) It's all about how 17th-century Amsterdam was the birthplace of modern liberal society, including the multinational corporation in the form of the Dutch East India Company. Characters like Willem the Silent and Rembrandt are fascinating!
Sister Carrie is engrossing. There's something that seems very modern about it--I can imagine the story happening in real life. (Someone said that Theodore Dreiser was a master of inarticulate characters!)
I'm now watching three anime shows concurrently! One is Dragon Ball's sequel Dragon Ball Z. It's started well with Son Goku dead and doing martial-arts training in the afterlife. (They're going to use the Dragon Ball wish to resurrect him when it's time for earthlings to fight the invaders from the Saiyan planet.) He has a young son Gohan whose fighting potential is so immense that former villain Piccolo (now a reluctant ally) has subjected him to boot camp in a land with dinosaurs rather than people. Akira Toriyama has an incredible imagination!
I've also been watching the third year of One Piece set in the desert land of Arabasta. (Was Eiichiro Oda influenced by Frank Herbert's Dune?) And I've also been rewatching the first season with Moira, for the third time--it's that good! I recently finished rewatching the third season of Sailor Moon. (Mimete was a villainess I actually felt sorry for--she had a life beyond villainy, for all the good it did her.) Now I'm watching the fourth season, but it isn't as good as the first three. Aside from Rini's cute relationship with a winged unicorn, it's getting rather familiar. (I hear that the fifth season got really crazy!)
I've almost finished the Level 3 book of musical theory.
"A lovely home atmosphere is one of the flowers of the world, than which there is nothing more tender, nothing more delicate, nothing more calculated to make strong and just the natures cradled and nourished within it. Those who have never experienced such a beneficent influence will not understand wherefore the tear springs glistening to the eyelids at some strange breath in lovely music. The mystic chords which bind and thrill the heart of the nation, they will never know"--Sister Carrie
Today at archive.org I rewatched the 1972 NBC News White Paper documentary "The Blue Collar Trap." Back when I was ten, we saw it on American TV when we were visiting the USA. Our visit came in the wake of Hurricane Agnes, at the time of the Watergate break-in. (When Mother heard about in in the news, she predicted it would prove important!) We were also in the Washington DC underground parking lot where Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would soon meet Deep Throat...
Anyway, this documentary focused on four young men working at a Ford Pinto factory in California. A couple of them had fought in Vietnam, one was a "hippie," and one went to this ecstatic church where people were dancing in the aisles. (I'd always imagined church services as quiet, restrained affairs...) They seldom voted on union matters, let alone in public elections. One of them mentioned that when he was starting out the foreman advised him that instead of staying there he should go back to school and get a better job.
Watching it today, I couldn't help considering that this was near the end of the "golden age" for the American working class; things have since got harder for them. Of course, this was a decade before Van Gordon Sauter dumbed down CBS News (giving anchorman Dan Rather a jersey to wear on air, etc.) and NBC and ABC followed suit, leaving them unlikely to produce reports this thoughtful again.
But what do I know about physical work? Well, the last few days I've moved a huge amount of dirt to the back yard from our cellar, and I actually got a bit of a sunburn on my scalp! I've been wearing gloves, but my hands are still getting sore in places. (A couple of times I've forgotten that I have to tie my shoes before putting my gloves on.) We have ten buckets, and my favourite four are relatively small, with handles. Two others are small but don't have handles; three have handles but are larger; and my least favourite is large without a handle! John's also using a jackhammer to break up these cement steps that used to be part of a cellar door, but led to nowhere after the room was built over them.
I've now started watching the anime sequel Dragon Ball Z. It looks pretty good so far, with Goku dead and seeking martial-arts training in the after-world. (The others plan to use the seven dragon balls to bring him back.) His little son Gohan is undergoing a sort of manhood training alone in the wilderness to develop his immense fighting potential. All this is in preparation for fighting two Saiyan aliens who will arrive on Earth within a year in the hope of destroying it... What an imagination Akira Toriyama has!
I've already finished Level 1 in the Royal Conservatory's Celebrate Theory series, and the other day Carolyn brought me 2 and 3. (At that Friday Zoom.com session, she and someone else are at level 4, and I should be caught up with them before long.)
"Naturally timid in all things that related to her own advancement, and especially so when without power or resource, her craving for pleasure was so strong that it was the one stay of her nature. She would speak for that when silent on all else"--Sister Carrie John's been renovating the sun room. (When he's finished, Father will have a downstairs shower!) Just now he's digging in the foundation to make it less mouse-friendly, with Moira and I toting the dirt and rocks to the back yard. There's now the sort of big, low space there where people would hide from the Nazis in a war movie. I was thinking about the Cold War. Remember the ending of The Maltese Falcon? Sam Spade hands Brigid over to the cops and they take her down the elevator (whose cage closes on her like prison bars), while Sam takes the stairs down. Someone said the subtext is that they both go to hell, but Brigid goes there directly while Sam takes the longer route.
Anyway, I was thinking that applies to the post-1980s situation. Russia went straight to hell in the early '90s with an economic downturn as severe as the Great Depression, while the US has finally reached hell this year. The Cold War's real "winners," it's now clear, were the Chinese. They not only reinvented communism, they've reinvented capitalism! And Reagan didn't even end the Cold War, let alone winning it. On the contrary, he turned it into something permanent that only needed a new enemy in the form of the Moslems. His foreign policy decision with the greatest long-term importance was arguably reflagging the Kuwaiti oil tankers just to get in Iran's face and show that Washington was still regionally powerful in the wake of Iran-Contra. This was the first step on a road that led to the 1991 war with Iraq (which I for one consider to have been a contemptible exercise in "power without responsibility"), 9/11, and the ill-starred occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. But I think I said that before... Finally got my Cipralex and Robutrin prescriptions refilled. I had to message my shrink and it was a bit complicated, so I went without for several days and my dreams got vivid again. I just bought the Ebook of the first reprint of the manga version of Dragon Ball. (Just finished watching the first anime series--am I ready to take on Dragon Ball Z?)
Booker T. Washington: "You will receive a speedy trial and a swift execution."... "Mr. Washington, you speak like an angel. It's too bad we're down here on earth"--Ragtime
Yesterday I did my first watch party with the History Meetup group, screening Milos Forman's movie of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (which I was seeing for the second time). The group wasn't all in the Toronto vicinity; there was one from Brooklyn and another from Austin, Texas.
The movie's a handsome production but it doesn't really work. It removed a lot of the sprawling book, including Sigmund Freud and Emma Goldman and the Peary expedition and the Zapatistas and the Lusitania, but what's left seems less streamlined than spotty. What seemed "kaleidoscopic" on paper comes across as hit & miss on the screen. (Maybe it could work better as a miniseries. I have heard good things about the Broadway musical version.) Among other things, the story's central bourgeois family manufactures fireworks, yet we never see any pyrotechnic displays! Randy Newman's central theme is graceful, but it's a waltz rather than ragtime.
As lady of scandal Evelyn Nesbit, Elizabeth McGovern seemed to me more teenager than sex goddess. I noticed a lot of future big names in small roles, including Dominic Chianese (Junior Soprano), whom I recognized from his voice! The best performance is Howard Rollins as Coalhouse Walker, though his storyline struck me as the novel's most dubious. (An African-American heads down the road to radical terrorism because bigoted firemen vandalized his car?? I guess that's supposed to be the sort of black militancy middle-class white readers can identify with.) Doctorow got away with stuff like this in the book because there was so much else going on, but that sort of thing is harder to pull off in a movie. Earlier on they'd considered hiring Robert Altman to direct it, and his style might have worked better.
I've started learning music theory on Friday afternoons on Zoom with some people from my singing group. Level 1 was no challenge for me: so far it's all stuff I remember from my piano-playing days.
It's been a week and a half since my last post here! There just hasn't been much going on in my life.
Every day or two I check the latest Covid-19 statistics. First I check the Canadian figures to see if we're getting closer to ending isolation. (Even though I know a watched pot never boils...)
Then I see the international figures here. (But bear in mind, random testing and death rate statistics suggest that in the USA the true figure is two or three times as big!)
It's Victoria Day, and the warm weather has arrived. We're now opening the living room windows, and today I mowed the lawn for the first time this year. I also brought out my summer hat. John finished relaying the floor of the big second-storey room that used to be mine, and it was fun helping him align the individual boards so the whole thing would be flush!
Thursday night the book club met and discussed Leaves of Grass. Only a few people came, but the book was a real revelation for me! Walt Whitman was a rare original.
I now have over 5000 followers on Twitter, a number that exceeds people I follow. That means I can be more lenient in following more Tweeters, since my maximum is now something like 5500!
I finished rewatching the third season of Sailor Moon, and now I'm on the last arc of Dragon Ball, with Son Goku doing nth-degree training up above the clouds with Mr. Popo. Some people think Popo is racist, but I find him pretty cool.
Peaky Blinders is getting to be a little much. It's the kind of show where we see Churchill painting with a nude model. (I could hear them thinking, "What can we throw in that's attention-grabbing?") One Youtube comment said, "I got lung cancer just from watching the show." Not only do the characters smoke a lot, there's generally a smoggy industrial atmosphere!
Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,
Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death,
And again death, death, death, death,
Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous'd child's heart,
But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and leaving me softly all over,
Death, death, death, death, death.
--a rather Povian verse from Walt Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"
Today I hosted the first online event for my Meetup groups. My History Meetup discussed the world in 1900, and it felt pretty timely. I actually came on an hour early, but Subha from Korea made the same goof and we had a good talk waiting for the others to arrive. In the weeks to be come I'll be hosting the book club online and even have a watch party for a historical movie.
I've really been getting into Walt Whitman's poetry! (I was worried about finishing it in time for next week's Meetup, but I'm well on schedule.) His sea poems are vivid, and he wrote some of the finest poems about old age.
Just finished rewatching the King Piccolo arc of Dragon Ball. (Now it's time to return to Sailor Moon.) That arc is the series' best of all! It involves the evil alien King Piccolo out to reconquer and destroy the world, who's killed three of Goku's friends so they want to find the dragon balls to bring them back to life and Goku wants to destroy Piccolo, but Piccolo got the dragon balls and rejuvenated his superpowers and then killed the dragon... Tribesman Yajirobe is a funny sidekick for Goku. The part where they go through an icy underground maze with a spirit who plays mind games, to get a drink of ultradivine water, is especially imaginative. And the subplot about Tenshinhan's need to take on Piccolo in order to atone for his past misbehaviour is dramatically strong.
We've started watching Peaky Blinders on Netflix. It stars Cillian Murphy as a numbers racketeer in Birmingham, England a century ago dealing with communists and the IRA as well as the police. The music's oddly anachronistic, like in Boardwalk Empire.
I'm ashamed of myself, taking so long between posts on this blog! Why don't I feel motivated?
I've found some more virtual Meetup events. On Saturday nights I do a virtual karaoke. I don't have a handheld mike and the audio has trouble, but I sing five songs at each event. And on Sunday mornings there's an event where we talk military history.
I've returned to watching Dragon Ball, now the third season with the second worldwide martial-arts competition. And I bought and read an Ebook of the first chapters of the manga version of One Piece.
It's less than two weeks to the virtual Book Club, so I'll have to get Leaves of Grass read. (I had to google the word "eidolon"--it's a sort of spirit-image.)
John finished remodelling the kitchen, so now he's renovating the big second-floor room that he'd previously been keeping all his tools in. He pulled up all the floorboards, and I helped him drive out all the nails, which means hammering them on the sharp side to push them up enough for a hammer claw to do the rest. When that's finished, we can make it into a guest room and move in the excess furniture now in my and Moira's rooms.
Today there were some snow flurries! (The big temperature drop gave me another headache.) I remember when I was growing up in New Brunswick, there'd be snow in May once every several years.
I'm now in the Orcs and Goblins chapter of the online Elvenar game.
I now have over 4800 followers on Twitter. Which means my ceiling of Tweeters I can follow has finally been raised a bit above 5000!
Sailor Venus on Esmerald: "Not only does her attitude bite, but so does her voice!" Sailor Jupiter: "Well, she has the loudest voice in the universe, so I guess we'll know when she's here!"--Sailor Moon
I've downloaded the zoom.com arc and entered the world of online conferencing. (In the '70s wasn't there a PBS children's show titled Zoom!?) I was at an online Meetup event Sunday, and Monday I participated again in my now-online memoir group: I read them that piece I'd written several weeks ago. I've also moved the Meetup groups I organize to the online format.
Just finished rewatching the "Dark Moon" arc of Sailor Moon, which comprises the last two-thirds of the second season. The story gets pretty convoluted: a rather bratty younger girl called Rini literally falls out of the sky, who eventually turns out to be the daughter of Serena and Darien's future selves in 3000 A.D. when they're ruling Crystal Tokyo! (She returns to our time in the later seasons and becomes a Sailor Scout herself...) Darien, who's finally become Serena's boyfriend, gets these visions that Serena will be in mortal danger if he marries her, so he dumps her. Later it turns out that the future Darien was messing with his mind to make sure that their relationship was strong enough for the battle ahead... (Destroy their relationship in order to save it, huh?)
This arc has a hit & miss array of ten villains, including Rini who briefly turns into Wicked Lady because the Wise Man villain has been messing with her mind! Counter-intuitively, over half of them get "redeemed" in the end. I liked it when Neflyte got redeemed in the first season, and Alan and Ann in the previous Doom Tree arc, but this yields diminishing returns. I do like the sheer shamelessness of the villainess Esmerald!(The first season villains took their names from varieties of jade, and several of these villains are named for precious jewels.)
Like the Malachite arc at the end of the first season, this arc is uneven but has some great episodes--particularly after the Sailor Scouts enter the Time-Space corridor to fight the villains, who want to conquer the future earth. I especially like the moment when Serena's heading off for the final battle and meets her civilian friend Molly, who hints that she knows Serena's true identity and ends up praying for her. (It works better in the original Japanese version--the DiC dub softens the religious aspect.)
My new time-killing interest is watching stage musicals on Youtube. You can find whole shows of a high quality there! I'm interested in stuff like Oliver!and Pacific Overtures and Guys and Dolls. Yesterday I watched a video of the 2018 Broadway revival of Carousel (actually a preview of the show).
And today I saw Sam Mendes' famous 1993 Cabaret production with Alan Cumming as the MC. Powerful ending! That show seems particularly timely in 2020, with so many people sleepwalking into disaster...
I finally finished The Vertigo Years, which my mind keeps mistitling The Vortex Years! I've now started reading Walt Whitman's poetry opus Leaves of Grass--I just read a few poems at the start so I could write here that I've started it.
I finished rewatching the second year of Dragon Ball and started the second season of Sailor Moon. The first third is the Doom Tree arc, with two aliens pretending to be schoolkids Alan and Ann. (They're my favourite second-season villains.) That arc has my personal favourite episode, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall," where they're putting on a play of Snow White and have to deal with a clown monster!
I've started reading manga online. Right now I'm reading Candy Candy, a romantic girl's comic from the late '70s about an orphan called Candy White who's hired by a rich family to serve as companion for this nasty sister and brother pair but gets treated as a servant and has to live in the stables, but this boy on a neighbouring estate falls in love with her... It has a certain Cinderella sensibility, and that's just the start of a soap opera spanning decades of her life. I just found out that forty years ago they made an anime of Anne of Green Gables!
We've finished putting everything in the kitchen, so our dining room is in pre-clutter mode again.
Last weekend was warm, so I walked out to Hillcrest Park. (There were few people there, so I had an easy time keeping social distance.)
Bulma: "If there's a boat there must be people, and where there's people there's shopping!"--Dragonball
I got off my bum today and went to Shoppers Drug Mart for my annual ritual of buying discounted Easter candy. I had to wait in a queue to get in, but when I left it was significantly longer. My favourite stuff is the chocolate-covered marshmallows.
I finished the second year of One Piece. Episodes 85 and 86 are must-see, telling the back story of the anthropomorphized reindeer Chopper. Now Moira has started watching it!
Now I'm watching the dubbed Dragonball again, six episodes a day. It's really fun, though I admit a lot of the humour is on the vulgar side. In the storyline I'm now rewatching Son Goku is up against the sinister Red Ribbon Army in a new search for the seven balls, resulting in some funny villains. Goku climbed into Muscle Tower and met the Frankenstein-like Android #8, who turned out to be a mild-mannered pacifist he made friends with and dubbed 8er! That's the sort of thing Luffy often does with prospective enemies on One Piece too. (One Piece artist Eiichiro Oda started out as an assistant on Dragonball, and the earlier show's influence is clear.)
Yes, I am disappointed about Bernie Sanders endorsing Joe Biden. I think that the best way to stop Trump is by stopping someone as unelectable as Biden from getting the Democratic nomination. Don't be passive and accept it as a done deal! And the only chance of preventing Biden's nomination is if enough voters promise not to choose him in November. It's time for Sanders' movement to outgrow him.
My Twitter account got another three-day freeze after following too many fellow Tweeters! On Twitter I've seen talk of a general strike, and I think the best time would be after the self-isolation ends and the elite is relying on the economy getting restarted. (I feel like a syndicalist from a century ago...)
I'm almost finished The Vortex Years. There's a lot of talk about Freud and Nietzsche and the latent violence that presaged the Great War.
Our kitchen is almost finished--we now have all the shelves installed and most of them are filled. I hope we can go back to eating at the dinner table again soon!
There still isn't much to talk about. I'm now in the second year of One Piece, with the gang entering the Grand Line and getting involved with a very sinister organization. (Right now they're at a prehistoric island with dinosaurs, volcanoes and two giants!) We've almost finished the third season of Ozark on Netflix. It's hardly morally uplifting, but it's a pretty great show. These characters aren't admirable, but they're smart and believable! Janet McTeer has a good role as the drug cartel's icy lawyer. There's a great quarrel at the start of the sixth episode. On Twitter I'm always on the lookout for new Tweeters to follow. On Friday I found a thread devoted to Tweeters with few followers, and I followed a lot of them because they're more likely to follow me back. I gained almost a hundred followers in one day, and I'm getting closer to a total of 4000! The catch was that Twitter suspected I was a bought, and suspended my ability to follow for three days, along with my ability to like and retweet other posts. But now I'm back.
I've had to suspend the Meetup events I organize for a month. I just hope the self-isolation is over by May! Oh well, Canada's doing better than several places... It's time to do my taxes!
Yes, it's been a week since I posted here last, and I do wish I had more to talk about! Today I suggested we dine on pizza, only to find the corner pizza shop has closed for now because of you-know-what. Then I went to McDonald's, only to find that you have to place orders through their mobile app! So we had omelet again.
Brother John's almost finished renovating the kitchen. All that's left is some shelves and a new counter top. The other day we moved our new refrigerator in there, and our dining room feels less cluttered.
Today my memoir group had a phone conference call where we all recited memoir pieces we'd written. The subject I chose was anime, and I talked about Sailor Moon. Too bad I moved the phone away from my mouth at times!
I finished watching the first 47 episodes of One Piece. The Arlong Park story is great, climaxing in a big four-episode fight with the horrifying fish-men. Even if you aren't into anime, I highly recommend episodes 35 and 36. Those episodes show the backstory of Nami the navigator and explain why she's been robbing other pirates. (All the crew have superb back stories starting in their early childhood.) It's emotionally powerful and shows what a deep writer Eiichiro Oda can be--this isn't just another adventure yarn. Her foster mother Bellemere is a great character for someone who only appears briefly!
I've started watching the new anime Cardcaptor Sakura. It's from the "magical girls" genre, and the title character is a schoolgirl, about four years younger than Sailor Moon, who has to retake spirits from these tarot-like cards that escaped from an occult book she carelessly opened. (In the first two episodes she recovers Flight and Shadow.) Her sidekick is the spirit Kero, who looks like a teddy bear with wings. She also has a rich girlfriend who makes her fancy costumes to fit her function--remember the Strawberry Shortcake dolls?--and videotapes her heroics. (After each episode Kero spends a couple of minutes displaying Sakura's clothes!)
It's a pretty cute show altogether. I'm impressed by its low-key tone in comparison to more conventional slam-bang anime, well suited to younger kids. (I remember how my mother admired the low-key tone of Captain Kangaroo.) I have a feeling I'll be checking out quite a few anime before this crisis is over...
Strangely, I have a feeling that overall society may actually benefit from this forced solitude! Maybe what we most need is time for greater self-reflection and more learning.
