Hands On

My daughter has also become fascinated by other kinds of self-improvement and specifically clearing up her skin (so she wants to visit a dermatologist) and growing her nails.  Not being quite patient enough (or disciplined enough to stop biting her nails), she asked us for press-on nails to see how they might look.  We decided that this was a relatively minor ask, so I picked some up from Shoppers.

I have my doubts how long this "manicure" will last, but she seems to like it well enough.

A New Leaf

I do try to stay away from big pronouncements and (New Year's) resolutions, but I am glad to note that I replaced my swim goggles with a brand that actually works.  The first time back in the water I only managed 8 laps, though I had hoped for 10.  The second time back I did make 10 laps.  I probably would have swum last Wednesday, but I needed to wash the swim trunks.  I had planned to swim on the way home from work on Friday, though it turned out that the lap swimming was much later than I thought and it was a leisure swim period.  Since my daughter (somewhat surprisingly) has been very interested in going swimming, I decided I would see what the leisure swim set up was like.  It turned out that the Regent Park Aquatic Centre is set up to have a fairly large shallow area, probably twice the space that the Matty Eckler pool has.  Then there is a middle area basically set up to do short laps.  Then they have an area to practice diving.  Since I was there fairly early, I claimed some space in the middle section and worked on building up endurance, i.e. how many short laps I could swim without a break.  I don't know if this ended up adding up to 10 or 12 full-length laps, but it was a decent workout.  They also have a spa area open, though only for swimmers 17+, which will be a sore temptation for my daughter.

In addition to this new-found interest in swimming, my daughter had been pestering me to race her.  I've never been a particularly fast runner, but I had pretty good stamina for middle distance running in my 30s.  I finally broke down and bought a new pair of running shoes, since my gym shoes were starting to get worn down in the heels.  There's an elementary school with an actual track around the corner from us, so we went there.  Sad to say, she was much faster than I was, though she can only keep it up for about a lap.  On our second outing (the following week), she was able to run the first lap quickly, then rested while I ran laps 2 and 3, then she jogged with me on the 4th lap.  I told her that in general, she should work on endurance, and this is also the area where she will see the most immediate improvement.  We did do some jogging in the neighbourhood, with her again having to stop about halfway through with a stitch in her side.  She asked if we could jog every morning.  I didn't think she could stick with it, and indeed this morning she didn't get up in time (and she wanted to take a longer shower), but we may jog after I get home from work.  I do want to encourage her in this, but temper it with realistic expectations of how often she'll actually feel like running (maybe every other day instead of every day) and how fast she'll be able to run.

She was a bit disappointed that she couldn't join my gym right away and try out the treadmills, since she is a bit too young.  But I guess I can sign her up on her birthday, and then take her after work during the winter, though it will probably mess up my routine, since I prefer to lift weights and then do the stationary bike and don't use the treadmill at all.  Keeping her active and relatively happy is an important goal, however, so I'm sure we can figure something out.

She is also quite interested in doing yoga as well, but I said that I would leave that up to her mother, since I don't know the first thing about yoga and don't intend to start now.  It's definitely quite a turnaround from before, but a good change so long as it lasts.

Tired of Trudeau

This is really the last straw for me.  I don't actually get to vote in Canada, so it is all pretty hypothetical, but I'm not entirely sure what I would do if I had the vote.  I generally am centre-left and vastly prefer the Liberal platform to the NDP's, but I am so tired of Trudeau and his terrible judgment.  The ridiculous trip to India and now the brownface from his past.  (Actually, I generally gave him a pass for the SNC-Lavalin "scandal.")  Maybe I wouldn't care quite as much if he hadn't been such a sanctimonious prick about what a feminist he was and how much he was going to do towards reconciliation.  And now this.  It never crossed his mind that this would come up, and therefore maybe he needed to tone it down a bit in 2015???  I think what really kills me is that he was 29 at the time of his Arabian Nights party and it was 2001 (to paraphrase the man himself).  By the 90s, it was well known that one should avoid blackface and brownface (remember Ted Danson... -- that happened in 1993).

While it is far too late for the Liberals to ditch him in 2019, maybe the best case scenario is that he pulls off a minor miracle and, after the election, ends up leading a minority government (with the Greens propping him up), takes some time to think these things over and agrees to step aside for a new leader by 2021 or so.  Wishful thinking, I know, but I just can't bear the thought of Scheer (aka Harper Lite) in charge...  But I guess I won't be too surprised (or even all that upset honestly) if the electorate agrees that Trudeau has worn out his welcome.

Bright Spots

Things are definitely pretty gloomy right now, in the world generally and in my home life.  But there are a few things worth celebrating or looking forward to.

It sounds as if there is a reasonable chance that Gary Larson is restarting The Far Side in one form or another.  (I don't think they would bother announcing anything if it was just the old comics in a new format (Old Wine in New Bottles), but one never knows.)  I was pretty excited a couple of years ago when Berke Breathed restarted Bloom County.  I don't usually remember to check in on his homepage for the daily strips, but I have been buying his new collections as they come out, and they are pretty solid.  In some cases, even more profound than the old strips from the 80s.

While this second item is mostly of interest to the bookish, scholars believe that they have uncovered a First Folio with John Milton's hand-written comments in the margins.  How cool!  I assume that, if this is proven true, then the entire thing will be digitized at some point, and then students can write all these papers on how Shakespeare influenced Milton, etc.

Third (and perhaps actually the most exciting for me) is that there is another blockbuster show (on top of Diane Arbus) coming to the AGO in 2020 - Picasso and the blue period.  That's one I will check out several times for sure.

Closing out Shakespeare

I'm definitely getting closer to seeing all of Shakespeare's plays at least once, though it is true I passed up a chance to see a somewhat distorted version of The Winter's Tale in Withrow Park and then also King John at Stratford.  As I just mentioned in the previous post, I will be checking out Henry VIII in Oct., and now it turns out that Shakepeare Bash'D will be doing Cymbeline in Feb., and I'll want to check that out.  (They are also doing Midsummer's Night's Dream, but I think I pass, as I've just seen this so many times, including this summer and last summer in Withtow Park.)

In early April, Shakespeare Bash'D is doing a staged reading of Ford's Tis Pity She’s a Whore.  I don't think I've seen this, though I could be mistaken.  A staged reading is better than nothing, so I expect I'll go to that.  I did encourage them to do some of the Middleton plays I haven't seen or Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, but no dice so far.  Actually I should see if the UC Follies or one of the other UT dramatic companies* takes this up.  Otherwise, it will be a long wait I fear.


* I did a quick spin around the UT websites, and there isn't too much of interest.  About the only thing I might check out is Jordan Tannahill's Peter Fletcher (UC Follies), and I think I'll be passing on everything else.  Too bad.  Well, as I said before, I will be subscribing to George Brown again, and that usually works out reasonably well.

Procrastination Pays Off!

The post title is supposed to mostly be ironic (normally procrastination is a terrible idea), but it is true that in some specific instances it can work out.

This is one of my favorite Dilbert cartoons of all time where they are given an assignment they know will be cancelled, and of course do not work on this task (whereas Alice finds the task to be completely urgent):

The trick of course is getting a good sense for when a meeting will be cancelled or when priorities shift and some tasks are just left at the bottom of the to-do list forever.  This can backfire spectacularly if a manager suddenly remembers and elevates the unnecessary task.  I don't often pull this at work, but it has worked out in my favor a few times.

At any rate, in this specific case I am thinking about the Stratford festival.  I wasn't that interested in the 2019 season and didn't book any tickets in Dec. or Jan (before the prices went up).  When I finally decided I was interested in checking out Henry VIII after all, the prices were frankly ridiculous.  (This is often a problem with shows in the Studio Theatre.  The Festival Theatre has a much broader range of ticket prices, and it is more typical that they will offer 2-for-1 sales and other discounts.)

I decided I would hang tough and see if they sent me a late-season discount.  While it took longer than I expected, I finally got the flyer with the discount code.  I was a bit more surprised that the Stratford Bus was still going to be running in October, but that makes it even more satisfying (since renting a car to drive down there would more or less eliminate the ticket savings).  So I will be checking out Henry VIII after all.  This gets me pretty close to seeing all the history plays, aside from King John (I guess I'll just rent the video from Stratford's 2014 season) and Richard II.  Not sure if I have had a chance to see Richard II and passed, though I have seen Marlowe's Edward II (once live and then Derek Jarman's film).  While it's not the end of the world, it is just a tiny bit disappointing that the bus will be coming back kind of late on the 20th, so I can't catch Thievery Corporation at the Danforth Music Hall that evening.  (Or rather I can't count on being back in time, though I might conceivably be back home by 8 pm.  Hmmm.)

At any rate, next season at Stratford looks a lot more interesting to me.  There are three plays I am likely to see (The Rez Sisters, Moliere's The Miser and Hamlet) and I may go see Hamlet-911, which is a new play by Ann-Marie MacDonald built on the bones of Hamlet.  I may even take my son to see Hamlet,* but I'll have to see how everything works out in terms of timing.  I will make much more of an effort to book tickets in the pre-sale period before the prices go up.

Once again, Shaw doesn't interest me that much.  There is a small chance I'd check out Trouble in Mind, and I'll think it over for a while.  Actually, I might be up for Flush, based on a novella by Virginia Woolf, which is one of the lunchtime one-act plays, but I am almost certain the bus won't get me there in time, so I would either have to rent a car or carpool with someone else who wants to go to that.


* I've definitely been taking him in reverse order -- Lear and then Othello and now probably Hamlet.  I still haven't managed to get him to Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet, which are the much more typical entries into the tragedies.

Salman Rushdie - Off and On

I was actually thinking just the other day that it would be cool if Salman Rushdie came back around to promote his new novel, Quichotte.  I hadn't moved quite fast enough when he came to the TPL reading from The Golden House a year or so back and that still rankled a bit.  (I have seen him reading before -- in Chicago, most likely from The Enchantress of Florence.)

At any rate, I opened this week's Now and saw under events that will sell out, Salman Rushdie was giving a reading at the AGO at the end of Sept.!  As soon as I got to work, I went to the AGO website, only to be greeted by a sold out notification.  I was pretty annoyed, given that there was essentially no notice at all.  While it is true I could have picked up Now yesterday, I felt in general that AGO members should have gotten a bit more advance notice.  I then went back through my emails from the AGO and saw an email with a moderately prominent mention of the Rushdie reading from yesterday, and then more or less a footnote in another email from two weeks back.  It is true that I don't read the emails from the AGO all that carefully these days, since I am not expecting any major exhibits for at least another six months, but that's still not what I would call a lot of warning.  Needless to say, I was extremely put out.

When I got home from work, I decided to check once more.  While it was unlikely that a block of tickets had been freed up, you just never know.  And lo and behold, there were tickets available here.  (Whether the earlier sold out notice was a glitch or it was real (and they added seats) is unclear to me and frankly not all that important.)  There is the option of just attending the lecture or buying Quichotte at the same time.  I don't know if it is pre-signed (honestly, probably my preferred option) or you get to stand in line for a signing, but only if you bought the book.  There may even be the option of having an additional book signed, so after I find out the ground rules, I might bring along The Golden House if it is allowed.  I decided that I should not hesitate and took the plunge, splurging on the novel as well.  Hopefully it will be an entertaining (and uneventful) evening.  I haven't read either of his most recent novels, but the reviews have generally been positive, saying they are a bit of a return to form.

I might as well throw a list together, since there are quite a few mid-career novels that I haven't tackled, and this will eventually inspire me to get around to them.

Grimus (1975)
R Midnight's Children (1981)
R Shame (1983)
R The Satanic Verses (1988)
R Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (1992)
O East, West (1994) - short stories
The Moor's Last Sigh (1995)
The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)
R Fury (2001)
O* Step Across this Line, Collected Nonfiction, 1992-2002 (2002)
Shalimar the Clown (2005)
R The Enchantress of Florence (2008)
Luka and the Fire of Life (2010)
R* Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015)
R The Golden House (2017)
R* Quichotte (2019)

O Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020 (2021)
R Victory City (2023)
Knife (2024)

* Signed copies. 


Edit (9/10) It appears to be sold out from my home computer as well, so I guess I got very lucky.  Sorry if you found out too late...

Three More Lists

Just a quick spin through this blog will make it evident that I am addicted to lists.  What can I say?  They do help me organize my reading, particularly for very long-term commitments, like going through all of Faulkner's novels, to say nothing of Mahfouz's.

Anyway, I have three more lists to add to the blog.

I just saw the Giller Longlist for 2019 was announced:

• Days by Moonlight by André Alexis
• Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
• Dual Citizens by Alix Olin
• Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta
• Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
• The Innocents by Michael Crummey
• Greenwood by Michael Christie
• Lampedusa by Steven Price
• Late Breaking by K. D. Miller
• Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
• Dual Citizens by Alix Olin
• Reproduction by Ian Williams
• Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
• The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Apparently the winner will be announced in November.  What is somewhat unusual is that I have actually read 2 of the books on the list - Immigrant City and Late Breaking.  It usually takes me much longer to get around to reading current fiction (waiting to see how some of it shakes out, as it were).  I do have a library hold on Frying Plantain and will probably read (and review) that sometime in October.  I'm not in any hurry to read The Testaments, since I will want to reread The Handmaid's Tale first (and that will probably have to wait until after I've read Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy).  I don't have any burning desire to read any of the others, though I'll take another, closer look when the short list comes out.  It will be interesting if they automatically give the prize to Atwood or, conversely, feel that someone else needs a chance to win (though apparently she actually only won once before for Alias Grace).  Not to be too cynical about it, but my money's on Frying Plantains, since it ticks off so many boxes.

I just wrapped up Ibuse's Black Rain and saw there was a pretty decent list of Japanese fiction at the back, and I pulled out a few of particular interest.  Most of the following are only available in the Toronto Reference Library, so I'll probably be hitting up Robarts to see how many of them are in the stacks.  While most of these books are short (under 200 pages), I still don't want to spend half the day reading them at the Reference Library.

Japanese novels/short stories:

• Sōseki Natsume I Am a Cat
• Kawabata House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
• Yoshiyuki The Dark Room
• Matsumoto The Voice and Other Stories
• Maruya Rain in the Wind
• Tanizaki A Cat, A Man and Two Women

(Actually I Am a Cat is fairly long, but that's ok, as it is the one book on the list that I actually own.)

Finally, I have been feeling the need to go back and read some of the classic science pieces that an educated person from the 1960s-80s would have been aware of.  I'm not entirely sure why, but maybe I am working, emotionally, through an alternative history where there hadn't been such a groundswell of anti-intellectualism in American life, basically since the rise of Reagan.

There probably isn't a better figure than Loren Eiseley to represent a corrective to the mindless jingoism that surrounds us these days.  He often wrote about how mankind's proper place in the world (and the universe) was much smaller than the collective we imagined.  Some people were quite annoyed that in The Invisible Pyramid he quite severely downplayed the achievement of landing on the moon...  I can only imagine what he would have written regarding the fact that today our ecological footprint is almost double what the Earth can actually support.

While I was tempted to get the LOA 2-volume set, basically all his books of essays can be purchased much more reasonably as used stand-alone titles.  At some point, I probably will check the Volume 1 out to browse through the Uncollected Prose, particularly whatever is in The Lost Notebooks.  But I might as well start with what I have easily at hand:

• The Immense Journey (1957)
• The Firmament of Time (1960)
• O The Unexpected Universe (1969)
• O The Invisible Pyramid (1971)
• O The Night Country (1971)
• O The Star Thrower (1978)

I'm definitely torn on whether to just buy the first two, but I think I really ought to just borrow them from the library first.

At any rate, this should keep me pretty busy, on top of all the other reading (and quilting!) I have signed on for...

One step forward, two steps back

I'll just be cryptic today.  Maybe in a few weeks I'll write down what is really bothering me,* but for the moment, I'll just focus on something annoying but not that important.  I have been focusing on archiving my music (and to a lesser extent getting CDs out of the house) and slowly getting through my piles of books, including a depressingly large pile in the basement.  That means that I put most other projects to the side, including working on a quilt for my son.

I have finally turned my attention back to this.  While it will be tight, if I focus, I should manage to get it ready for Christmas.  At any rate, I turned up the small pair of scissors I need to trim the stray threads and also the seam ripper, which I also need.  However, I simply cannot find the "roadmap" that I created to help me keep the pattern correct.

 

It's not just the pattern though.  I also had some notes written down on how to press the seams, and probably most important, some notes on how many squares it would take to extend the pattern a bit more.  In the end, I just reprinted this and will recalculate the squares.  It is always annoying to lose work like that, but no point in stewing over it.  At this point, I basically need two more rows, and then I'll have the entire top half completed.  The bottom half will be a lot more annoying, however, since everywhere you see an upside down animal (the deer on white and blue backgrounds and the penguins), I have to rip out the squares and sew them in correctly.  This probably more than anything else is what really caused me to put this project on hold, but I think I am over the mental hump now.  I'll try to report back when I hit the 75% mark.


* While not the most important thing on my mind, I have been backsliding a bit in my diet, eating a bit more comfort food.  I'm still going to the gym and biking, so not all is lost, but I will need to get more serious about cutting out junk food if I want to be able to fit into my clothes (the ones that I have been able to wear again since losing the weight last year).  At the same time, if I stress over this too much, it will just make things worse.  A true dilemma...

Blast from the Past

I saw on CBC that there is a new exhibit (and a book) on the last days of Honest Ed's.  More info here.  I'm fairly unlikely to buy the book, though I may check it out if it ends up at the library.  I might check out the exhibit, which is up the street from the former Honest Ed's site at Weird Things (998 Bathurst St.) from mid-Sept. to mid-Oct.

Of the photos displayed in the CBC story, I think this was probably my favorite:

It is interesting that she got permission to shoot inside the store.  I was told to stop taking photos on one of my last trips, not that that prevented me from getting a couple of decent shots (posted back in Dec. 2016!).

While I am a bit sorry that Honest Ed's is gone, I never went in all that often, and it was incredibly rare for me to buy anything there.  Now I did spend a reasonable amount of time and money at Fabricland in the basement, but that wasn't really part of Honest Ed's proper.  Nonetheless, it definitely was a one-of-a-kind institution and Toronto is a bit more boring without it.

Toni Morrison leaves the stage

It is frankly a bit embarrassing to get around to this post basically a full month after Toni Morrison's passing.  I could say that I have been reflecting on her place in American literature (and trying to come up with something profound to say), though that's not really true.  I will say that even from an early age (18 or 19) I was aware of who she was and probably had read The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon.  I did read very widely in those days, and I probably would have come across her anyway, but I know that her work was discussed in one of my American literature classes at University of Michigan.

I actually saw her at University of Michigan giving the Tanner Lectures, which were eventually published in the Michigan Quarterly Review. (This link gives a significant portion of the lecture, though then you have to go page by page through the archive for the rest.)  The themes are fairly similar to the Massey Lectures that were published as Playing in the Dark. I remember this was a three part lecture, with breaks built in for people to escape to class (or dinner).  I think I ended up losing out on lunch and dinner to stick it out for the whole thing.  The following day there was a response from Eric Foner and Amiri Baraka! (also in the MQR issue).  That was pretty interesting.  I can't recall if Ms. Morrison was in the audience or on the panel for this follow-up, though it is likely that she was still in Ann Arbor and probably turned up.

I have to be honest that I kind of run hot and cold with her novels and pretty much stopped reading them around Jazz (more due to running short of time than anything else).  I recognize the importance of The Bluest Eye but don't love it.  Beloved left me fairly cold, and I never was a fan of the novel, even though I recognized it was "important."  My favorites among her novels are Song of Solomon and Tar Baby. 

I think this year I will commit to rereading The Bluest Eye (it is quite short, and I have it in the Norton's Anthology of Literature by Women) and Song of Solomon.  However, someone has convinced me to give Sula a second look, and Tar Baby is also fairly short, so maybe I will reread everything (though I'll certainly bail on Beloved if I don't like it any more on the second go-around).  I'll then restart with Jazz and try to read one or two of her later novels each year until I get through them all.

To help me keep track of progress, here is a list of her novels:

R  The Bluest Eye (1970)
R  Sula (1973)
R  Song of Solomon (1977)
R  Tar Baby (1981)
R  Beloved (1987)
O  Jazz (1992)
   Paradise (1997)
O  Love (2003)
.  A Mercy (2008)
R  Home (2012)
.  God Help the Child (2015)

Theatre Subscriptions 2019-20

It's that time of year when Shaw and Stratford have more or less wound down (and Fringe and Summerworks are long over*), and I turn my attention to the fall (and winter) offerings around town.

Soulpepper's half season is the most depressing and uninspired I've ever seen from them.  Art is just a trifle, far more appropriate for community theatre than the premiere professional troupe in Toronto.  While Streetcar Named Desire is a better play of course, I just think they should have dug a bit deeper into Tennessee Williams's back catalogue, and I won't bother going.  Pinter's Betrayal should be a home run, but I just think the casting is so problematic, given that the female character appears to be a decade (or more) younger than the two men, and the text makes it clear they all went to uni together.  So I think this is a major misstep, and I probably would have skipped it anyway, though the fact that I saw a solid performance at Red Sandcastle means that I don't have to feel like I am missing out on anything.  I'm also still pretty steamed that they have decided, pretty much unilaterally, to dump all the Ayckbourn plays from their repertoire (I guess because Albert Schultz was such a promoter of his work).  They had booked the rights to House & Garden this season, but dropped them silently.  So I'll see what they bring to the table in 2020, but the tea leaves aren't looking promising at all.  That may not be entirely fair, as, at some point in 2020, they are going to be doing David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly.  I'd rather they did Chinglish (though honestly that might be a better fit at Canadian Stage), but I'd check this out.

I'm never too interested in Canadian Stage, though this time around I'll be checking out Lynn Nottage's Sweat in January.  The rest of the line-up is here.  I believe I already mentioned that Sweat will be playing in Hamilton, opening one week after Canadian Stage!

I've just fallen out of step with Tarragon, and it is pretty rare that I can find more than one play to see per season, whereas I did subscribe a couple of times in the past.  Their season is posted here, and I believe the only play I will see is Kat Sandler's Yaga (and indeed I probably need to book a ticket to that soon).  If a reviewer (that I trust!) actually likes The Jungle, I might go see this, but I'm pretty sure it is going to be cliched in very annoying ways.

Theatre Passe Muraille has gotten super woke these days, and there isn't anything I want to see there.  Factory is more interesting.  Or at least it can be, though it is also pretty woke.  I managed to find 3 shows of passing interest in the 2017-8 season (with the very best being The Fish Eyes Trilogy).  Then last year I didn't want to go see anything there, though it is also true I had already seen Bears at the Theatre Centre, so I'm not quite sure how to "count" that.  This time around, there are three, and perhaps even four, shows I might check out from the season.  I talked with the box office, and they have a pretty good deal.  If you get a 3-show pass, then you can get 25% off additional tickets.  I'm not entirely sure I want to check out Trout Stanley by Claudia Dey or House by Daniel McIvor, but I'll probably go in the end.  Lady Sunrise looks interesting, and One is a bit of a reworking of the Eurydice myth.  I might even take my son to that one.  Generally, this time around Factory is more up my alley, compared to last year for sure.

I've seen an article here and there suggesting that Coal Mine is losing its edge, deciding to put on more warm and fuzzy shows (only a slight exaggeration according to this piece).  To be honest, I've never actually subscribed to Coal Mine, and I am even less likely to do so now.  Of their four shows this season, I'm reasonably likely to see Between Riverside and Crazy (and probably paying full price), and possibly willing to see Marjorie Prime, though there I might wait for the reviews and/or try to get a rush ticket.  Still, I do wish them well, not least because they are putting on shows East of the Don.

Speaking of making a splash on the east side, Streetcar Crowsnest was an official Fringe site this summer, which was incredible, and they generally have strong line-ups, even if not everything is to my taste.  They also are partnering with a lot of up-and-coming companies,** particularly The Howland Company and now apparently The Groundlings and Obsidian.  Here is a somewhat confusing narrative of what they will be presenting.  In this case, I think it will be pretty hard to put 4 together, since I already have a ticket to Annie Baker's The Flick (quite possibly the event of the season).  I think I will check out Casimir and Caroline, since I like everything the Howland Company has done so far.  They are quite fierce!  I just don't think I can sit through another Julius Caesar, having seen it at Shakespeare in High Park a few years back, then Wolf Manor's take in 2017 and then Portia's Julius Caesar last summer.  Even though this is going to be a star-studded version, I think I'm going to pass.  I probably should check out Blacktop Sky (presented by Obsidian), but I doubt I will.  It's probably the same thing with Moscovitch's Secret Life of a Mother.

Hart House is remounting Portia's Julius Caesar, which I will definitely avoid, and quite a few musicals.  I am going to sit it out this season, even though I am sure they will do a fine job with Rocky Horror.

I think I mentioned it already, but I think Alumnae is making a mistake putting on The Heidi Chronicles so soon after Soulpepper did it.  I'm definitely not going again.  There is a smallish chance I will check out Ruhl's In the Next Room, though I saw that done at Tarragon (as a rental, not a mainstage production), but the rest I will skip.

In terms of more community theatre, I am not at all interested in East Side Players this season.  I'm still a little sore at them cancelling Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) and substituting in the very terrible The Memory of Water.  I didn't really like the very manipulative Disgraced and don't plan to see it again, and the other 2 plays just sound dreadful to me.  I haven't had very good luck at the West Bloor Village Players, but this time around I will check out The Glass Menagerie (coming up soon) and possibly Lindsay-Abaire's Good People in the spring.

It's taken a bit of digging, but I now have the main plays at George Brown in 2019-20 (there are usually a couple of plays oriented towards children as well):

"The Learned Ladies" directed by Sue Miner
"Metamorphoses" directed by Jordan Pettle
Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" directed by Soheil Parsa
"Picnic at Hanging Rock" directed by Tanisha Taitt

Metamorphoses is basically the version of Ovid's tales that Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago made famous, though I haven't been able to find out if they will use water features in the same way.  I'll definitely go to this and take my son.  I'm also reasonably likely to take him to Rhinoceros, but I'll check out the translation of Moliere's The Learned Ladies on my own.

So it looks like I will plump for a George Brown subscription, as well as 3-play pass from Factory, and that does look like the only subscriptions I will be ponying up for this season.  I"m sure I will end up seeing enough theatre this season, but it will largely be a la carte...


* It was a decent but not amazing Fringe for me this year.  I only saw one play at Summerworks (Greenland by Nicolas Billion), and it was actually a staged reading, but it was definitely worth checking out.

** It's still as hard as ever to be a small company in Toronto.  It looks like Wolf Manor has more or less packed it in.  Seven Siblings is still doing the occasional show, and I think I'll check out their show in November (Girl in the Machine), but they aren't doing a lot, compared to their ambitions from previous years.

(Down) The Memory Hole

It's possible that some of the gaps in my memory will be plugged based on rereading old journal entries or stumbling across an old concert program, though it is just as likely they are lost in the mists of time.  Right now I am thinking of events I went to or whether I saw a particular artwork, and not so much intrapersonal happenings (when did I meet X or when did Y tell me some secret), since I'm finding myself less and less interested in dealing with other people as I get older.  I probably will more or less become a hermit in my 60s.  What's particularly interesting or frustrating is that most of what I am trying to recover is from the mid to late 80s and early 90s when the internet wasn't really an all-encompassing thing.  Nowadays, much of what I would want to recover is archived somewhere or another.  So for instance, I no longer bother writing down concert setlists, since there is a site dedicated to capturing them, at least for rock and pop acts.  (So for instance, here is the Steve Winwood concert that I just barely found out about in time.  Vancouver was the only Canadian date on that particular tour.)  However, there are still a few frustrating internet gaps, which I'll touch on a bit later.

I have a pretty good memory for which plays I have been to, though there are exceptions, particularly the late 90s when I was seeing so many shows at the Northwestern Theatre school (often 3 per week!).*  I recently stumbled across a program for Strindberg's A Dream Play, and I certainly wouldn't have remembered that I had seen this (without the evidence in hand).  If it comes up in Toronto, I probably should go again (and the same for his Ghost Sonata, which I probably haven't seen).  I made a list of all the Shakepeare plays I have seen, which is very useful as my memory does start to give out, but even there there are a few gaps.  I'm not entirely sure I've seen Timon of Athens (though I think so).  I'm less sure about The Winter's Tale, and I somewhat reluctantly passed on a chance to check it out at Withrow Park because the director made some (to me) unforgivable choices and added her own text to the play.

In terms of jazz musicians, it was generally less common to get programs, except for some of the Chicago concerts in Millennium Park.  I probably don't have any programs for any of the Detroit Jazz Fest and Chicago Jazz Fest concerts.  In most cases, the concert line-ups are still on-line, but I have no way to prove which events I actually attended (aside from journal entries and in a few cases messages on the Organissimo message board).  I think that I did pass up a chance to see Elvin Jones at one of his last Chicago performances.  On the other hand, I did see Allen Toussaint and Gerald Wilson fairly late in their careers.  Also, I managed to see Bobby Hutcherson at least twice (once as part of the SF Jazz Collective), but it might actually have been three times.  Again, the memory isn't what it once was.

I vaguely recall seeing one of the jazz heavyweights with my parents, but my father couldn't remember this when I asked him a couple of years ago.  It probably wasn't Dizzy Gillespie, as that probably would have been seared in my memory.  It's a bit more likely that it was Clark Terry, and I am reasonably sure I saw him a second time.  It terms of the other major, major jazz figures, I saw Sonny Rollins on several occasions and Ornette Coleman,** Kenny Burrell once (with Gerald Wilson), Chick Corea, Roy Haynes, McCoy Tyner and Wayne Shorter (generally a disappointment live).  I also saw Dave Brubeck a few times, pretty much every time he played at Symphony Hall or up at Ravinia.  I'm guessing I saw him 4 or maybe even 5 times.  I saw Lou Donaldson twice at the Chicago Jazz Showcase and Benny Golson 2 or 3 times at the Showcase.  In terms of slightly more obscure, but still canonical, figures, I saw Pharoah Sanders at the Showcase and Andrew Hill twice (once at the Showcase and once in Amsterdam!).  I also saw Johnny Griffin once in Chicago, which was an unexpected treat, as he had essentially retired to France by that point.  I've certainly seen a lot of other jazz musicians over the years, but that is probably it as far as the major ones from the classic era of jazz.

I'll probably make a list elsewhere of the major free concerts I've seen over the years, but I am struggling to remember whom I saw in New York (just off the Winter Garden, which was technically where the World Financial Center met the Hudson River).  It was a fairly famous Latin musician.  It was probably Tito Puente, since I think he was the only Latin musician famous enough to motivate me to leave New Jersey for the night.  This is a case where it probably is in my journal, but I don't have the time to sift through right now.  The back pages of New York Magazine† indicate that Tito Puente was playing quite a few free concerts around then (and sometimes with Celia Cruz) but mostly in Central Park or New Jersey.  While I don't think this is false memory, I will need a few more scraps of documentation before I can clear this up.

I'll wrap this up with an example of a painting that I am sure I have seen in person.  It is "Sugar Shack" by Ernie Barnes.  There are actually two versions of this painting, with one being used for the TV show Good Times and one for Marvin Gayes's album I Want You.  This is the Marvin Gaye version.

I was at the Chicago Cultural Center when I saw this painting.  (Now whether it was the Good Times version or this Gaye version, I can't recall.)  What's a bit frustrating is that I can't recall if this painting was owned by the DuSable Museum (and was part of an exhibit on African-American Art in Chicago) or was a different themed exhibit.  The Cultural Center doesn't have anything in its archives prior to 2014, so that doesn't help, and the DuSable's website is even worse (with no way to search the holdings at all).  I do know that this wasn't part of either the Archibald Motley or Norman Lewis exhibits at the Cultural Center (both of which I saw and enjoyed).  The good news is that if I actually did see this (and I am quite sure of that), then I will also have a photo of it as well as a photo of the label.  Interestingly, there is a movie about the Obamas' first date (Southside with You), which is going to really increase the number of false memories, as they shot inside the Cultural Center (but called it the Art Institute) and had the Obamas looking at "Sugar Shack" and some other Ernie Barnes paintings (i.e. showing them at an almost certainly fictitious exhibit).  It might not have been out of place to actually set the record straight in one of these articles, i.e. that "Sugar Shack" was on view but in 199X or even 20XX as part of Y exhibit.  I suppose if I can locate my snapshots, I can do my part to try to rescue this from the memory hole.

I think that's enough for now, and I really have to run...


* This is the exact same thing with fiction.  I was reading a huge number of novels in the late 80s and early 90s (60-80 per year), and I seem to have lost the reading log I kept.  At least this is one thing that I am now keeping track of in a more permanent fashion.

** Now this is an interesting, but probably false, memory.  Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman were the headliners of the 2008 Chicago Jazz Festival.  One of my co-workers was in town for part of the festival and we saw the Rollins set, which ended with a fairly typical samba-type number.  I honestly can't remember if I went to see Ornette later, since I had been so disappointed by his concert at Symphony Hall a year or two before, so I probably skipped it.  On the other hand, I seem to recall seeing Rollins and Coleman together.  But I am 100% sure the reviews would have mentioned this, so I am probably just thinking of the 2010 concert captured on Road Shows 2 (which I've heard but clearly didn't attend).

† Sometimes going back in the Wayback Machine can cause me some unintended pain, as I see that I passed up opportunities in 1992 to see Lionel Hampton and even the Kronos Quartet (for only $20!). I vaguely remember seeing ads for Hedwig and the Angry Inch, though I probably wasn't quite ready to see that at the time. On the other hand, I also passed on the original off-off-Broadway production of Terrence McNally's A Perfect Ganesh, but I didn't mind missing out so much after I finally got around to seeing this in Chicago.