Nickled and Dimed to Death

I guess these are all small things, but oh so annoying.

I am heading over to see A Strange Loop at Soulpepper on Sat.  I think I'll find it interesting, though I am definitely not the target audience, and indeed I generally am not that big on musicals in the first place, with a few key exceptions.  Anyway, what was not made clear (or at least I definitely missed it) is this is such a challenging role that the lead is taking off every Wed. and Sat. matinee!  (Honestly, that feels a bit extreme.)  Of course, I had already booked a ticket for a Sat. matinee and thought, well I really ought to switch that.  There was a bit of a hassle, and I had to downgrade my seats a bit, but I managed to get this done.  And then after I thought everything was settled, a different person from the Box Office wrote me back saying that there was an $8 ticket transfer fee.  I wrote back a pretty salty email, saying that this was part of a subscription, as well as I thought it was misleading to not have the lead actually in every performance, and I would never have booked that date in the first place, etc.  I guess I just really was annoyed by the constant nickle and diming, esp. as the original person I was talking with did not mention an extra fee.  They ended up just sending me the ticket without collecting the extra fee, though maybe I used up all of my karma for the week.

I had recently put in an order from Dusty Groove.  It's quite a decent jazz store in Chicago, and they do a good job with shipping items, even internationally.  I definitely miss dropping in on the store, which I used to do all the time while living in Chicago.  At any rate, I ended up putting in an order.  Normally I ship to a friend still living in Chicago, but I won't be going back to Chicago any time soon, so I investigated the cost to ship up to Toronto.  It definitely cost more but not a ridiculous amount more, and this was offset by not paying Illinois sales tax.  However, when the package arrived, it was over the de minimus limit (which was supposed to be raised in any event), and I ended up paying $20 extra dollars in GST.  Which makes it that much less likely I'll be ordering again from them in the near future.  Darn it...

But the most annoying has to be this poster I was working on for a conference that was in town.  First off, I was never granted permission to go, even though I had the poster accepted and it was just down the street.  So that really dampened my enthusiasm.  Then my hours supporting the other conference activities were cut substantially, and I ended up having to do the research for the poster on my own time, which understandably started to drag...  I did finally pull all the data and putting the poster together (pretty late at night), but I was also disheartened by the fact that the data didn't line up with what I was expecting to see, which made it particularly hard to come up with any punchy findings.  So generally it was a disappointment all the way around.  Anyway, I finally got it done, though far too close to the conference deadline, but then I needed to actually print the poster.  I uploaded it to the Staples website after asking someone who said it would be ready the next day.  Well, they definitely gave me bad advice.  The next day I waited quite some time and then finally started calling in the afternoon, but I never managed to talk with anyone in the print shop.  The conference had already started by this point!  

This morning I decided enough was enough, and I biked over in the morning, only to find that the poster still wasn't done.  However, if I forked over another $20, they would turn it into a rush job, and I would have it in about 30 minutes.  So I did that, though with very poor grace.  I think next time I will just go to The Copy Shop instead, which is just a bit further up University Ave.

So just a few of the many interactions leaving me annoyed these days...

 

A Busy, Busy April

As April comes to a close (with more unseasonably cold weather and even a hail storm, though one that seems to have bypassed Toronto), I thought I should write down the highlights of what I got up to.  As I have been moaning, I spent an awful lot of late nights on my US and Canadian taxes, though, in the end, everything got mailed in with one day to spare in both cases.

I saw Esprit Orchestra three times(!) with several highlights including Vivier's Lonely Child.  And I saw Amici perform, primarily pieces off of their Armenian Chamber Music CD, along with a few other "Hidden Treasures."  I saw Logan's Red up at the Theatre Centre.  It was a solid performance (and I'm glad I went), though I did see the original production in New York, and that is awfully hard to beat... 

I saw Godard's Une Femme est une Femme at the Fox, though I didn't care much for it at all.  I saw Certified Copy at the Paradise and was somewhat dissatisfied with the way information was withheld from the audience, though I certainly liked it more than the Godard film.  I followed that up the following day with Kurosawa's Yojimbo at the Revue, and that film I did enjoy a fair bit.

I was misled and didn't see a couple of David Lynch films on Good Friday as planned, though I did make it to the gym and then that evening I saw A Public Display of Affection at Crow's.  On Sat., I saw both parts of The Mahabharata at Canadian Stage, as well as hit a few art galleries in Yorkville and even went swimming.  That made for a very long day.  On Easter itself, I helped out with the neighbourhood Easter egg hunt (planting eggs not searching for them...) and then saw Pochsy Part IV at Video Cabaret.

Somewhere in there I ended up seeing The Little Prince at Theatre Passe Muraille.  I didn't care much for this at all, because I hadn't realized there would be no dialogue at all.  I had assumed there would be some dialogue (though interpreted in ASL).  I found it just too difficult to follow along -- and the story seemed to have been altered and stretched out beyond what I remember from French class.  Speaking of French, I received a free ticket to a different production at TPM called Cispersonnages en quête d'auteurice, which was indeed in French (though with super titles, so it wasn't that hard to follow).  This is a spin-off of the Pirandello play.  It's a bit hard to describe.  I didn't love it, but it was interesting.  I don't regret going at least.

Last Saturday, I went swimming, then went to Bau-Xi over on Dufferin.  The transit ride to get there was pretty bad, and I was not impressed with the new exhibits.  I made it back over to Tarragon, though I was about 10 minutes late to meet my friend.  We were there to watch Feast.  I thought individual scenes and characters were interesting, but did not find the ending remotely plausible for all kinds of reasons.  And there was absolutely no reason to make this a 2 hour play with no intermission!   I went back south with my friend to Osgoode.  I thought I would find something to eat on Queen Street.  I settled on Queen Mother Cafe, but it really was a not very appealing Thai-inspired dish.  I kind of doubt I'll go back.  Anyway, I went in to work (and work on taxes) for a couple of hours, and then back out to TPM to see the French play, as I mentioned.  At least I didn't get rained on, as I had feared.*

Sunday, I did not get up as early as I hoped, but I still made it to the gym and did the grocery shopping.  I made it to Union Station to catch the 12:30 bus out to Hamilton.  I was there to see the Helen McNicoll exhibit.  It was pretty good with a lot of paintings that are in a private collection and aren't displayed frequently at all.  I thought the exhibit only ran for another month, though perhaps it was extended through the end of August?  At any rate, it is worth checking out this spring.  I'll add a few shots from my visit later.  It was unfortunate that the Farmers Market at Jackson Square was closed on Sundays (I keep forgetting that detail), but I ended up catching the bus back and not having to wait too long.  It was probably the 3:50 bus, and we got in around 5:30.  (Traffic on the Gardiner was pretty slammed in both directions...)  I was able to finally wrap up Soseki's I am a Cat and started in a bit on Joy Williams's State of Grace.** 

I grabbed a bite at Kibo at Union, then went over to the office for the last plunge into taxes.  It was so late when I finished that the subway was no longer running!  I debated catching a cab, but in the end I waited for the King Streetcar and then walked home from Queen and Carlaw, since the overnight bus wasn't going to show up for ages.  I had kind of thought I would take Monday easy, but that didn't happen.  I put in essentially a full day at work, though I had to leave at 5:30 in order to pick up my bike from the bike shop before it closed.  Then I voted.  Then I turned in a library book.  Ideally I would have gone swimming, but I really was wiped out.

And I probably bit off a bit too much on Tues. as well.  I ended up working until 7:25 (partly on a bid for new work, as well as on the first draft of a conference deck) and then took the subway round the loop to Yonge & Dundas.  I walked over to Massey Hall with 10 minutes to spare and saw a huge line.  I almost gave up, but then the line started moving quickly, and I was able to get to the box office and scored a ticket to the Max Richter show.  It was a very hot ticket and had been sold out forever...  Indeed, there were quite a few people who bought standing room only tickets, which I thought was just absurd.  It was an obstructed view seat but on the main floor, and really the view wasn't too bad.  I had a very clear view of Richter himself and the first violin (and then the vocalist in the second half).  They decided to play not one, but two complete albums/compositions.  In the first half, it was In a Landscape.  After the break, they played The Blue Notebooks.  I enjoyed The Blue Notebooks more, particularly the ending of the piece.  But it did remind me of electronic mood music more than a contemporary classic concert.  It was worth seeing, but I wasn't really knocked out the way I was during the Steve Reich celebration a few years back.

I don't have much planned for the 30th, though I may try to go swimming after work.  I do have a pretty full agenda from May 1-4, however, so I guess I need to gear up for that.  And with that, I really do need to get some sleep.

 

* Somehow I totally forgot that after the French play on Sat., I took the Queen streetcar over to the Rex.  It was just after 9 (and the show had started at 8:30, so I hadn't missed all that much).  It was supposedly sold out, but they managed to find me an open seat (and in the front section even!).  The line-up was unusual: 2 guitars (Peter Bernstein and Lorne Lofsky), Neil Swainson on bass and a drummer.  I had actually stopped by on Friday at 6, but they were sold out for the evening sets and even the early set was pretty full, and I would have had to sit in the back, which I try to avoid.  I ended up taking the subway to College and seeing In the Mood for Love.  (I had tentatively pencilled it in for Sunday afternoon, and that would not have worked at all...)  So I was glad that I managed to see this group on Sat. as sort of a last minute add-on to an already busy day.

** I may have mentioned that I finished rereading Tim O'Brien's America Fantastica (for a book club at work!), which is quite dark and full of largely unredeemable characters and other characters that make terrible decisions.  It was clearly written as a response to Trump being in power, and frankly isn't as funny now that he is back in power and even worse than before.  There are some interesting parallels to Timothy Findley's Headhunter (another dark, flawed work).  I finished Abe's The Woman in the Dunes.  I'll still go see the movie at the Fox in a couple of weeks, but I don't think I'll bother with the book lecture.  I'm midway through rereading Carr's A Month in the Country, and thankfully this novel does stand up to a second reading.

 

A Dog's Breakfast

I think the first time I ever heard this term (or at least the first time it stuck with me) was 1993 when someone was predicting the federal election would result in a "dog's breakfast" with no party able to govern effectively.  As it happens, that didn't happen, and the Liberals under Jean Chrétien wiped out the Conservatives and had a stable majority government.  While it is a bit too early to tell, I worry a bit that last night's result will result in a weak minority government.  I mean there is no question that the Liberals cannot believe their luck (and will gladly take this result).  Not only did they avoid being wiped out, which clearly was going to happen under Trudeau, but Poilievre lost his seat!  I'm sure he'll be around carping for quite some time, but if the Conservatives were smart, they would dump him now and find someone less grating.  If the current projections hold, then the Liberals will come up 4 or 5 seats short of a majority, but the (very weakened) NDP will have 7 seats and could enter into a Supply and Confidence arrangement.  I think this could probably work, rather than the Liberals having to rely on the Bloc or hiving off a few Conservative votes now and again.  But if the math doesn't work after all the votes are counted, then we are looking at a really precarious government that would likely only last a year or two before going back to the polls.  So fingers crossed.

I'm still recovering from being up nearly all night doing taxes.  Last week I finished my son's, only to find that his T4 was completely incorrect.  He did have provincial taxes withheld but this wasn't indicated anywhere on the T4, so he will need to get that corrected and then refile them.  So infuriating and unfair.  I did get a modest refund, though I was expecting a much larger one.  As always, the issue ends up being the large bite that Ontario takes.  I think what continues to grate on me the most is that the marginal tax rate is pretty high in Ontario, but then they hide it.  So you calculate taxes and then have to pay not one but two surtaxes, i.e. tax on your tax, which brings you incredibly close to 50% marginal tax (and indeed 53% for anyone earning over $250K), and it just seems completely dishonest to me.  So I'm feeling very surly today.  It isn't just the tax (not that I enjoy paying these sneaky surtaxes), but that I am paying to support a bunch of provincial politicians that I despise and are making life worse most of the time for progressives in Toronto, by ripping out our bike lanes and weakening environmental laws and just being stupid and generally corrupt.  And we seem to have no way to get rid of them, as the voters are still punishing the provincial Liberals for the sins of the 2010s.  Sigh.

I did manage to do a few fun things over the weekend, and maybe tonight or tomorrow I can account for the time I was not doing taxes.  I'm actually going to run over to Massey Hall to see if any tickets opened up for Max Richter, but I think that's fairly unlikely, so I will probably have this evening to work on this, as well as a few other outstanding issues on my plate. 

Edit (11 pm): While there are two or three extremely tight ridings that will go to recounts, the unofficial count shows the Liberals at 169.  So very, very close to 172.  (Again, in their wildest dreams, the Liberals couldn't have expected this outcome, even a month or so ago.)  If I were Carney, I would probably cut a deal with the NDP to allow them to keep official party status (and not much more) in exchange for a Supply and Confidence arrangement (and just let the Conservatives' complaints about "corruption" roll off his back).  I think that is probably the stablest of any of the options, but I guess we'll find out what they decide to do.  I would definitely hope we don't go back to the polls for at least two more years.

So long, Cinemaclock

I've been more than a little annoyed at Cinemaclock for some time now, not least because whenever I get around to turning on Adblock (which I really should reinstate on the new computer), it completely blocks me from the service.  While I am not 100% against ad-revenue on principle, most of the time these ad-happy websites don't do any meaningful screening, and you can end up with some really annoying computer infections, so it doesn't seem reasonable to me to over-react when people try to keep their computers clean.  Nonetheless, that isn't really the issue.  The issue is the several times now that I have been given bad information from Cinemaclock, including the wrong time for Mickey 17 out at the Beaches, and then on Friday I had planned what would have been an incredible twofer of David Lynch movies at the cinema kitty-corner to the Eaton Centre.

I actually made an extra effort to get over to the gym early on Friday so that I could leave in time to make it to the 12:30 show.  For once, transit went super smoothly, and I made it there by 12:15.  Then I went up the many escalators, only to find that Mulholland Drive wasn't playing at all that day, and Lost Highway wasn't playing until the late evening.  They had nothing on at 12:30, and only Eraserhead at 1 (a film I didn't care for and have no intention of revisiting).  I was very clear on putting the schedule together, so someone screwed up, and I am not sure if it was the cinema itself or Cinemaclock, but I was beyond pissed to the point that I am going to make a conscious effort to block Cinemaclock from all my devices.  In addition, I don't plan on going back to the theatre at Yonge and Dundas (just as I am avoiding Beach Cinema).

So I went home in an incredibly foul mood.  This even spread to the point that I decided I didn't want to see Memento at Carlton Cinema, even though this had nothing to do with them.  I just decided this was a movie that I wasn't sure I really wanted to see, and I wanted the opportunity to stop the film if I didn't like it (as I generally don't care for gritty crime films, no matter how novel).  I will still see In the Mood for Love next week, though I will go straight to the Carlton website.

I took a nap and did a couple of other things (though I didn't make any appreciable headway on Canadian taxes), and then I saw A Public Display of Affection over at Crow's.  It wasn't the worst way to end the day (and in fact it is a very thoughtful piece on growing into a "gay elder" in Toronto), though I had such higher hopes for the day...

Taxes and Other Certainties

I wouldn't say I exactly procrastinated on the taxes, though it is true I didn't get too far on them on the weekend of the 5th-6th.  I was still pulling together lots of materials at this point, especially the small gifts to charity.  The only positive is that I need almost all the same material and even a bit more for CRA, so it won't take nearly as long to get started on them, though they do take twice as long, since I need to file completely separately from my wife.  Sigh.  Also I am mostly but not 100% finished with pulling together medical expenses.  This is likely going to be another year where this will be treated as a non-refundable credit, so I am not likely to owe too much to CRA, though I guess I'll know in a few more days.  (I am definitely not leaving it to the last minute like I usually do with the IRS.)

I'm struggling a bit to remember what I did on the previous weekend, though I remember I did bike around a fair bit, even though it was wet.  On Sat., I had tried to fit in a swimming session (since the Regent Park pool was closed).  I found a pool near Corktown, though I didn't actually get there until the pool hours were over.  They strongly warned me to not leave anything in the lockers, as there were massive security issues there.  The pool itself looks pretty nice, and I may go one of these days, though it isn't a free pool (like Regent Park and Jimmie Simpson).  I did hit the galleries in the Distillery, and a small gallery on Richmond near Jarvis, then went to Gallery Gevik in Yorkville.  I honestly can't remember if I did anything else that afternoon or evening, but I think it was mostly spent on taxes, esp. starting my son's.  I did spend a lot of time pulling bank statements together, but some were missing, and it took forever to try to track down some health expenses, though fortunately they don't matter for US taxes only Canadian taxes.  That Sunday I saw Esprit's concert, which featured a solo percussion piece, as well as a Vivier piece.

Over last week, I was mostly overwhelmed by work, but I did continue to pull receipts together.  As I mentioned, I finally managed to get to see Mickey 17.  I had been debating going to see The Little Prince at Theatre Passe Muraille (and they offered me free tickets!), but in the end I passed.  I may go this week possibly, depending on my mood.  Friday, I managed to see Godard's Une Femme est une Femme (literally catching the Lakeshore East train with one or two minutes to spare!  I didn't care much for it at all, and I feel you can already sense the contempt Godard has for conventions and certainly audiences that like movie conventions.  Also, I strongly disliked all the characters who were very unappealing to me.  I wish I had known how much I would have not liked this movie, but live and learn I guess.  

Then Sat. I did manage to get some swimming in, though only about half my normal laps.  Then I went to Gallery Gevik to look again at a small painting that is calling to me, along with a Yorkville gallery that had quite a few Letendre paintings, including a watercolor that is also calling to me (and somewhat blocked my interest in the painting at Gevik).  Then I ran into the AGO to see a new exhibit I missed last time.  (It really wasn't worth my time...)  Then I swung through Richmond 401 and used the cheque that I thought I was going to use at Gevik to pay for the framing of a piece I bought at Abbozzo.  

Then I finally started in on the taxes, and it took pretty much all night.  The worst was I started with the FBAR, which has the worst consequences if you don't file it.  I somehow put it in for the 2023 tax year and used the wrong file name as well!  I wasn't even that tired, so that was an extremely bad sign.  Over the next couple of days, I tried to tell the system to delete it, and that this was not an attempt to amend my 2023 filing, which was on time a year back.  I finally got a note from the government saying that they couldn't delete the improper filing, but that they had noted my comments.  I guess because I then filed the FBAR again with the same info but correct year and file name, that's the best I can do.

I took the forms home for my wife to sign.  I thought I would sleep in, but in the end, I did go to the gym for 25 minutes and picked up a small number of groceries.  I'm glad I didn't completely give up this weekend on staying active (and I had biked everywhere on Sat.), even though taxes were pretty overwhelming.

I still had a few minor tweaks to the taxes (mostly filling in Forms 8938, which are a total pain and simply repeat the same information on the FBAR!).  I think I probably could have/should have amended my Form 2225 and Schedule 1, but it wouldn't have actually changed the tax consequences, and it just wasn't worth it.  (If the IRS asks for any other amendments, I will do it at that time.)  I will read up on the topic and make changes for next year if it is still relevant.  While I haven't decided definitely to renounce or not, the ridiculous extra burden of all the extra forms for having investments in two countries makes the idea of renouncing very appealing, on top of the fact I wouldn't be connected to a country that seems determined to be run into the ground by the Worst and the Stupidest (to say nothing of the most Corrupt and Venal)...

Sun. was at least a little more fun to make up for the last gasp of the taxes.  I saw an Amici concert where they focused mostly on Armenian music.  Then I went out west to Ossington (luckily that was the last stop before a weekend subway closure!) and had Ethiopian food and watched Kiarostami's Certified Copy.  There are many parallels to Before Sunset, and personally I found Before Sunset to be a lot more satisfying.  Kiarostami refuses to let the audience know whether the couple are actually married or not.  Perhaps the one (fan) theory that makes the most sense is that the two are in a long-term affair and that Binoche's character decides to just play along that they are married (after a woman in a cafe assumes they are married) as a "copy" of marriage that has its own intrinsic value.  That still doesn't quite square up with the beginning of the movie where the author seems to have no idea about Binoche's family life, including her sister's name.  So a movie that is being intentionally obscure in a lot of ways, which frankly I don't appreciate.

Anyway, the important thing is that taxes are done, and I mailed them off on Monday.  I don't think I will be quite so late with Canadian taxes, since I have everything pulled together now.  I should be able to get them wrapped up this weekend.  Fingers crossed.  (And perhaps if I don't owe anything or even get some money back from CRA, I will more seriously consider buying the artwork I saw on Sat.  And while I don't buy art as an investment, it wouldn't be a bad idea to track down what I did pay for these other pieces and just note it down somewhere, since "collectables" are taxed at a different rate, and I probably have two or three pieces that should have at least held their value whenever I die or otherwise decide to give them up.  Such a cheery thought for a somewhat dreary day...)

 

 

Mickey 17

After 3 failed attempts, I finally managed to see Mickey 17 on Tues. after work.  It actually snowed on Tues., which was a real kick in the teeth.  (On Wed. I did bike in, despite it being on the cold side, particularly in the morning, but it warmed up a bit in the late afternoon.)  I had just enough time to get to No Frills and then march back to Market Square to see the movies, dropping in a few minutes into the previews.  (Somehow I got the row numbers wrong and was in someone else's seat, which was embarrassing.)  I have a few reservations, particularly Mark Ruffalo's impression of Trump.  Both he and his wife, who was totally obsessed with sauces, wore out their welcome really quickly.  It certainly wasn't a subtle movie, but overall I enjoyed it a lot.  That said, being beaten over the head repeatedly over how humans were the terrible colonizers and the so-called Christian leader who repeatedly called for the aliens to be doused with nerve gas was definitely unnecessary.  

It is interesting to see how polarizing this film is, with almost equal numbers giving it a 5 stars or 1 star!  I was definitely far more interested in life on the ship and some of those subplots than in the conquest of the aliens subplot.  I hear that the director shot enough for a 4 hour movie, so who knows how much of that might show up some day in a director's cut.  I think what I would have wanted to see more of was the love quadrangle, perhaps with Mickey 18 pretending to be Mickey 17 and then to make a move on Kai.

In general, I thought Nasha was a bit too much of a loose cannon to have kept her job as security officer, including pulling guns on fellow crew members any time they messed with Mickey, which was all the time as he was the lowest ranking individual on the ship by a long shot (and basically not even considered fully human).  But the interactions between her and the Mickeys were really the most interesting part of the movie, and I wouldn't have minded seeing even more of that, including how she coped with the fact that she would be mourning Mickey and then immediately start with a fresh one the next day.

Perhaps the drollest thing for me was the printer and how close it came to malfunctioning and generally it seemed to catch just like the old dot matrix printers.  I think I probably still have a few things printed on those continuous rolls of paper.  Or how they didn't always have the "printer tray" ready, and the new Mickey would end up on the floor.  Indeed, my brand new printer doesn't appear to have any sort of a printer tray, and my print jobs always end up on the floor.  Frustrating!

Now part of me is a little annoyed as I had drafted a SF story that uses some of the same conceits (reprinting bodies and overlaying a personality matrix on them).  So it might be a while before I could shop that around.  But it isn't as if this is really unique plot point.  I can think of several other authors that got there first, including Altered Carbon.  What is interesting is that apparently in the actual novel, not the movie, the aliens have a hive mind, which is something I was toying with in my "moon novel."  

And several people were saying they vastly preferred the movie Moon, which had some parallels to Mickey 17, and particularly to the original novel by Edward Ashton.  I'm kind of glad I didn't see this, as it apparently has cloning as a plot point, and yes I was thinking that there might be a handful of the colony founder's clones running wild in my novel, so probably best to wrap up whatever I am going to do with my own novel (which is, honestly, probably nothing) before watching Moon.

I had debated going to see Blade Runner on Wed., but was just far too busy, and tonight I need to get a first cut of the U.S. taxes done.  If all goes well, I will try to see Godard's Une Femme est une femme at The Fox after work on Friday, but I have to say I predict something will come up to prevent that from happening, given the way things have been going lately.

Quiet Desperation

I'm struggling a bit to recall how I found out about Dorothy Edwards.  Most likely it was through an Amazon recommendation, though I don't think I have been browsing anything lately that would have triggered this.  At any rate, I was surprised at the parallels between her and Katherine Mansfield (connections to the Bloomsbury group and dying much too young), though I suspect Virginia would have seen Mansfield as much more of a true rival.  Indeed, the way that Edwards sort of fell out with the group, and with David Garnett in particular, led to her suicide in 1934.  She had published Rhapsody, a collection of short stories, and Winter Sonata, a novel about a young man who struggles with his feelings towards a beautiful young woman in the village where he lives.  It's not really giving that much away to say there is not a happy ending in sight in the novel.  (I haven't read through the short stories yet.)

I don't remember all the details of Carr's A Month in the Country.  I vaguely remember the plot running on similar lines but being very different tonally.  Nonetheless, given that A Month in the Country is quite short, I think I will slip it into my list of very short books I am reading on the side.

For that matter, I have only read long chunks of Walden, but not the whole thing.  (This links back to the title of the post: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”)  Perhaps in the late summer and autumn, I will finally tackle reading all of Walden.  The edition I have also has some excerpts from The Maine Woods and Cape Cod, and I'll probably read those as well.  I actually have the full texts in a LOA volume of Thoreau's writings, but honestly, I think that will have to wait for some other year.

For the book club at work, we are reading one of my suggestions - Tim O'Brien's America Fantastica, which is a darkly comic road trip through Trump's America.  (This is set during the first Trump term and has quite a lot to say about greed and corruption.)

I'm kind of reskimming it now, though I don't know if I will definitely get through the whole thing.  I may need to borrow a copy from the library if that is possible.  (After checking, this definitely doesn't appear to be a problem...)  Here is a good summary though it and the interview with O'Brien have some significant spoilers, which I am trying to avoid.  At the time, I saw lots of parallels with Rushdie's Quichotte, and those are definitely still there.  But the slightly manic road tripping (with a spunky female sidekick) also recalls Tibor Fischer's The Thought Gang.  I'm trying hard not to endlessly reread books I've already read (though sometimes I do read them faster the second time around), but I remember really enjoying The Thought Gang, and I probably ought to read it again one of these days.

I did just reread Gide's The Vatican Cellars.  While it was fine, I didn't think it was quite as amusing this time around.  The criminal gang was sufficiently interesting, but Lafcadio is a bit of a drag, and I couldn't really get behind his motiveless crime this time around.  But it does set me up to read a couple of short Gide novels this year.

Anyway, to round out books that I might reread in the next couple of years.  I am definitely considering Murdoch's Under the Net, even though I don't know where my copy is.  I did plan on reading other Murdoch, though it might not be until 2026, so there isn't a huge hurry.  It looks like I read it for the first time in 2014.

I don't think I am going to reread Hoban's Turtle Diary in 2025, though there is a chance I might tackle it in 2026.  I read this back in 2019.  I don't have any specific novels I would pair it with, though it does make me think of del Toro's The Shape of Water.

On top of my work book club, I just found out that The Fox seems to be partnering with Great Escape Books (over on Kingston) to do a book club meeting on Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes on May 9 with the actual film screening the following week at the Fox.  This is awfully tempting, but I am not sure I will be able to fit it in.

Just to recap, I have about 100 pages to go in Winter Sonata, and I should wrap this up tomorrow (or rather the next day I take transit).  I have two more chapters (roughly 150 pages left) in Soseki's I am a Cat (which honestly I am not enjoying all that much).  I'll probably go ahead and intersperse I am a Cat with Dawn Powell's Sunday, Monday and Always and Joy Williams's State of Grace as I wrap this up.  After that, I probably need to switch exclusively to O'Brien's America Fantastica, and then decide if I am going to read Abe's The Woman in the Dunes.  I think after this it is The Leopard and some other short story collections and maybe A Month in the Country.

Speaking of quiet desperation, I think I'll put in another hour or so on the ground work to do my US taxes and then go to bed.  Unfortunately, because of a pension distribution (a long story), I likely will owe US taxes, or at least I might before I claim the foreign tax credit, but I need to have the Canadian taxes completely done before I know what that credit would be worth.  It's definitely annoying.  I was on track to have the US taxes done in time, but think it would be a real push to have the Canadian taxes also done by the 15th.  I mean Musk is destroying the IRS, and Trump imagines replacing taxes with tariffs, but neither of these (quite horrible) events will happen in time to prevent me from needing to file my own taxes.  Sigh...
 

Edit: I just found out I don't even have a copy of The Woman in the Dunes.  I was sure I did, but instead I have The Ruined Map (which is probably the book I remembered wanting to read) and The Ark Sakura.  Weird.  (Maybe I do have a copy in storage in the basement, but I suspect not.)  TPL has this as an e-book, but only one reference copy.  Fortunately, there are a few copies kicking around at Robarts if I decide to tackle this after all.

 

Last Chance - Truck and Red

There is quite a lot I should blog about as it has been on my mind for some time, but I am running late, per usual, and will keep this brief.

I was able to slip in to see John Logan's Red over at the Theatre Centre.  I enjoyed this production a lot, though nothing ever quite lives up to the experience of seeing Alfred Molina on Broadway.

Molina even looked a bit more than the real Rothko (above) than this actor, though that doesn't really matter in the end.

At any rate, for 90 minutes you get Rothko opining on art and other artists and how the viewers need to be "compassionate" towards the art they are viewing.  I've actually seen this play three times (also in Vancouver), making it one of the most-seen plays I've seen along with Stoppard's Arcadia, Kushner's Angels in America, Rivera's Marisol and of course many Shakespeare plays (including 6 Lear's after a slow start!).  I wouldn't quite put it that company, but it is definitely worth seeing, esp. if you love visual art.

There are two shows today and one on Sunday over at the Theatre Centre.

The other play is Truck, which is a one hour play about automated vehicles taking over the trucking industry and putting thousands of blue-collar workers out of work, on top of the general deindustrialization that has so shaken North America.  The playwright also sees the same forces impacting creative work, and even copy-writing and legal work, though he doesn't raise it in the play, only in this interview.  Unfortunately, the CBC piece gets the closing date wrong and says the show has closed (and even the splash screen at the Factory website says the same!).  Nonetheless, there are two more performances of Truck; one tonight and a matinee tomorrow.  Tickets here.

I'll just drop in one more thing, as I am really late now.  I had vaguely remembered there is a Warhol exhibit opening up somewhere in Yorkville, and I didn't think I had missed it but wasn't sure.  It was surprisingly hard to find the right info, but the show opens next weekend at Taglialatella Galleries and will run through April.  I expect to get there next Sat., and also to stop in at Galley Gevik, though I think the current exhibit will have closed, which is a bit annoying.  Well, I really don't get over to Yorkville that often and probably can't add yet one more cluster of galleries to my crowded calendar.

Edit: While I never made it swimming, I did stop in and saw some new paintings at Thomas Landry in the Distillery.  Then I went to Taglialatella in Yorkville.  Interestingly, they had all the Warhols installed, so I wandered around for a bit, though I plan on going back next weekend with my wife.  Interestingly, Gallery Gevik thinks they will extend for a few more days, so I didn't absolutely need to get over there on Sat.  I am sorry that I didn't stay on top of this and see the Henry Wanton Jones exhibit back in Nov.  I liked several of the pieces.  They were nice enough to give me one of the exhibit catalogs.  They had a handful of pieces from that show in the basement, and I was able to look them over.  There is a small chance I will pick up a small painting, though I have to admit, I am not sure where I would hang it...

Cutting It Close

I think I mentioned that I just gave up on trying to submit a piece to the Toronto Star short story contest.  I do have a decent idea and it was written out, but I just couldn't find the time to type it out.  (I definitely should take a week off and just type up all the other material I have written in long-hang before I completely forget what I was trying to write out.  My hand-writing is pretty hard to decipher, even for me...)

Anyway, as I mentioned a couple of times, my old computer went down, and I really needed that to some some specialized computing to finish up this paper.  I really should have spent the evenings working on it, but mostly I spent the time on work work unfortunately.  So I ended up backed into a corner and the one week extension I had came and went, and I said I would try to wrap it up and turn it in over the weekend.

On Friday, I did manage to get the estimation software working, and I also figured out how to get Stata to produce weighted cross-tabs.  This is something that is a breeze in SPSS, though I used to have to do this from home, since I can't get my employer to install SPSS.  I did work from home on Friday.  Now in an ideal world, where I wasn't being pressed so much on the work front, I probably would have gone to see Gary Smulyan playing on Thurs., and then run over to the Revue to see Wenders's The American Friend on Friday.  Instead, I ended up staying until the last minute and then went to see Smulyan on Friday instead.  It was a good show.  I wrote out a lot of notes for the paper, though I have to admit, this was more useful for getting my thoughts together, and I didn't really use most of them in the final draft.

Sat. I went to the gym reasonably early, then took my daughter over to this bakery where she will be volunteering next week.  Her mother took her home, and I went over to Woodbine Beach.  I want to check out the Winter Stations exhibit.  I seem to manage to get to it every other year, and I was reasonably determined to go this year.  The pieces aren't really what one would call great art, but they are somewhat playful, and the best of them allow for children to clamber all over them.

It was pretty chilly, and I had to make a big loop to get back to Beach Cinema.  I had checked a couple of times, and Mickey 17 was playing at 3:30.  However, when I got there at 3:27, someone had changed the schedule, and it was now scheduled to play at 3:10!  Even with the 10 minutes of trailers, I would be coming in a few minutes into the film, so I just turned around and left.  This happened to me before, spoiling one of the very last times I could convince my daughter to let me take her to the movies (I think it was the Wreck It Ralph sequel where they had switched the times of the regular and 3-D versions of the film).  I'm generally a pretty unforgiving guy, and this will probably be the very last time I attempt to see a movie at Beach Cinema.  I swung by the Jones Library on the way back, and then mostly just crashed, between disappointment and general exhaustion.  I had debated going back out to see Smulyan a second time, or maybe to see if I could catch an evening show of Mickey 17.  In the end, I didn't really do much, aside from get some rest and run a few last cross tabs of the data.  I should have pushed myself to write more of the paper, but I just didn't.  

On Sunday, I biked over to Jimmie Simpson to swim.  Then I picked up a few groceries.  Then I worked on the paper pretty much straight though until 6 pm.  I then ran over to the Revue to see Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg.  Transit was not cooperative, and I ended up showing up 5 minutes late, just as the final previews were showing.  (This is getting a bit old...)  It was an interesting film, mixing true stories about Winnipeg history with his own family history.  It was certainly quirky.  I took the King streetcar (and actually was able to get a bit more of the paper drafted on the way).  I ended up stopping in at the office, and just powered through.  I ended up turning in a really rough draft after 1 am.  In fact, I found out (at the last minute) that I had formatted the paper incorrectly, so I tried to get that in shape, which took maybe another 30 minutes.  It's far from my best work, but it's not too shabby for a paper written in a day and a half, and the main thing is it keeps me on the program for this conference in Ottawa in May, and it sets me up to work with these professors on turning this into a proper paper.

I finally left the office around 2 am.  Fortunately, the streetcars were still running, and I just managed to catch a Kingston car, which dropped me off at Queen and Carlaw.  Unfortunately, the night bus wasn't scheduled to stop by for 25 minutes, so I had to walk home.  My mood was not helped by the fact that it actually snowed, and of course I hadn't thought to wear books.

I worked from home on Monday, though I should have take more time off.  I ended up going over to Paradise after all.  And I left enough time this time that I was able to drop in at African Palace for Ethiopian food.  I was there to see Fellini's La Strada.  Wow, that was a depressing film...  I don't exactly regret watching it, but I can't really envision watching it again.

I generally am not taking transit much these days, but, when I do, I am slowly making my way through Soseki's I am a Cat.  I brought this on the trip up to Ottawa and managed to get 300 pages into it (which is definitely better than my progress on a few other long trips).  I only just recently hit page 400, and there are 200 pages more to go!  I have to admit, this isn't really grabbing me, so I am trying to read it gently, and I will take it over to Seekers Bookstore after I finish reading it.

 

I think for the last few chapters, I will alternate a relatively short book and then a "cat" chapter.  I think it will likely be Gide's Lafcadio's Adventures, perhaps Dawn Powell's story collection Sunday, Monday and Always and then Joy Williams's State of Grace.  That might provide a bit of variety while still clearing out a few more books.  I think after this will be Lampedusa's The Leopard and then maybe Dorothy Edward's Winter Sonata (or I could reverse them while winter is still fresh in memory).

It's going to be another overstuffed week, but I am going to try not to do quite so much over the weekend.

Computer Almost Back in Business

The timing was just terrible to try to carve out time to set up this new computer, as I had an incredibly busy week at work, just like the previous week in fact.  We had a number of impossible deadlines, and the only realistic way to make them was to work overtime.  I definitely can't have this become the new norm.  As if that weren't enough, I needed to try to write a paper by the end of day.  I thought just possibly I could do it, but the questions at work never stopped, and at some point I just gave up.  Indeed, I eventually went to The Rex to see Gary Smulyan (backed by Neil Swainson and Terry Clarke).  I did write down a lot of notes for the paper, but I didn't have a laptop or any such thing with me.  I told the people at the conference that if the portal for papers was still open on Sunday, I would submit, but that would be the best I could do.  I probably shouldn't even have promised that, as I desperately need a break.  If it hadn't been for work (and this paper deadline) I would probably have managed to see Smulyan yesterday, then I might have gone to see Wenders's The American Friend at the Revue tonight.  That said, going to see Smulyan was fine; I believe this is the first time I've heard him live.

I'm not actually sure what I will do tomorrow.  Ideally, I will take my daughter to this bakery she is supposed to volunteer at next week, though I suspect she will bail on me, esp. as it will likely rain.  I'd like to go swimming, though I have to say the times aren't ideal, though I might be able to make it back to Matty Eckler in the early evening.  I would like to get over to 401 Richmond, but that seems unlikely.  It looks like there is one exhibit at Red Head Gallery that closes tomorrow, but I think I will just not make it.  I definitely need to get to 401 Richmond on the 29th.  I believe this is the same day I am seeing Truck at Factory, so at least I'll be in the right general area.  Anyway, I am likely to be staying east this Sat., as I will see if I can get to the Beaches to see Winter Stations (which closes March 30, I believe), and then will likely see Mickey 17 at the movie theatre out that way as well.  (Of course, this does somewhat depend on not feeling particularly guilty about missing the paper deadline.)

Anyway, back to my computer updates.  While I would never have recommended this, there have been a few positives.  I believe I mentioned that Mailstore now works again after a gap of several months, and I was able to find the old emails.  I was able to get TotalRecorder working after getting those old emails back.

It tooks a few tries but I managed to get iTunes back on the computer.  So far it hasn't kept asking for the password, knock wood.  A lot of programs were relatively simple to get back, including 7-Zip, VLC Player and Libre Office and IfranView (once I remembered its name).  I ended up going with a new CD ripper - EAC (Exact Audio Copy).

What was relatively difficult to the point I nearly gave up was getting Kindle and Calibre set up the right way.  (I was getting extremely put out over this.)  However, I think it is oddly enough a staging issue in fact.  It is best to get Kindle for PC back on the computer, then Adobe Digital Editions, and then finally the right version of Calibre.  It was incredibly frustrating, but it seems to be working again.

About the only thing I haven't been able to figure out is how to bring MODI (the MS Tiff editor) out from hiding.  It is possible that it simply isn't possible in Windows 11, and there are a handful of alternatives, but it is still annoying.  And while I think I downloaded the latest version, I don't think I have installed Notepad ++, which I will need to do, as I have a need for it coming up quickly.  I also have a subscription to SPSS (as well as Disney and Crave).  I don't think I'll get the temp license for SPSS back in time, so I really ought to follow through with cancelling!

Oh, there is also some good news.  I had copied some of the key files from the damaged hard drive to a USB memory stick, but it basically said everything was damaged and corrupted.  This was a hard blow, but I wanted to give it another try, so I picked up a new hard drive from Staples.  I was able to copy the damaged files.  I believe this was a successful rescue effort (and it was just a failure on the part of the USB stick, not expecting such a huge transfer of data!), though I will have to sit down later and try to open up every one of the transferred files.  So this put me in a pretty good mood for once.  I think the amount of files that I actually lost is probably pretty low, all things considered.  (Weirdly enough, I can't seem to recover a playlet I wrote as SFYS was winding down.  I submitted it through Google forms, rather than emailing it, or I could track it down that way.  I still have the hand-written notes, but I certainly don't feel like retyping it if I don't have to...)

Ok, with that I really had better get back to this paper, at least for an hour or two.  Ciao! 

Edit to add: I forgot that I have plugged in an old scanner, and the new computer doesn't seem to recognize it.  So I am a little hesitant on trying to install drivers and such, though I may do that at some point, after I clear the desk to the point I can see which cable is going where!  I do have a newish printer, and if things get to that point, it can do basic scanning, but I would still prefer to get this old scanner working.

Three Off-the-Beaten Path Film Makers

I've been thinking a bit more about Universal Language, which was the Canadian film where almost all the dialogue was in Farsi or (to my mind) very strangled French.  I suppose this was partly to foreground the strangeness of the world of the film but mostly as a nod to the Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami.  I've actually seen very few of Kiarostami's films.  I'm fairly sure I will not really care for his work, but I'll try to watch a few of the more central films, like Taste of Cherry and perhaps Certified Copy.  I did watch The Traveler, which is about a selfish boy trying to see a soccer match, at TIFF, but I didn't enjoy it at all.  It reminded me too much of Narayan's Swami and Friends.

Here's a shortened list of Kiarostami films that are generally available in North America:
The Koker trilogy - Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987)
And Life Goes On aka Life and Nothing More (1992)
Through the Olive Trees (1994)
Close-Up (1990) - not part of the Koker trilogy
Taste of Cherry (1997)
The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)
Ten (2002)
Tickets (2005) with additional sections directed by Ken Loach and Ermanno Olmi
Certified Copy (2010)
Like Someone in Love (2012)
24 Frames (2017) - Posthumously released

I don't think I've seen any of these, though it is possible I watched Like Someone in Love at TIFF.

Kiarostami also was the story writer on Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon, which I'll probably get around to one of these days.  It's not really all that many films, and nearly all are still available through Criterion (though the DVD of Taste of Cherry is no longer available, as they put out a Blu-Ray instead).

While there are not great similarities between Kiarostami and Aki Kaurismäki, I usually think of them together, though I would say Kaurismäki films are definitely more plot-driven.

Here are Kaurismäki's main films:
O Crime and Punishment  (1983)
O Calamari Union (1985)
Shadows in Paradise (1986)
O Hamlet Goes Business (1987)
Ariel (1988)
Leningrad Cowboys Go America  (1989)
The Match Factory Girl  (1990)  
Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses (1994)   
Total Balalaika Show (1994)
O Drifting Clouds (1996)
The Man Without a Past (2002)
Lights in the Dusk (2006)
Le Havre  (2011)
The Other Side of Hope (2017)
Fallen Leaves (2023)

I actually own a couple of DVD sets by Kaurismäki, though they are mostly gathering dust.  I did watch Hamlet Goes Business, which is certainly quirky.  I did see Fallen Leaves at TIFF back when it came out.  I thought I had seen The Other Side of Hope at Facets in Chicago, but given the timing, that's not possible.

Fairly recently, a new Blu-ray set came out, covering essentially everything Kaurismäki did through The Other Side of Hope.  It's a tough call, given there is a fair bit of duplication with what I have.  Also, I'm fairly sure I'm not going to really be into the Leningrad Cowboys.  The middle ones in the Proletariat Trilogy (Ariel and Match Factory Girl) and late films are covered pretty well by Criterion and are easy to rent through the library.  I would definitely have gotten the set had Fallen Leaves been in there, but it stops just short.  I will probably think about it for a while (and watch a couple other of his films) and then most likely get it anyway given all the shorts and bonus features in the set, but I'm a little annoyed.

The last film-maker in today's post moves us from Finland to Sweden.  Roy Andersson is another quirky director.  Apparently, he has retired from film-making, but one never knows.  I've certainly seen a higher proportion of his films, as I definitely saw You, the Living (perhaps at Facets) and I'm almost certain I also saw A Pigeon...  I thought that the scene with the house moving on tram tracks (from You, the Living) was similar in spirit to some of the more absurd sections of Universal Language.

Andersson's main films
A Swedish Love Story (1970)
Giliap (1975)
Songs from the Second Floor (2000)
You, the Living (2007)
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014)
About Endlessness (2019)

A Blu-Ray set came out from BFI with all of these films, aside from Giliap, and adds a documentary, Being a Human Person.  I went ahead and ordered this and am just waiting for it to turn up.  So that's the round-up for today.

 

Computer Follies

I was pretty close to having a meltdown in that I know I had backed up everything in my MailStore archives, but I wasn't able to find it anywhere.  It finally turned up thankfully.  Now it is definitely easier merging two databases if I had MailStore Server, but you have to pay for that.  I am going to see if I can get it to work with the freeware version, but I have saved off the new archive (of the recent emails I haven't been able to back up for months), in case something goes wrong, as it likely will...

It terms of overall priorities, I would say it is getting Total Recorder back up and running, and then the wav editor I use.  I'd like to get Calibre reinstalled soon, as well as Kindle_for_PC and then probably iTunes.  I'm pretty sure I do remember my password for iTunes.  For whatever reason, I had to plug in my password every week or so, so I got increasingly salty towards Apple. 

So there was a snag, as there always is with MailStore in that it upgraded to version 25 recently, which means that old archives are invalid.  It's possible to downgrade to 24.2, which I did but it isn't entirely clear how to then export the files into the new format.  I'm sure it is possible, and at least my old emails (from as far back as 2011) are still saved, which is what I really cared about, even though some of the even older emails are in a not particularly useful format.  I think what I will do is rerun the archiving of my current email, which seems a bit stupid, but it will combine newish emails with what was already archived, and then I'll figure out how to move the whole enchilada over to version 25, though not for a month or two I suspect.

I had some image editing program I liked - Irfanview or something like that.  And a PDF editing software that was useful - I think it was PDF Split And Merge Basic.  And there is supposed to be a way to restore the MS Tif editor (MOBI?), so I'll see if that is still possible in Windows 11.  I will probably reload Beyond 2020 which is a special software used to look at Census data files (from the Canadian Census) and 7 Zip. And I guess LibreOffice, though I don't use it all that much.  Oh, and I guess Comic Rack to read cbr files.

The last rolling update for the evening.  TotalRecorder was pitching a bit of a fit, but I finally got it up and running.  One added bonus was the registration key I had (from an email in that archive from nearly 10 years ago!) still worked, so I am golden.  

I think I'll just download a few more of the missing programs but actually install them in a day or two.  

 

Back in Business (& Back on the Bike)

I truly don't have much time to post right now, but I thought I would mention that about a week ago, my home computer crashed.  I knew this was coming and had been fairly good about backing stuff up, but then work got extremely busy and I went a bit crazy downloading stuff from Anna's Archive.  This was all just sitting in my Download folder, and in fact I had bought another flashdrive and was going to copy everything the next day (famous last words) whereas that day I was making space on another hard drive in order to free up space on my phone (prior to heading out to Ottawa to see Our Lady Peace and Collective Soul*).

Anyway, Windows decided to do an unauthorized upgrade.  (Given how many major issues and slow performance are attributable to Windows upgrades, I think it is probably worse than any virus I've ever dealt with.)  This led to a complete hard drive failure.  I am sure Bill Gates would say that if I only had left enough free space on the C drive, then it wouldn't have tried to write to corrupted sectors, etc., but it's still completely unacceptable.  In fact, this all happened right before my trip to Ottawa, so I was stewing about that the whole way up and back.

On Sunday I removed the hard drive to see how much could be recovered.  I took the remaining computer shell over to Staples for electronic recycling and to see if they had any computers in stock that had optical drives, specifically a CD/DVD burner, and they did not.  While I knew it was a waste of time, and it was impossible to talk to anyone on the phone!, I went over to the big Best Buy at the Eaton Centre, and they didn't have anything either.  They tried to sell me on an external optical drive.  As it happens, I have one of those, which I have been using for quite some time since my desktop started failing (it was the second or third bad omen!), but even it is acting up a bit.  So I wasn't going to start off with a computer without one!  I went one more place with no success, and then I went over to Paradise to see a Seijun Suzuki film called Yumeji.  Unfortunately, I didn't like it at all.  Then I managed to get over to the Women from Space event on Bathurst.  

It was sold out, but I thought I might as well see if they had any tickets at the door.  Not only they did have a few spots left, but because I was coming in during the second act, I only paid $15 (not $20).  I was there to see Myra Melford, Ingrid Laubrock and ​Lesley Mok play.  Sadly, I found their version of free jazz to be really disappointing and frankly boring.  I ended up leaving about 40 minutes in.  I'm not exactly sorry I went, but generally I don't like free jazz and I probably should stop going unless it is someone that I know will be somewhat entertaining like Ken Vandermark.  On the whole it was not a great day.  After all that, I finally broke down and ordered a new computer.  I ended up getting a pretty basic model, and I do wish I had been able to get more internal memory, but that meant it was impossible to get the optical drive for some reason.  So I will probably be even more reliant on external hard drives than before, though maybe that isn't the worst thing in the world; it will force me to be more disciplined about backing up files.

I'm going to skip over the week.  It was a very long week at work.  I also realized I had let the deadline slip for the CTRF conference up in Ottawa in May.  Technically, I was supposed to have the paper ready by Friday, as well as register.  Unfortunately, due to other reasons, I cannot install estimation software like alogit or even the freeware Larch, on my work laptop, so that meant it was a waiting game until the new computer showed up and I could reinstall absolutely everything.  (This is really proving to be a drag.  I may make a list of everything I had added to my computer and now need to reinstall, and generally restore passwords to accounts, etc.)  I did get a one week extension, though this will likely not be enough.

The one thing that I did for fun was go see Performance Review.  Outside the March was putting this on in a coffee shop in the Trinity-Bellwood area.  Getting there was a drag, and I nearly gave up on the streetcars to take a taxi.  I'm glad I didn't as there was a very delayed opening, and the performance didn't actually start until 8:30!  In the meantime, you could order coffee or tea and a cookie.  It's basically a fictionalized take on the various jobs the playwright (and performer) had in her early to mid twenties, focusing on a particularly bad event in each.  It was quite interesting.

Anyway, I was expecting the computer to be delivered on Mon., but it actually came in on Thurs., which was terrific.  It's taken a few days to get it mostly where I need it to be, though I still have 5 or 6 key programs that still need to be migrated over.  One perhaps surprising bonus is that MailStore is working again.  About 4 or 5 months ago (or maybe even more) it stopped working with by Bell email account, which was super annoying.  On the plus side, the version of the archive that I copied over (when I knew the computer was dying) covered everything I downloaded before the linkage was no longer supported.  I am a bit concerned about merging the two, but there are ways to do it.

I think I need to get that working this afternoon to see if I can find the key to TotalRecorder (and then request a new one because you need a different version with Windows 11.  (While I would have preferred to buy a computer with Windows 10, it just wasn't an option...)  The other things that may be a bit trickier will be to reinstall Kindle on my new computer, since I want a slightly older version, as well as getting Calibre to work again.

I do have some bad news in that virtually all but not all of the files I copied over (when I turned the old, corrupted hard drive into an external drive) are not viable.  On the positive side, I was able to generate a list of all these files, and many I can download again from Anna's archive.  It's going to be annoying but at least I have a record of what is currently corrupted.

The other, more positive news is that the weather has improved, and I have started biking to work again.  I was in fact going to bike to go swimming in Regent Park, but the swim times moved from 11-1 to 7-10 am.  Not at all happy about that.  I need to do a few tasks, including dropping off some pants and picking up something at the library, and I might stop in at Distillery to check out the galleries, but I will have to put off 401 Richmond for next weekend.  I'm pretty sore, however, and I hope that I am back to my normal comfort level in a couple more weeks.  At this point, I am running quite late, so I had better just do a couple of things right now (and risk the rain) and then maybe go swimming this evening at Matty Eckler.  I am just going to have to skip a couple of movies I would like to see at Carlton and then hope that Mickey 17 sticks around an extra week at Market Square.  (Ironically, one of the movies I am picking up at the library is Rumours that only lasted a week or two at Market Square and TIFF.  Hopefully, that doesn't happen to me this time around...)

* After all the trouble I took to get up to Ottawa for this concert, they ended up adding a date at Budweiser Stage.  Not too happy about that...  It was a good concert, and I particularly liked Collective Soul, and I had a terrific view of the stage, but I am not sure I would have gone had I known they would indeed tour Toronto after all...

Still Cold, Less Snow

An awful lot of the snow did melt last week, which generally lifted my spirits a bit.  Maybe the best outcome was that the bridge over to Gerrard Square was clear enough that I could actually just wear my tennis shoes, so I went over the bridge Friday evening and went to the gym.  I'm trying to get back to my routine where I either went to the gym or swimming a second time each week, esp. when I am not doing all the biking, which is how I got most of my cardio.  Now coming back, there were definitely spots that were wet and starting to ice up, but I managed ok.  It seems that most of this dried up by Sat., whereas when I was downtown (on Sat.) there were many ice patches on the sidewalks, so I clearly needed my boots.  Nonetheless, I am about to head over to the gym (and groceries) shortly, and I think I can get away with tennis shoes one more time.

It was very cold walking around yesterday, and the TTC was not great.  They had closed down Osgoode to Bloor-Yonge.  There was some trickle down impact in that because of the huge number of shuttle buses they needed at Osgoode, some (and perhaps all) of the Queen streetcars were stopping short, which meant even more frustration and having to make longer walks in the cold.  

I was trying to get to the Regent Park pool by 11, so I could leave by noon and still make it to TIFF by 12:45.  I jumped on an off-route streetcar thinking it was the Dundas streetcar, but it was the Queen streetcar!  Which took me pretty far out of my way, so I didn't make it to the pool until 11:15 or so.  I was fairly efficient, and managed to get in 18 laps and left right before noon.  I decided because of the subway shut down, I would just take the streetcar to Dundas to the AGO rather than taking the subway one stop and still having to walk.  I had to hustle (and it was bloody cold), but I made it to TIFF by 12:42.  I enjoyed Universal Language, which is inspired largely by the Iranian cinema of Abbas Kiarostami (and to a lesser extent by Guy Maddin*).  As has been reported elsewhere, the movie either takes place in Montreal or in Winnipeg, though a Winnipeg where everybody speaks Farsi, which is certainly a bit unsettling.  I'll circle back with a few more thoughts on the film later.

I had forgotten my pass to get into work, so I just went over to No Frills and then up to St. George.  I dropped in at the Bata Shoe Museum, mostly because I wanted to see their exhibit on 80s fashion.  I had thought I missed it, but it still runs a few more weeks.  It's fine, though it's only a small exhibit.  I spent only about 20-30 minutes in the museum, as I am not really a shoe person.

Then I went to Robarts and dropped off a few books, though not the ones still at work, and picked up Bradley's The Ministry of Time, which the book club at work is reading for March.  I'm actually mostly done with the huge stack of poetry I have checked out from Robarts, though I have a few books out from TPL.  Anyway, I should be able to return to reading novels next week, finish up Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (where I am about halfway through), wrap up Last Night at the Lobster (only 100 pages left) and then read The Ministry of Time.  Then some of the other books I had planned to read - Lafcadio's Adventures and The Leopard are next up.  Actually, next weekend, I will be coming back from Ottawa.  I think I'll read Soseki's I am a Cat on that trip.

I did stop in at BMV and tried to sell off my Region 2 DVDs (La Notte and L'Avventura).  Unfortunately, the video buyer (downstairs) was tied up and the main buyer wouldn't even look at them.  I don't know if I should try again or just email Seekers and Circus Books to see if there is any interest.  I don't want to be carting these all over town, trying to flog them...

I just came home after that.  It was still cold, and I was tired, so I didn't go back out, even though Winnetka Bowling League was playing somewhere on Queen St. West.  Strangely enough, I have some indecipherable scribble on the calendar.  I have no idea what this is, though it looks like I have two question marks, so it clearly wasn't something that was high priority to see.  I've gone through the list of usual suspects (The Rex, Revue, Paradise, TIFF, Factory, Tarragon, Alumnae, Coal Mine, Red Sandcastle, even TPM and Assembly) and just have no idea what I was thinking.  So I think I will just go in to work for a bit (after the gym), try to catch Anora around 3:50, then drop off these books at Robarts and come home.  If I have time, maybe I will finally watch another Almodovar film, Matador perhaps.  Ok, if I am going to get this done, I need to get going.  (At least I did cook what we are having for dinner already...)

* I haven't seen all that many Maddin films, though I did see Archangel at View the North where Maddin actually did a bit of a Q&A.  Anyway, the Revue is showing Maddin's My Winnipeg on March 23, and I'll probably go see that.

Small Frustrations (Continued)

I have a post titled exactly like this from last month, but I suppose it is because so many days are filled with small frustrating things that even I recognize are small potatoes compared to all the truly terrible things going on in the world, like Trump selling out Ukraine or global warming making the planet unlivable for our children.  I am probably feeling even more raw than usual because we are sleep-walking into an election in Ontario where Doug Ford is going to get another sweeping and totally undeserved victory.  About the only tiny good news on the horizon is that at the federal level, we might be looking at another minority government for the Liberals, as Canadians have decided that PP is far, far too much like Trump for their taste.  Here's hoping anyway.  This turn of events might or might not sway me to finally get that tattoo I have been contemplating.  The truth is, not that I am so scared of the pain, but that I might not want to have a Canadian tattoo when I am fairly sure I will be fed up with Canada (as I am with everything else) before too long.  I am, however, wondering about getting a tattoo memorializing The Barbaric Yawp, which was a poetry magazine I was editor of for a few years while an undergraduate.  (I've been thinking about this episode in my life lately because it represents an intriguing road not taken...)  I'll scan a picture of the logo in the near future, since I would need one anyway to take to a tattoo parlour.

To get back to the point, it can actually be a very thin line separating a day that is predominantly frustrating versus one that was overall positive in my mind.  As a recent example, I have been having to work far too long at work with only occasional breakthroughs with far more setbacks lately, which colours pretty much everything.  I have been trying to get over to Carlton to see The Night is Short: Walk On Girl, and it was showing at 7 pm (and then maybe 9:45) Monday through Thurs.  It became fairly obvious that I was going to have to work late on Monday, and I briefly debated going to the late show but just went home.  Now I would likely have tried harder to go on Monday if there was even a chance I could see Mulholland Drive at the Revue on Tues., but the tickets were sold out and I didn't feel like standing in the rush line (like I did for Withnail and I).  So that meant I would shift Night is Short to Tues., though there was another potential snag in that I was roped into a work call with the L.A. office from 6-7, so I tried to find out if there was a place with free wifi around.  It actually didn't look promising at all, as this part of downtown is a Starbucks desert and the nearest Tim Hortons is very much an urban one with essentially no amenities.  I'm not even sure if it has a bathroom...

In the end, I ended up working until 5:50 on something else, so there wasn't any chance of getting up to College anyway, so I just (somewhat grumblingly) took the call from the office.  Fortunately, it wrapped up early (a rare occurrence!), and I had just enough time to make it to the theatre, slipping in during the previews for Mickey 17, which is looking like a movie that I would enjoy, so I'll plan on catching that in a few weeks when it opens.  The theatre was pretty full for a Tues. evening.  This is such a weird movie, but I think it may be my second favourite anime, right behind Paprika, which I'll watch again if it shows up at Carlton in the near future.  I was pretty hungry throughout, but overall the evening was a pretty good one as I managed to snatch some personal time back for myself.  I was even able to get to Bulk Barn, though this was after the show not before.  They were warning people, we are only open for 8 more minutes, then 5 more minutes, etc., but I was lightning fast and picked up some trail mix before they kicked everyone out.

So that made for a pretty good evening, though I did end up going to bed instead of writing up a short story for the Star's contest, and then I had hoped maybe to type it up Wed. over lunch (as the deadline was 5 pm) but ended up working straight through lunch and didn't even eat until 2:30, then went straight back into meetings.  While I did ultimately leave work at an almost reasonable time (6:30),* I never found the time to type this in (and indeed the story probably works better as a playlet than as a short story, not that I have found an outlet for my theatre writing since SFYS went dark yet again).  Anyway, I was still beating myself up a bit over this while I marched over to TIFF -- only to find that the 6:45 showing of Universal Language was sold out.  So incredibly frustrating.  This sort of thing just reinforces how frustrating I find TIFF in general and why I gave up my membership there.  I spent a bit of time going through the schedule of TIFF and The Fox, which is also showing Universal Language this week.  Go figure!  (I was hoping it might turn up at Market Square, which sometimes carries the movies around the same time as TIFF.**  It doesn't have Universal Language, but they are showing Anora, and I suppose I might try to check this out on Sunday, if I don't have anything else planned...)  It looks like the best bet is to try to catch Universal Language on Sat.  Either I can see it at The Fox at 1:45, or at TIFF at 12:45 (in the relatively roomy Theatre 3 where there are plenty of seats) or in Theatre 5 at 3:30, which is a pretty small and sometimes uncomfortable theatre (and it is about halfway sold out already).  If I was confident that I could bike, then I could commit to either 1:45 at the Fox or 12:45 at TIFF, but if I am stuck on the streetcars, it is a lot dicier because they are still diverting the Dundas streetcar, as far as I know.  While it warmed up a lot and the snow is receding, the streets were still far too messy for me to attempt to bike in.  It looks like the temperature is going to drop this weekend, and it will likely snow, so biking is probably out.  I would have to get to the swimming pool by 11 and leave by noon to have a shot at making it to the 12:45 TIFF showing, though I suppose I could plan on going to TIFF for that first showing, but if something went drastically wrong, I could reverse direction and make it to The Fox in time.  So I guess that is a workable back-up plan, though I have to remember that I can only take the subway to Osgoode (Queen) rather than St. Andrew, which is annoying though not a fatal flaw.  It would make going to Anora a lot more challenging, and clearly I would be better off biking or maybe taking the King streetcar than dealing with the subway and shuttle buses.  

Nonetheless, this spoiled my plans for the evening (and I was then feeling too grumpy to drop in at the Rex).  I was only slightly mollified that when I got home, I saw that two things I had ordered showed up.  One was the Blu-ray of La Notte.  I was starting to get a bit worried that it wasn't going to show up, so I'm quite glad it made it.  (I'm now only waiting on Lord Vishnu's Love Handles and a graphic novel called Street Cop.)  The Blu-ray is indeed really sharp.  Now that it is here, the next time I am at BMV, I can see if I can sell off my region 2 DVDs of La Notte and L'Avventura, hoping to get a bit more dosh back if they are sold as a set...  Also, I had decided to order a copy of Tory Dent's Collected Poems.  It wasn't entirely clear from the description if this actually was a collected (and essentially complete) poems or a selected, so I decided to gamble.  I would say in general, Tory Dent is not particularly well known, and if one thinks about poetry about the AIDS crisis, one turns to Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats.  

As powerful as Gunn's book is, it is written from the perspective of one on the outside looking in.  Gunn was certainly impacted by AIDS, losing many, many friends, but he was HIV-negative (and died of a drug overdose (in his 70s!)).  Tory Dent is one of the only poets I am aware of, and certainly the only female poet, that wrote from the inside on what it was like to be living with AIDS.  As an aside, I would like to find a way to include her in my anthology (to do my part in buttressing her legacy) but none of her poems fit well and her preoccupations were so different that it almost seems insulting to try to pull out a poem that has a transportation angle (rather than about her journey and struggles with the medical establishment).  Anyway, the volume is indeed her collected work, including all the poems in her three collections, along with a handful of early unpublished poems.  

I did have to bump Ariel Dorfman's The Last Song of Manuel Sendero off the shelf to make room, so I will move that up on my brand-new reading list to make up for that.

In general, reading is going fairly well.  I have been reading a lot of poetry lately.  I did sort of give up on Jon Silkin.  I was just not finding his work that interesting even after reading 400 pages (out of about 800 in his massive Complete Poetry).  I finally settled on reading the remaining unpublished poems.  I have to admit that I did like some of his later poems more, but I am definitely not on his wavelength.

I generally am enjoying Wesley McNair, who is a New England poet.  He strikes me as a bit more engaged in the world than say, David Budbill, who is much more in the Gary Snyder vein.  McNair's Late Wonders has a trilogy of long narrative poems conflating his family's travails with the (declining) state of America.  I'm only just starting in on them, but they remind me of the impulse behind Updike's Rabbit novels.  I'm generally enjoying Lynn Emanuel's work as well.  I think I just need a sustained push to get through some Wanda Coleman books, and then I can finally return to novels (Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and then I think Gide's Lafcadio's Adventures immediately follows, though I probably should read Bradley's The Ministry of Time as soon as my copy turns up at the reserve desk at Robarts).  Tonight, I venture over to the Theatre Centre to check out Monks, which I never was able to see at last year's Fringe.  For once I have the tickets to a sold out show...  Given the trip out there is so long, I can catch up on a bit more of my reading.  Unless there is another unforeseen disruption (or they try to force me to work past 6:45 tonight), the omens are generally positive for today (aside from the fact that Ford will be re-elected, which of course is a major, major downer, though there is nothing I can do about it).

* I'm not the only one that is generally working too long these days.  The newly inaugurated book club at work had to push the meeting off by a week because no one could make it.  I suspect this will be a monthly issue, but we shall see

** Still so annoyed that Rumours disappeared after such a short run.  I could have scrambled my schedule a bit and probably saw it at either TIFF or Market Square, though I think that was a week I was travelling for work, which made it particuarly hard.  Rumours has finally come out on DVD, and I put a hold on a copy through TPL, so maybe will get to watch that by the summer...)

Sick of Snow

So very, very tired of all this snow.  It is seriously messing up my life.  Last Sunday, they cancelled The Merchant of Venice in advance.  I mean better knowing it was cancelled than showing up and finding it was cancelled.  That would have been worse for sure.

The view of my back porch, which looks like it won't be clear of snow until April or something.

Actually, snow has been messing up my outings for even longer, since we had the first big snowfall on Wed. (so 10 days or so ago).  I was over at Hart House for a mentorship event.  It became pretty clear early on that most people had bailed.  I think in the end only 3 or 4 mentees showed up and maybe 10 mentors.  I talked to a couple of the staff attached to Hart House, mostly about Toronto (and Hart House) as it was in the early 90s.  All 3 of us lived in the East End, which seems pretty common.  (UT employees that were around since the 80s are more likely to be living in the Annex, but that was already a bit out of reach by the 90s...)  I called to make sure that the jazz show was going on at the Rex.  They thought it was a bit odd I would call, but I vividly recall checking with the Green Mill in Chicago to make sure they were open, only to walk over in the middle of a huge blizzard to find they were closed.  To be fair, that blizzard was several times worse than what we have faced this past week or so.

So I went back to work for about an hour, then went over to the Rex.  It was a sparse crowd, maybe 60% of the front area was full.  I did consider going back on Thurs. but then got caught up with other things.

Anyway, what makes the Merchant of Venice cancellation so upsetting is that they did schedule a make up performance (for today incidentally) but I couldn't move things around to make it work, and the other two nights last week I could have gone, they were sold out (and made very little attempt to shuffle things around and squeeze me in).  Now I don't care much for the Merchant of Venice at all, but I suspect they did a fine job (and Shakespeare Bash'd is down to just a single real performance per season).  So I am feel pretty raw about it.  Just in general all this snow is making me even more surly than normal.

I did debate going to the Rex on Sunday but just stayed home instead.  (Probably the smart choice.)  I think Fantasia was playing at TIFF, and I strongly debated going to that, but decided to skip it.  (I'm not entirely sure whether they went ahead with the show or also cancelled.  An awful lot of venues and museums called things off on Sun.  So I was particularly glad I had been criss-crossing the city on Sat., which I may get around to writing up at some point.)

There wasn't much playing at the movies (or at least that I wanted to see) on Family Day.  TIFF was completely shut down, which I thought was odd.  I was not really sure I wanted to leave the house to get over to the Rex, but I did in the end.  (The bus service was reliably terrible per usual, and I briefly turned around, then trudged on up to Danforth.)  It was actually a CD release party, and the group included Mike Murley, Neil Swainson and Reg Schwager, so I'm glad I went in the end.

I was able to get pretty much everything I wanted to yesterday, though again no thanks to the TTC.  I went swimming (which I hadn't managed to last Sat. because the 506 streetcar was delayed by 15 minutes).  They actually are rerouting the Dundas streetcar, so I had to walk to Parliament, where I just missed a bus, and the next one wasn't even showing up on the tracker!  So I had to walk over to the Distillery District.  I was not in a great mood by that point, even though the sun was out and it was a bit warmer.  I couldn't believe how terrible the service was at the little bakery right by the entrance to the Distillery, so I stomped out and dropped in at Corkin.  Corkin hadn't changed its displays up at all, so I went over to Thomas Landry.  

I liked this piece a lot, though not quite enough to buy it (at their price), even though it would pair really well with a few other things I own.

Jean-Daniel Rohrer, L'espris des lieux II, 2022

I made it over to Canadian Stage's Fat Ham, which is a reworking of Hamlet, in plenty of time.  Overall I liked this, though there were a few parts that were a bit troubling (almost glorying in how uneducated most of the characters were, and how Juicy was pinning his hopes on a digital degree in Human Resources from the University of Phoenix, when he seems a bit smarter and clued in than that, at least compared to the other characters, particularly when he then launches into a few of the lesser known soliloquys).  But overall it was good, and it was fairly short (90 minutes), which was even better.

Then in the evening we went up to North York to see Dimanche, which is sort of a wordless set of vignettes using a lot of puppetry and special effects to contemplate the end of the world after global warming wipes out all the icebergs and the major cities are all flooded.  Cheery stuff, but a lot of this was really interesting.  It was only 75 minutes, though perhaps 5-10 minutes could have been trimmed, as one or two scenes just went on a bit too long.

Today is all about music.  I have a Tafelmusik and an Esprit Orchestra concert, so I had better run over to the gym and get the day started.  Ciao!