Over-stuffed weekend (Early Feb. 2026)

Virtually every weekend for me is a bit over-stuffed, and I likely have used that exact title before, so now I have to distinguish between them...

But this was one that had me seeing two plays (Mischief at Tarragon and Witch at Soulpepper), going to see the Cowboy Junkies at Koerner Hall, and then going to Warm Company (the successor to Toronto Cold Reads) on Sunday.  It would have been tight, but I attempted to go swimming at Regent Park, only to find that the lane swim was cancelled.  I was pretty upset, though in truth I mostly wanted to warm up in the spa pool area, and that hasn't even been open the last two times I went.  I think it would have been pretty disappointing all the way around had I been able to get in.  Nonetheless, I will see if I can get some swimming in on Tues. or Wed. evening this week.

Being blocked in that avenue, I took the Dundas streetcar over to Yonge-Dundas Sqaure and then popped into BMV.  I picked up Up and Alien on Blu-ray.  I don't think I have Up on DVD, but I might.  If so, I can try to sell that off.  I still regret not picking up Howl's Moving Castle on Blu-ray at the BMV on Bloor, so I will keep looking for that to turn up again.  Then I cut across on Queen, stopping in at City Hall to drop off More and More and More.  There was some Olympic Games viewing party at Nathan Philips Square, but it was way too cold and very few people were out.  I then continued on and made it up to Tarragon with about 15 minutes to spare.

I loved the set for Mischief (a small reserve store set inside a whale skeleton) and the video projections were first-rate.  The interactions between the store clerk and her uncle and aunt(?) were good, and clearly the playwright (who also played the store clerk) is going for something like Kim's Convenience (or even Corner Gas), but I felt that too much was subtext about her trauma of her mother disappearing and not grounded in the actual text that the audience gets to hear.  After all, she goes on and on about how she is fine and that she feels paying attention to this statue of Cornwallis just is allowing Cornwallis to live rent-free in the community's head, but then she explodes on her uncle, attacking him for no good reason, as well as, more justifiably though less plausibly, on a racist customer.  And she literally explodes the statue with fireworks from the store.  Mostly the interactions she has with the white customer and then a "good guy" in the woods aren't satisfying in the sense that she starts screaming at the customer, telling him that he stinks, and he glowers at her and then leaves the store.  Exqueeze me?  And then the "good guy" turns out, extremely implausibly, to be a cop, who says that she will be charged with criminal mischief, but then she just turns back up at the store, and we never find out if she has actually been charged and just let go to turn up later or if they don't think they can actually make the charges stick or what.  Basically, she writes herself into these corners and then doesn't do the hard work to get herself out.  I understand the challenges, facing some of these myself, but it doesn't change the fact that there are massive problems with the script.  Personally, I didn't like any of the interactions with the 300 year old spirit of her ancestors.  This was particularly lazy writing.  (Naturally, Joshua Chong over at the Star loved it, telling me once again that I will never enjoy a show that he likes and if he dislikes something, I will probably find a lot of merit in it.)

I spent a bit of time at work, mostly making some improvements to bid we are putting in for a project in Alberta, then I grabbed a sandwich at Subway, and took the train up Koerner Hall.  I've seen the Cowboy Junkies three times.  Once in their glory days (1990 or so) when they opened for Bruce Hornsby in Detroit, and then in 2023 at Danforth Music Hall and now at Koerner Hall.  I'm pretty sure I was supposed to see them at Massey Hall but the band came down with Covid and the concert was scrapped.  I enjoyed it quite a bit, though they are far more muted and a bit more depressed than they were back in the 90s.  The set list from Danforth is here, and here is the set list from this weekend.  They are broadly similar sets, though this time around they played several new songs, not even on an album!  In both cases, they played a lot off of Such Ferocious Beauty, and indeed the Danforth set was sort of a CD-release party.  In 2023, they played "Murder, Tonight, in the Trailer Park" and "Walkin' After Midnight."  This concert they played "Working on a Building," "'Cause Cheap is How I Feel" and "Fuck, I Hate the Cold" (so appropriate).  Combining the two concerts into one super live set would be incredible.  I have to track down the video I took from Danforth, but I should have it somewhere.  In both cases, Margo was drinking tea constantly, but her voice was fine under the circumstances.  I probably don't need to see them again, though never say never.  I would like to see Bruce Cockburn one more time, particularly if he brings a full band and it isn't just a solo show (as good as that was).

Sunday was generally smoother, though I got a bit of a late start going over to the gym.  I also spent a bit too much time looking for hardware over at Home Depot.  I didn't get back with the groceries until 1:20 (and somehow I didn't have the hamburger buns, which either got left at the store or perhaps fell out on the trek back).  Given that I obviously can't bike, as no bike lanes are truly cleared, and the Distillery is in this weird pocket with terrible transit service from the East End, I had to cab it.  I just cannot wait for it to warm up a bit and the roads to clear.  There have been a few times I skipped going down to Jimmie Simpson for the same reason, i.e. I can't bear taking 40 minutes to get somewhere on transit that would take 10-15 minutes on a bike.

Witch is a much stronger play than Mischief, though I still had a few issues with it.  I think they deliberately blurred the line between Edmonton (as a dukedom of some sort in old England) and the witch being from First Nations rural Edmonton.  That's probably mostly my spin, but the set did push me in that direction.  I think the script probably needed to give the witch a bit more to do to establish why the community thought she had any powers at all.  Did she ever heal anyone?  But overall, the conflicting needs of the characters were much stronger (and a bit of a lesson for me).  I am not entirely sure why they thought Frank should at least partially reciprocate Cuddy's barely suppressed romantic interest.  That made no sense to me.  Also, the extended (Morris) dance sequence after the explosive confrontation between Cuddy and Frank was way too long and self-indulgent.  I tuned out of that completely.  I kind of thought that Elizabeth's desire to tear it all down and start over was perhaps referring to the horrors of WWI and even moreso WWII, but that seems an extremely long wait, based on when the play was ostensibly set.  And I don't think the final, final scene worked (or even made much sense), but otherwise it was a strong piece and certainly worth checking out (whereas Mischief really needed a thorough rewrite).  I'm generally able to get through concerts and plays without too much coughing, though the Morris dance scene really tested my powers to stay the cough (and really was so unnecessary...).

I didn't have quite as much time as I had hoped at work, but I did get one thing done, then I went over to the Well.  I've been wanting decent Thai food for some time (and Thai Room was closed by the time the Cowboy Junkies set ended).  So I picked up something to go, and then suffered through a very slow streetcar trip (particularly on College) until I got to Dovercourt for the Warm Company reading.  I think next time I'll try to eat before getting there, as several people commented on how I had the only decent food in the place.  Oh well.  I hadn't actually eaten lunch and was pretty hungry by that point.

I had a chance to talk a bit more to Jamie, who is planning on directing (if I can improve the script enough), as well as Sam who would like to take the lead role, but isn't entirely sure he is up to it.  I liked most of the scripts though the first one was a bit too cliched.  My piece got some huge laughs, as the cast really sold the piece.  And at the moment the start is by far the strongest part of the script.  It's almost a bit of a problem, as it is quite tempting to leave things as they are and not put in the work to hone the script.  Nonetheless, it was great getting that positive feedback, and I think it makes it that much more likely they will start taking more of my pieces in the future.  I didn't make quite enough connections as I could have (I didn't have my cards with me), but I definitely laid the groundwork for next month.  Someone else asked if they could shift the date (as it conflicts with the Oscars), but they said no.  A bit unfortunate, as there was another concert I had hoped to go to, but this is more important, so I will be back with them in March.  Jane Smythe has agreed to come on board as well, probably as Abby, so I have even more motivation to get this done well.

So on the whole a good, though extremely cold, weekend.  Let's see what this week brings...

Feb. Reading

I'll start off with an announcement of interest only to me and that is I have finished booking all the out-of-town travel I am expecting for the near future.  Of course, work might take me somewhere (and in fact we just won more work in Calfornia).  I don't really want to travel to California at the moment, but I would be open to traveling west to Vancouver, as they are close to 20 degrees warmer than we are at the moment.  (This extended deep freeze is really bringing me down, including the fact that I can't shake this cough.)

I've had tickets to see Angela Hewitt in Ottawa for a while now, and I finally got around to booking the Via tickets and a hotel in Byward Market.  This should be fun.  I'm expecting to bring Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor on the train.  Then I am off to see Shaw's Heartbreak Hotel at the Shaw Festival in August.  I believe this is the only Shaw production they are putting on.  Last year, I was on the fence on seeing Major Barbara.  (I heard that the production in 2012 or so was much stronger.)  However, it was literally impossible to find a weekend matinee where the bus actually ran.  Such bad scheduling.  There were still several dates that I would have considered this summer, but the bus didn't run.  However, I did find a date in August that worked.  I read recently that the Shaw Festival is hoping to coordinate with Harbourfront and bring some Shaw productions to Toronto.  I'm all in favour of that, even if they probably will mostly bring the musicals over, which don't have a lot of interest for me.

As it turns out, this is going to be a major Stratford season in terms of what I am trying to catch.  I'm seeing three plays with my wife on one weekend (perhaps ironically right after Fringe has ended, so I won't be able to pick up any more material from our stay at a BnB).  I was a bit surprised when she told me she wanted to see Death of a Salesman and Othello and then probably Waiting for Godot.  I hadn't really planned on seeing Godot, as I just saw a good production at Coal Mine.  However, Paul Gross is in it, and I believe it is the only time he is acting at Stratford this summer.  Anyway, then I go back in Sept. for a long day to catch Saturday, Sunday, Monday by De Filippo and The Tao of the World, which is a modern version of The Way of the World, but set in Hong Kong.  It sounds interesting at any rate.  I have a few longer books including Skvorecky's The Bride of Texas and maybe Vanity Fair that I might take along on the bus ride(s) down.  I am going to skip Midsummer's Night's Dream and The Tempest, as they just put them on too often.

Anyway, I wasn't expecting it, but Murakami's The City and Its Uncertain Walls turned up at the library.  I thought I had paused the hold for longer.  I decided I will hang onto it, but probably not get started on it until I have read a few other books, mostly likely Faulkner's The Wild Palms, O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find and McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (so a bit of a sweep through Southern literature).  But before I can get to this, I have some poetry collections to quickly read and return, as well as two novels by Slovak authors (including Mothers and Truckers!), which have to go back to Robarts soon.  So the Murakami might be waiting for a while.  Also, I didn't think it would turn up in time, but I am being sent a copy of Kaveh Akbar's Martyr!, which is the book our work book club is discussing in Feb., so I guess I'll also read that once it turns up.

I had tried to renew my copy of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz's More and More and More, which is an extremely depressing non-fiction account of how we never have managed any energy transitions nor stopped using coal or even wood as fuel, so the hope that we will suddenly start using renewables (and stop global warming in its tracks) is a complete fantasy.  We're clearly going to break through the 3 degree mark.  I really do regret that environmentalists haven't made any more traction and the world we are leaving for our children is going to be a fairly dreadful one as these bills come due.  I can only say that I have avoided owning a car or driving for most of my adult life, I stick to a vegetarian diet (which also is less carbon intensive), and I try to do most long-distance travel by train rather than flying.  And my work has generally been to support transit projects, though I have not worked exclusively in that domain.  Someone else had a hold on the book, so I couldn't renew it.  I'm skimming it right now and should be able to return it tomorrow, only a day late.  I also need to start reading a book on megaprojects, which I agreed to review for a journal.  

So certainly a fair bit of reading on deck for Feb., which will have to be balanced against revising my Fringe play.

Edit (02/08): I'm making decent progress through the poetry volumes, though I really need to focus a bit more on this megaprojects book.  I think this time around, my favorite poet has been Karen Solie.  She has several poems involving transportation (and my objective in reading this much poetry is at least ostensibly to finish up my transportation poetry anthology).  In her Griffin-winning collection Pigeon, there is a poem about a rough bus ride called "Medicine Hat Calgary One-Way" that I liked a fair bit (and would include if the anthology ever gets off the ground...).  I have made two extremely frustrating trips to try to look over Konchan's The New Alphabets at Fisher Rare Book Library.  I'm at the point I don't really care much any more.  If there is a Thurs. where I am coming up to see something at Koerner Hall (like an Esprit concert at the end of March), I might try again, but my interest is really low at this point.

Updates (Movies, Concerts and Fringe)

Last week I saw Buñuel's Viridiana.  There were moments I thought were very interesting or very creepy or both.  It was fairly obvious that her bringing a veritable raft of the wretched to stay on her uncle's estate was going to end badly.  It's only surprising that it didn't end worse for her.  (As far as I can tell, we are supposed to assume that the attempted rape was thwarted.)  Anyway, the scene with the paupers lined up just like the Last Supper was pretty daring, and you can certainly see why the film was banned in several Catholic countries.

I'm not sure how much I actually enjoyed the film (as a lot of it was stressful waiting for the paupers to turn on her), but I'm not sorry I saw it.  The scene where her crown of thorns falls out of her suitcase is classic!  I have another couple of weeks before the next Buñuel over at TIFF.

I already mentioned that I enjoyed Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, except for the portrayal of Bruce Lee.  I haven't entirely decided, but I might go see Reservoir Dogs at Carlton towards the end of the month.  I've never seen it, and while I don't generally enjoy ultra violent movies, I'm sure it's worth seeing.  I briefly debated going to see The Hateful Eight again, probably also at Carlton, but it didn't work out for some reason.  I did see Pulp Fiction there not so long ago, though my notes says this might have been back in August.  Good lord, how time flies!  I would like to see Jackie Brown again, which is perhaps the most enjoyable of his films to watch (for me), so I'll keep my eyes out for that.

I'm scheduled to see Rohmer's La Collectionneuse, De Palma's Blow Out and Wong Kar-wai's 2046 this month. I'd be up to try to catch Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother, but I may have already missed its run at TIFF, and I don't think it made it out to The Fox or the Revue.  It's not my highest priority, but I'll see if it turns up somewhere close to me at some point.

It was quite overdue, and I finally found the time to watch Godard's Masculin Feminin.  I liked it far more than I expected.  I think it's a combination of the humour working with the material much better than in Breathless, and probably also I just like Jean-Pierre Léaud better as leading man; it was particularly droll when the girls told him to turn that trash off (when he put classical music on), and later he said his favorite musician was Bach.  (I wrote a play ages ago where the male lead wasn't much interested in music past Bach...)  I definitely wish this had been in the massive Godard box set.  I may still part with this box set (if I could find anyone to pay me even part of what it is worth), though I definitely need to watch Une Femme est Une Femme, though I expect I won't like this as much (it sounds like it might be more like Vivre sa vie, which was ok but not amazing).  Anyway, I kicked the idea around for a while and finally ordered a copy of Masculin Feminin, though it is being sent to my step-mother's house first, so I probably won't have it in hand for some time...

In terms of concerts, I saw a great concert by Tafelmusik where they did Bach's Brandenburg Concertos 1-4 on Sunday.  I cut it a bit close, and ended up running (in the snow!) and just catching the 72 bus.  Had I missed that bus, I would likely have been a few minutes late.  For some reason, they rewarded all the subscribers with their 1994 recording of all the Brandenburg Concertos.  I have a mini-subscription, so I also got the CDs.  Sweet!  I think I might already have a copy of this, but I'm sure I can find someone who would want it.

Then last night, I went and saw a percussion concert as part of the UT New Music Festival.  The first half were pieces by Vivian Fung and the second half were percussion pieces by Morton Feldman.  I didn't like the final piece, as it was too long and monotonous, but the other pieces were good.  Then last night I saw 3 pieces by Vivian Fung, including a very virtuosic flute concerto.  I left at the intermission, as I didn't really want to see the Unsuk Chin piece.  However, it made no difference in terms of getting home early.  The TTC was terrible.  Line 2 was shut down between St. George and Chester!  So I decided to try to take the streetcar.  As I made my move, they said that Line 2 service had been restored, but I wasn't able to jump off the train.  It might not have actually mattered, as there was suddenly another announcement about the security alarm being pulled on a train.  Definitely a bad night on the subway.  But it wasn't much better waiting for the streetcar at Queen's Park.  It was brutally cold out,* and the streetcar took forever to arrive.  When we finally got to the East End, we got stuck behind a very slow garbage truck around Degrassi, and of course the streetcar couldn't maneuver around it.  So a bad time getting home. 

On Friday, I am back to see a student orchestra at Koerner Hall.  They are doing yet another Vivian Fung piece, as well as Tchaikovsky Symphony 6.  Then I see Cowboy Junkies on Sat., which will be an interesting bookend, as I saw Sudan Archives the previous Sunday at The Great Hall.

It doesn't look like I am seeing any TSO concerts in Feb., though I went to see them three times in Jan., so it balances out.  I have two Soundstreams concerts, including one at Hugh's Room.  I also want to get over to Hirut a couple of times and the Rex two or three times in Feb.  Indeed, I might move my ticket at Coal Mine to a different day so I can see Gary Smulyan a second time.  I haven't entirely decided, and I don't want to then find out that those dates at the Rex are sold out.

At any rate, I probably can use this time productively.  I finally got feedback from a few people I sent my script to.  They basically agreed with me it was too talky.  The overall idea was ok, but there wasn't enough conflict driving the action, and the whole thing needed a lot of tightening up.  That said, one actor is leaning towards signing on for the main part, and I have landed someone who will direct the play, if I make significant improvements to the script.  While I have fond memories of this first draft, I agree it really could blossom more if I put in the work and don't get all defensive about what I have written and resist making these changes.  But still, it definitely means almost completely rewriting the piece, when it was only last Sat. that I got the whole thing down and formatted properly for the first time.  Still, I want to see if I can create something I can really be proud of.  

So that's the main news, and I really need to head off to bed now. 

* It looks like we have a solid seven more days of this terrible cold weather, so none of the damn snow will melt, and there isn't a chance in hell I am going to bike in this weather (which means I am definitely getting out of shape).  This has been a really bad winter, weather-wise at any rate.

Movies, Movies, Movies!

This is basically a continuation of this post.  This is a very good time in Toronto for art films.  It may even slightly surpass the mid 90s, which was a good time indeed.  I still don't like TIFF policies (which did indeed shift post-COVID, and they were far more reasonable pre-COVID).  Nonetheless, I was able to see pretty much all the Naruse I wanted.  If it had been scheduled differently, I would have tried to watch Repast, but I guess I can watch it on DVD at some point this winter.

I guess there are a few SPOILERS here and there, so be warned...

TIFF also started a very compact Buñuel retrospective.  As it happens, I was seeing Belle de Jour at the Revue (last night incidentally, and I'll include a few thoughts about it down-thread).  Ages and ages ago, I saw Un chien andalou (the film he made with Dali) and don't really need to see it again.  Now the first time through, I was only able to book a ticket to the late film Viridiana.  I was frustrated with TIFF as usual, but just now I saw a few seats had opened up at most of the screenings, so I booked tickets for Diary of a Chambermaid, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel, which certainly covers all the major films.  I would have tried to see That Obscure Object of Desire (Buñuel's final film), but it only plays once, conflicting with Eric Rohmer's La Collectionneuse over at Paradise, and I expect I'll enjoy that more (and I already had tickets to see my 2nd Rohmer film!).

One of the more interesting things about the ending of Belle de Jour is that it is definitely a fantasy (not completely dissimilar to the "Love Conquers All" edit of Brazil, and I suspect that Buñuel was an important influence on Gilliam) but also that it could lead to a reading that the entire prostitution plot was a very elaborate fantasy (and none of it happened).  I mean probably not, but it's at least possible.  There are also two direct references to Godard's Breathless.  First there is the male New York Daily Herald paper hawker, who shows up right as the two thugs are introduced.  And then the shooting of Marcel is framed almost exactly as the shooting of Michel in Breathless, with the key exception that Marcel went out guns blazing and Michel is inadvertently caught up in his shooting death.  This can't possibly be accidental.

I think I mentioned that I did see Godard's Contempt at the Revue but didn't actually care that much for it.  I think I am basically immune to the charms of Godard...

It's possible that the single best movie I saw all month was Antonioni's La Notte.  It was over at the Fox, and I did break my semi-serious vow not to go over there again, but it was worth it.  And indeed hardly anyone showed up, so the shallow raked floor didn't matter.  This film came out one year after Fellini's La Dolce Vita, and I think there are strong parallels between the two movies, though it's hard to say how far along Antonioni was with La Notte by the time he would have been able to see La Dolce Vita.  Interestingly, apparently there was a version ready for the Italian censors in Nov. 1960, and La Dolce Vita was released in Feb. 1960.  Of course, Mastroianni is in both, automatically linking the two.  I think I actually like La Notte a bit better than La Dolce Vita, as it is just more focused.  It's one of the only Antonioni films I actually like.  After this screening, I stuck around and watched No Other Choice, a black comedy from South Korea about a fired factory foreman who kills off rivals for an opening at another paper company.  I think the director may have missed a trick in not having the AI machinery kill him off accidentally at the end, perhaps when he unnecessarily hit the paper rolls with his baton, setting off some chain reaction...

The funniest movie I saw was Bottoms as part of Queer Cinema Club at the Paradise.  This is basically Heathers mixed in with Mean Girls and of course Fight Club (though the point of starting the fight club is to get with hot cheerleaders, which is so Revenge of the Nerds...).  Even though the weather was truly horrendous, everyone showed up, and it was a sold out screening!  I'm certainly glad I made it.  The series has managed to show some incredible films (as well as a few I strongly avoided...).  I also enjoyed Mulholland Drive (which I barely got into), three or so Fassbinder movies, Zero Patience, 2 Almodovar films, and Touch of Pink.  Oh and Kajillionaire, which I almost certainly wouldn't have seen without the club, and I enjoyed this a lot.  (Same with Pat Mills's Guidance.)  

I found the relationship between the slightly butch lesbian and the artistic/theatrical gay male in Can You Ever Forgive Me? reminded me a lot of the lesbians in my mother's circle who ran the AIDS crisis line in Detroit, and I felt moved by that.  (Ah, memories...)   Once in a while I am not able to make a Queer Cinema Club showing but then catch the film later, which is what happened for Law of Desire and Tangerine.

Despite fighting off a cold that makes me miserable, stuffing myself with cough drops, I just saw Galaxy Quest, which is so terrific.  I'm going to make yet another trip out to the Revue on Friday to see Blake Edwards's Skin Deep, followed by Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.  After that, De Palma's Blow Out at the Revue and 2046 at Paradise.  But the somewhat obsessive desire to catch up with films may taper off a bit by April (and I end up seeing a lot more concerts and plays).  I guess we'll see...

Edit (01/30): Just back from seeing Skin Deep, which was ok but not amazing.  John Ritter was playing quite a narcissistic womanizer who nonetheless triumphs in the end.  Apparently, this was going to be a sequel to 10 with Dudley Moore (called 11), but then they completely rewrote the entire thing after Moore dropped out and Ritter came aboard, trying to shed/shred his sitcom image.  However, I really enjoyed Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with a few reservations, namely the portrayal of Bruce Lee as a schmuck and the ultra-violent fight scene where the Manson family attacks a different house (not Polanski's and Tate's) and are thwarted.  But it definitely made for a long night.  Transit back home from the Revue has been very poor both times this week.  I think I have one more night out at the Revue planned for Feb. 20, and I may scale it back after that until it is warmer out again.

I actually forgot that I had checked out a Blu-ray from Scorsese's Polish Movie Classics called The Hourglass Sanatorium directed by Wojciech Has, which indeed is based on Bruno Schulz's stories.  (I enjoyed these very much in my 20s and should find some time to return to them soon...)  Anyway, I simply ran out of time and returned it to Robarts half-watched.  But I learned that TPL did have this film after all, as well as Has's The Saragossa Manuscript, so I have just borrowed them.  I was looking at some of the other films that Scorsese had picked out and decided I was interested in watching Wadja's Ashes and Diamonds, as well as Night Train and Wadja's Innocent Sorcerers.  As it happens, I have all of these films already (on R2 DVDs), though I haven't watched them.  Well, something to consider come springtime...

More Snow

We're supposedly going to get about a foot of snow today.  I actually had planned to be out much of the day (and relying on transit), so this is a little worrying.  One option will be to skip the follow-up activities and just focus on going swimming and then to a 2 o'clock concert.  I already did grocery shopping and a somewhat shortened gym visit on Sat.  And I did cook chili for the week, even though I will be out most evenings (mostly trying to see various movies).  Still, I would like to see One Battle After Another at Carlton, and today is a fairly convenient time.  

On the other hand, I really need to finish writing up this play, and I keep falling asleep instead of doing that (or booking cultural events in Feb. and March, and time is getting tight!)  I also said I would take the first shift of shoveling, though there is only a dusting so far.  I will probably be out most of the rest of the time.  So maybe I will just come home instead.

It was certainly cold out yesterday, but actually not as cold as Friday was.  Friday was bone-chilling.  We were fortunate that we caught the 72 Pape bus right away as we were heading down to Queen to the Red Sandcastle to see short plays with a horror twist.  They were fun and not particularly scary, and indeed the first play about a girl who has a witch for a mother (and hangs out with a boy named Hansel) wasn't scary at all.

Sat. I was criss-crossing the city, so I was very glad there was no snow to totally mess my journey up.  I decided to go across on Line 2 to Dufferin rather than take the Queen streetcar the whole way (I think it is still diverting onto Dundas for a stretch!).  (I also dropped off a few books at the library.)  I was fortunate that I caught the Dufferin Express down to Queen.  For all my griping about the TTC, it wasn't too bad on Friday and Saturday.  Fingers crossed that it won't be too bad today, though once I am downtown, Line 1 shouldn't be too impacted by the snow.  Famous last words...

Anyway, I made it in time for Sondheim's Company at the Theatre Centre.  I thought they did a good job, though a local critic wasn't that impressed.  The problem is that this musical and indeed most musicals leave me pretty cold.  I'm not sure I've ever seen such a navel-gazing musical about straight New Yorkers (and indeed from a time when young married professionals with children still lived in Manhattan and not Brooklyn!).  About the only song that really captured my attention was "The Ladies Who Lunch."  I thought it was a terrific piece, though the critic didn't agree.  I did agree with the critic that the kiss between Robert and one of his male friend just confused things, and I imagine Sondheim would have pitched a fit over this, since he explicitly said that Bobby's problems weren't due to latent homosexuality.  Anyway, this piece should have been 60 or 90 minutes, since there was zero character development or plot arc, and thus didn't merit coming back for more after the interval.  (Reading some thoughts, it's pretty clear that some of the musical's defenders come across as so condescending.  Oh you'll understand it some day.  But I don't think getting older will rescue an extremely shallow plot and a cypher for the lead character!  That said, some of the music and songs are interesting.  But everyone has different tastes.  I was astounded at the number of people fleeing during Prokofiev's Symphony #5 on Thurs., whereas I was only there for that and could easily have skipped out on the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto #2.)

I decided I should swing by Robarts and drop off a DVD that was due, even though I could have done this today, as I'll be at Koerner, which is just around the corner...  This did mean a little backtracking and then having to cross back to Bloor-Yonge, since Line 1 was closed between St. George and St. Andrew this weekend, which is a drag.

Then I went and saw the final Naruse film over at TIFF: Daughters, Wives and a Mother.  I didn't realize this is a relatively late film (1960) and is in colour.  I enjoyed it a fair bit.  While I think it's relatively unlikely anyone will watch it anytime soon, I will discuss with SPOILERS...

SPOILERS

This film, like every other Naruse film I've watched (with partial exception of Floating Clouds), is centered on a family (or just an older woman) going through a financial crisis, either caused by external forces like the supermarkets coming in in Yearning or due to death in the family (Scattered Clouds) or a male bread-winner more or less abandoning the family (The Sound of the Mountain).  In Daughters, Wives and a Mother, one of the sons is pressured by his wife into loaning huge sums of money to his wife's uncle, who then goes bankrupt, ruining them.  And as it turns out, he mortgaged the family home to do so (without telling his mother)!  At this point, the adult children begin to panic and try to figure out what to do with mother, and a few of them reluctantly agree to bring her to their smaller house.  One of the older sisters is pressured into a loveless marriage because her potential groom is willing to bring her mother to Kyoto.  The mother doesn't want this and is leaning towards moving into a retirement home, though it isn't clear if she actually will have the funds to do so.  (There are heavy echoes of Make Way for Tomorrow here, though I've never been able to make my way through this film, as it starts off with such appalling poor judgement on the part of the parents.  It is much easier to swallow here, as the financial crisis comes much later in the film and it is more plausible and the mother is taken unaware by all these financial transactions.)  The final scene is a bit of a cop-out where she plays with a neighbour's baby and doesn't actually reveal what she is doing next.  This reminds me of Umberto D.  (A very good film but one I probably can't bear to watch again...)  Anyway, it was really interesting watching a colour film made by Naruse, and this one holds up a bit better than Scattered Clouds.

I'm making my way through several poetry collections, as well as just launched into Gide's The Immoralist (which in some ways seems like an inversion of Camus's The Stranger).  It's very short, so I expect I will finish it today or tomorrow.  I haven't really decided what is next but one possible plan is Amis's The Information, Faulker's The Wild Palms and then Thien's The Book of Records.  I should have Russell Smith's Self Care in from the library soon, and will fit that in somewhere.

I've pretty much convinced myself to just go swimming and then to the concert and skip the movie.  I'll see if there is another time I can go see it, but I just need to finish my play (and also book Stratford/Shaw and some other upcoming concerts and plays).  I can't always be running around town, especially in this sort of weather, particularly while I have a cough I can't shake...

Edit (01/26): The day ended up being very different than I expected.  As I was getting ready to leave, I checked my email and saw that the concert at Koerner Hall had been postponed (to some undeclared date in late winter or even spring).  I decided that I didn't really want to go down to Jimmie Simpson and Matty Eckler had swimming in the late afternoon.  (This change of plans made me really glad I had dropped off my library materials at Robarts on Sat. despite the inconvenience!)  I decided to go see One Battle After Another at Carlton at 12:30.  I actually made it there without too much trouble, though the snow storm had already started.  I did not like this movie at all, mostly because I thought Perfidia was such a cartoonish character, oversexed and ultimately not actually committed to revolutionary goals but only in saving her own skin, and Leo's character devolved into such a useless parody of a burnt out stoner.  The only characters I liked (or even found somewhat believable) were the sensei (Del Toro) and the daughter.  And it was definitely too long.  I grabbed some cat litter and headed back.  Fortunately, the streetcar was still running, at least in the stretch I cared about.  I then attempted to shovel what was about two feet of drifting snow.  It was not particularly heavy, but there is just nowhere to put the snow.

Anyway, between the movie running long and the shoveling, I wasn't able to go swimming after all.  Maybe it is just as well, as my lungs are just not cooperating and I would hate to try to swim and then start coughing and swallow a lot of water.  That certainly wouldn't help things.  It feels like it is going to be a long, tough winter...

Quick Takes, Early 2026 Edition

Well, the Orange One is just determined to keep himself in the news at all costs, even if this leads to almost certain defeat in the House in the midterms (though obviously he will create so many crises that he will try to postpone the elections -- this is so clearly part of the madness).  (I'm talking about Greenland, but it really could be anything he gets up to...)  I can't even begin to list all the institutions that have completely let us down, but the Supreme Court is in a unique position to end a small part of the madness by ruling that tariffs can't be changed unilaterally by the President for clearly political reasons.  They have had two chances so far to issue their ruling and have punted both times.  Justice Roberts, such a pure specimen of political cowardice.

Anyway, let me try to rinse the foul taste out of my mouth....

I finished Mahfouz's The Beggar.  I have really liked most and been indifferent at worst to his many novels, but this is the first one I truly disliked.  Thank goodness it wasn't the first Mahfouz I ever read.  I've chatted a bit elsewhere why I dislike it so much, so I will refrain here.  I am just about finished with The Tale of the Missing Man, which I don't care much for either.  I think in both cases it is the fact that the main characters are having these deep existential-level mid-life crises that they simply surrender to, tearing apart their families in the process, which I object to so much.  Could they not at least try to pull themselves together a bit?  Of the two, The Tale of the Missing Man at least is more interesting, and I can relate to this man's agony when earlier in life he is horrified to find out that his beloved "sister" smokes (and later on he finds out she drinks as well, which is too much for him as a practicing Muslim (at this point in the story) and she suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her uncle).  I still remember that when I was a very, very young man at university, I saw one of the students at East Quad (whom I happened to have a crush on naturally) smoke a cigarette expertly in a student production.  At that point, I realized she operated at a different level than me and she was out of my league, and I never really tried to get to know her better after that.  Foolish me...  (Though I am sure she was out of my league.)

I also am nearly done with Heather O'Neill's Valentine in Montreal, which was written as a serial novel in the manner of Dickens, though Heather avoided having any really dark or troubling episodes in this book.  Each chapter takes place at a different Montreal metro stop.  It's more fun than the other two certainly, though it is a little too light, which is clearly by design.

At any rate, I'll need to decide what I am reading next.  It is somewhat inconvenient that most of the books I am considering next are in multi-novel anthologies, like Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, Faulkner's The Wild Palms, O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find and even Joyce's Dubliners, which I am considering throwing into the mix.  But there are a few stand-alone novels, and maybe I should focus on the shorter ones, like Gide's The Immoralist, Offill's Weather and Russell Smith's Self-Care, which I can put a hold on at the library and see when it comes in.  I'm also reading a depressing book about energy use and climate change called More and More and More, though I am not sure I need to read this in full and can just skim it.  I also agreed to read and review a book about mega-projects, so I should start in on that soon as well.  And I have a ridiculous number of poetry books checked out, so I am working through those as well. 

I've had another look through the good folder that was recovered off of the bad hard drive.*  It looks like I do have all visits to 401 Richmond salvaged, which is great, and even the TPL reading that Souvankham Thammavongsa gave. (It turns out she is left-handed!)

My back is feeling better, though it is still far from ideal.  I've been able to keep up my visits to the gym and swimming, though I found the Regent Park pool overcrowded and completely intolerable on my last visit.  I only got in somewhere between 12-15 laps (I was so frustrated I lost count!) when my normal workout is 24-25.  The problem is when I have really overstuffed weekends, which is nearly every weekend, Regent Park has the best lane swim times and the others just don't work, esp. when the weather is such that I can't bike.  Still, I will need to figure something out, either get there the moment the lanes open or push my way into the fast lanes despite my issues with them.  And to the extent possible, try to make it work at Jimmie Simpson or Matty Eckler pools.  I perhaps can do swimming on Sunday and then head over to Koerner Hall this weekend.  Anyway, I'll figure something out.

I've been seeing a lot of movies lately.  I saw Pan's Labyrinth, which was good but very dark.  Broadcast News last night, which was quite good and had a somewhat surprising ending.  I thought it was a bit refreshing that the Bonnie Hunter stuck to her guns and her principles (even though I wouldn't have made the choices she made) and yet she wasn't made to regret this decision and found happiness and presumably fulfillment in her own way.  I'm off to see La Notte tonight and will probably stick around to see No Other Choice after that, so it will be quite a long night.  Then I see one last Naruse film at TIFF on the weekend.  I have not sat down and figured out Feb. yet.  There are a few concerts at the UT New Music Festival and a few plays I haven't booked tickets to.  I've also figured out Stratford and Shaw, so I should book that, including a night at a BnB in Stratford.

Speaking of this (and really burying the lede) I had my number pulled in the satellite Fringe lottery, and my play, "At Home with the Bards," is going to be at Alumnae Theatre during the Toronto Fringe this summer!  So exciting and a bit terrifying.  I really need to just sit down and get the rest transcribed.  If it is a good enough script, I have a potential lead on an actor to play the main part and then a director.  But none of this will happen if I can't get it down on paper and cleaned up a bit.  Also, they have agreed to put on the first part at the successor to Toronto Cold Reads** in Feb.!  So lots of good things happening if I could just focus...

Other things on my mind are that I finally got Toby over to the vet to be neutered.  He is so sad in his cone, which comes off on Monday.  He actually managed to get it off and was not happy when I found the cone and wrestled it back on.

I actually managed to get his sister, Rho, to the vet yesterday, which is always an ordeal, as it is just so hard to catch her.  The idea that I will need to catch her 3 times when she is spayed (for the surgery and then two follow-up visits) is a bit upsetting, though I do imagine it will be easier to catch her with the cone on...

The weather is really getting me down, though it is not going to be nearly as cold today, though it will probably snow.  The deep chill settles back in this weekend when I am going to be all over the city with my various cultural activities.  Anyway, I should break now and back to work and then get this play transcribed.

 

* I think what is missing is confined to Gary Shteyngart's TPL visit, a trip to The Power Plant (this can be skipped but I do want to take photos of the murals just north of The Power Plant, and trips to MoCA (already well covered) and the new exhibit at the AGO.  I can recreate the AGO trip, though not the photos of my son in front of a few paintings.  And probably two nights at The Rex.  And then 1.5 shows of Robyn Hitchcock playing at home.  So it's certainly frustrating that this is gone, but it definitely could have been much worse.

** After talking with several people at the cold reads thing on Sun., it's pretty clear that very few people read the email and signed up for the satellite lottery, which helps explain why I got in.  Well, it's their loss.  But more seriously, this may be the last time there is so little competition, so I definitely need to make the most of my opportunity, which means I really need to get this down on paper.  (And double-check deadlines for paying rental fees, etc.)

Rescuing the Writing

One thing that I have been diligent about is copying the scans of all my hand-written notes (written mostly while at the Rex or Jazz Bistro or Hirut*) into several locations.  However, I still keep coming across notebooks that I haven't scanned, and I think the plan this week is to pull all the notebooks together and see what has been scanned and what hasn't.  (On the whole this is a good thing, though more effort...)

I recently came across the pages for The Trip (the bus ride from hell from Atlanta to Detroit), and I definitely want to type that up.  I do wonder if I wrote the ending out somewhere else, as it doesn't seem to be a proper ending.  But certainly the majority is scanned.  I also found the hand-written notes for Dharma Donuts, but this I probably won't bother with, as I have typed that up (and then decided it needed a severe overhaul anyway).  One of the more annoying things is I had typed up something (I think I called it Parkdale Queens or something), and I sent it off to SFYS but at a time they were using Google submission form, rather than me just emailing a PDF.  And I simply cannot find the file, which is so incredibly weird.  And then the folks at Assembly just gave up on running SFYS and stopped returning my emails (where I was just asking if they could flip that file back to me).  Given that this piece (about a band that broke up) is something I wanted to share with Skye Wallace, it is perhaps my top "missing" piece.  

I had thought I had scanned some of the early, early pieces of my planner epic, but I think beyond the very first scene, I hadn't done that.  So I scanned that again (almost 20 pages of dialogue and notes!).  Clearly, compiling this and putting it into some kind of order is a high priority.  It's almost like a puzzle piece now, just going through what is scanned and how it is all supposed to fit together.

The single highest priority, however, is to find all the pieces of the Stratford BnB piece.  I believe that is all scanned, just not labelled very well.  I have even transcribed the 2nd part (and the 1st part is cleaned up and typed out, which is great).  So I probably just need to transcribe the ending and get this whole thing into shape.  I find out tomorrow evening if I am going to the Fringe or not.  Then I will see if I can locate and finish the Parkdale Queens piece, and then maybe quickly pound out The Trip, then go back to the planner epic.  If I ever finish this, I might go back to the piece about living in Toronto in the 90s and the immigration struggles my character had (in a parallel life where I did decide to try to stay on in Canada by marrying a lesbian...).  It feels like this is all a lot of work, but at least it is generally emotionally rewarding doing this creative writing (and now trying to actually do something with it now that Toronto Cold Reads has returned).

 

* Last Sat. I had planned on seeing Pat LaBarbara at Hirut.  I was there about 15 minutes early (the TTC was actually somewhat smooth for once), but the place was completely full.  I thought I saw a spot at the back table where I usually sit, but the guy at the door claimed that the only thing I could do was grab a stool and sit by the door.  I mean I am not that worried about comfort (and had a pretty uncomfortable spot at the Rex the week before for the Mike Murley gig), but I had wanted to eat the Ethiopian food and put my phone down someplace and try to write.  I didn't see how I could do any of that sitting at a stool by the door, so I didn't bother.  I ate at Thai Room and went home, feeling pretty deflated.  (I guess I would have taken the stool if Neil Swainson had been on bass, but it was someone else.)  There is a small chance I would come by on Jan 21 after La Notte at The Fox, though I could only catch the second set.  I'm not entirely sure that is worth it, but I'll see how I feel at the time.  Then there is a Mike Murley show with Reg Schawger and Neil Swainson in mid Feb.  I guess for that one I will show up at 7 (an hour early) to make sure I get in!

I actually probably do need to book my ticket for Le Notte at least.  I just found out that Mulholland Drive at Paradise tomorrow is sold out(!), but I will probably drop by anyway to see if they have a rush line like the Revue does.

Bad Hard Drive Results

I've been feeling a lot of ups and downs about the recovery process.  Originally, they thought that most of the drive would be recovered, i.e. something around 95%.  In the end, it was 92% recovered, but the damage is time-specific with the most recent files the most damaged, which of course are the ones that are top of mind and the ones that are most painful that they haven't been recovered...

Anyway, I paid the (very high) fee and received a detailed report on what was recovered entirely and what was damaged.  I guess I'll start with the bad news.  There was a folder called Xmas2025 that had all the pictures and videos from my cell phone from pretty much all of Dec.  None of this was recovered at all.  This means that a couple of jazz shows at the Rex are just gone, including a 2 guitar show featuring Lorne Lofsky and probably a Dave Young show.  I believe the most recent Mike Murley show is still on my phone, though it cut off a bit early for some absurd reason.  Either I could have left the files on the phone longer (as storage space isn't quite as serious a problem as before) or I could have left the entire folder Xmas2025 on the laptop longer, and I remember debating copying vs. moving the files at the time.  I bitterly regret not copying that folder over, but how was I to know that a nearly brand new drive would fail so badly...  Never again.  I can't really remember the photos I took, though this includes a recent trip to the AGO.  So I can go again and replicate a lot of those, though not the couple of photos I took of my son in front of some of the art.  Sigh.  I didn't really care for the art at my last trip to the Power Plant, but I might take a few replacement photos of the art in the plaza just north of the Power Plant.  I probably am also missing a few photos of my last trip to 401 Richmond, but hopefully I have the visits prior to that, though I will have to probe once I have the data sent back.

However, most of the other folders (with phone pictures and videos) seem to have survived, including several shows out at Budweiser Stage and 54-40 at Danforth Music Hall.  I was freaking out a bit because there were two or three shows that I had started transferring over from phone video to mp3 (a somewhat tedious process).  It turns out that the entire Lowest of the Low show files survived and all but one or two of the GoGo Penguin files, so that was unexpected good news (I mean relative to the fact I had thought I had lost it all...).

Now some PDFs (of art monographs) were completely corrupted, but in a freak positive twist, I had copied these over so my son could take a look, and I was able to copy them back.  Too bad I hadn't also copied over a few more of the photos of our trip to the AGO...  Some poetry books survived, though these are ones I could have reconstructed from files still in my mailbox's deleted folder (which I hadn't emptied yet).  I'm sure it helps that the file size is an order of magnitude smaller than the art monographs.

A large number of wav files from material I recorded off the internet are also gone.  In many cases, I can just record this again, so annoying and time-consuming, but not "fatal."  However, there were two shows of Robyn Hitchcock performed at home (called Live from Tubby's House), and these are time-limited and cannot be replayed now.  Two other shows that I thought were lost were actually copied over to a different hard drive, so that's positive.  I only wish I had had more free space on the other hard drives (that didn't fail), but that just wasn't the case.  I asked them to copy over bad wav files, just in case portions can still be read, but I am not sure if they will do that.  I guess I'll find out in a couple of days.

So there are probably something on the order of 10 shows (either at the Rex or over the internet including two Hitchcock shows) that are just completely gone and the photos documenting my last trip to the AGO and 401 Richmond, but I believe most other files have been recovered, so I will try to focus on that rather than the loss.  (I mean 92% is very good just not quite as high as I would have liked...)  It's hard, however, as it is just not in my nature to focus on positives, particularly given I am in pretty constant low-level pain from my back.  But I'll try in this case.

Edit (9 pm): So the recovery technician said he had copied it all over to a blank drive, even the damaged files, so I'll see if any of the damaged wav files have usable chunks, and I guess I'll do the same for a few mp4 files.  He also said he was going to take one more stab at recovering some of the data a different way, which is cool unless he charges me another huge fee, and I told him just to focus on the Xmas2025 folder and a small handful of damaged wav files and just let the rest go.  No point holding out any hope here, but it would be terrific if something does emerge out of this.  I'm actually pretty excited about listening to the Lowest of the Low show and the GoGo Penguin show, which I had assumed were completely lost but were recovered.  It should just be another day or two before this drive shows up.

Edit (01-14): When I got back from seeing Mulholland Drive at the Paradise (I got in after all -- what a strange, strange movie!), there was a package on the doorstep.  It was the drive back from Recovery Force.  As feared, nothing in the Xmas2025 folder is recoverable at all.  Some of the damaged wav files are readable, though it is very hit or miss.  I have about 30 minutes from one of the Live at Tubby's House shows, but not the other ones, which is really too bad.  (With a little more digging, it turns out that I do still have the Dec. 17 show that kicked off with "Goodnight Oslo," but not the next one which was a mini-tribute to Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding album.  Honestly, I would rather have Dec. 17, so that sort of worked out.  And of course I've love to get back the rest of their New Year's Eve show.)  Maybe this guy will manage to recover a few more files, but I'm not going to lose any more sleep over this.

Bad Back

I've been dealing with back spasms over the past few days (since last Friday I think), and then it felt like I had a pinched nerve or something in my lower back, so it has been extremely painful to change positions from sitting to standing, though walking around isn't too painful.  Even getting out of bed generally means rolling out of bed.  This happened to me back around 2010, and then I had a flare-up while living in Vancouver.  In both cases, I did end up going to a chiropractor, and that seemed to solve things, though obviously temporarily.  I actually biked past a chiropractor's office on Queen East on the weekend, and I wonder if I will end up going there or see if there is a place closer to me.  

Somewhat surprisingly, I was able to go swimming on Sat., and then at the gym I tried to use the back extension machine and then the equipment that helps stretch the spine.  In the short term, it just felt worse.  Anyway, we'll just see how things develop, but it's definitely worrying.  

Interestingly, biking doesn't seem to impact me too much, and in my mind at least the minor stretching you need to do (to keep vigilant and look left and right to avoid being hit by a car!) loosens things up a bit.  At any rate, I was able to bike last Thurs. through Sat. (including a trip downtown to see Marty Supreme at Market Square), and it looks like I might be able to bike to work on Tuesday, before the weather gets bad again.  I probably would not consider biking to work in Jan. or Feb. if the TTC wasn't so unreliable.  And maybe 10 or 20 years from now with climate change, biking in winter won't be abnormal, though I am not sure I plan on going to work, particularly to a downtown location, on a daily basis 20 years from now.  (And I definitely wouldn't if I am still having occasional, but severe, back pain.)  I guess I'll see how it all unfolds...

Random Cultural Thoughts on the New Year

It's been a pretty good start to the year, reading-wise at least.  I have reread Narayan's The Financial Expert and read The Painter of Signs.  His novels are generally fairly short, and these ones have a bit of a fable-like quality to them, with the characters sort of returning to where they started but having learned something about themselves (or just the bitter teachings of "life") along the way.  I wouldn't say I loved either of them, though I enjoyed The Painter of Signs more.  I think my favourite of all his novels is The English Teacher with my least favourite (and one I will never reread) being The Man-Eater of Malgudi, closely followed by Swami and Friends.  I'm about 2/3rds of the way in reading through all of his novels, and now that I am back on track, I may well be finished by 2027.  I also reread Zelazny's Roadmarks, which I enjoyed but doesn't stand up as much (today) as some of his other work.  Next, I'm going to alternate between Mahfouz's The Beggar and The Tale of the Missing Man next.  I'm more like 1/2 through Mahfouz's novels, and I guess I will step that up a bit.  Then probably O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find.

I've seen 8 of the 9 Naruse films that I have tickets for at TIFF.  I completely forgot that I had watched several of his silent films that Criterion/Eclipse put out years ago.  The only film that I have on DVD I haven't watched is Repast, and I will probably watch this at some point this winter.  I mentioned that I saw Winter Light with my son.  If he comes home at Reading Week in Feb., I think I'll try to watch the other two in Bergman's Winter Trilogy, but if not I'll just watch them while it is still winter.

I also have borrowed a few Godard films from the library, and I should be able to get through Breathless and Masculin Feminin this weekend.  I saw The Truman Show at Paradise, as part of their Toonie Tues. and the theatre was packed.  I finally went ahead and got the membership at Paradise, as they have finally started showing enough films to justify it.  And then last night I saw Network at Carlton.  This is my first time seeing it.  I think maybe there were a few too many plot contrivances, almost more as if this were a TV series with a large cast rather than a movie...  (I wonder if there was any consideration to spinning this off as a TV show, just as MASH had done a few years previously.  Though it would have been a bit of a challenge as one of the more compelling characters ended up dead at the end...)  I am probably going to check out The Thing tonight, though it means going out to The Fox.  (I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but one of the only Antonioni films that I actually like, La Notte, is playing at The Fox, and I do plan to go to that.)

I was travelling back from The Truman Show, finishing up The Painter of Signs, and I saw someone reading a book with a huge Max Beckmann painting on the cover.  I did some sleuthing and realized this was the central panel from his Departure triptych, and from there learned that the young woman was reading Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy.  

I suspect I must have read this back in the day, but I don't remember anything about it.  I haven't decided if I like the cover enough to pick up a copy just for the cover.  Perhaps...

As part of this search, I ran across two Beckmann paintings I don't recall seeing before, which is odd, as I have gone through a lot of Beckmann monographs.

Max Beckmann, Odysseus and the Siren, 1933

Max Beckmann, Transporting the Sphinxes, 1945

I like both, though the one with the sphinxes a bit more.  The second one happens to be in a museum in Brussels, not that I am particularly likely to see it.  I guess I should see if it happened to be at the big MoMA show years ago, but I don't think it was.

I'm running a bit late for work.  I actually am going to bike in today and probably tomorrow, which is good, as I have not been very good with my diet lately, and I need the extra exercise.  I might even have a bit more energy when I get to the office, which I desperately need.  Ciao.

Edit (9 pm): Between being a bit depressed by biking around in the damp and dark, and the fact that I don't really like The Fox much, and the even more compelling fact that I have work still to do to hit some deadlines tomorrow, and I ended up bailing on The Thing.  I'm sure I'll see it some day.  I think they program it every so often at Carlton. 

Edit (01/09): I have confirmed that neither of these Beckmann paintings was in the MoMA show out in Queens, which is a missed opportunity, particularly for Odysseus and the Siren, as it is in a private collection housed somewhere in New York.

 

Computer - Good and Very Bad News

As I was jotting down the other day, I have been having severe computer issues that cropped up recently.  I assumed that I would need to get a new computer (and probably that isn't a bad idea, as frustrating as that would be, if I can find one with extra RAM and hard drive space, as well as an internal digital drive).  Anyway, I was realizing that I probably could just use the cmd prompt to copy over the recent files to the new external hard drive and then reformat the C drive if necessary.  All was going ok until I found out that the cmd prompt couldn't even recognize the drive, and that all the Explorer issues were due to a catastrophic failure on the part of the (very new) external hard drive(!) not the desktop itself.

So I unplugged the failing hard drive and the computer went back to normal.  So that's sort of a happy ending.  However, I had been of course been using this failed hard drive to consolidate all the backups over the past month or so.  (And it seems ridiculously unfair that a drive I bought only a month or so ago suffered such a catastrophic failure.)  Now most folders and files are still on another hard drives, so it will be annoying but not impossible to restore.  However, this failed drive is the only place where a lot of videos and concerts from the Rex were stored, as well as pretty much all the museum photos over the past 2 months.  (It's particularly galling as there was no immediate reason to remove the brand-new Xmas2025 folder from this older laptop after I copied it onto the new hard drive, but I did...)

As it just was failing in this past day (and chkdsk can still basically see the drive), there is a reasonably good chance that if I send it off to one of those data recovery centres, they can back it up (for a very large fee).  I'll call tomorrow.  I might as well send another bad drive that a different data recovery centre wasn't able to restore (from over a decade ago, however).  It's also ironic that if this had happened a few days back, I could have had someone who lives in Waterloo run it over to Guelph, but that won't work in this case.

I guess I will take the time to re-evaluate.  I think I need to stop taping so much music off the internet.  I'll probably drop BBC New Music Show and Round Midnight (which really backs up as it is five days per week!) and just focus on Music Planet.  Now whether that justifies keeping the VPN service is a question for another day.

So I am in a pretty crappy, crappy mood.  It could have been worse, in that some of the big files I was working on were also copied over onto a flashdrive for my son, and I can back those up immediately (and I had backed up some Jeff Wall images a few other places, which I would have done for everything aside from just not having enough free hard drive space on the drives that didn't fail!), but it is still a huge drag.  I may toy with the idea of storing more of this stuff in "the cloud," but I really don't want anything else that is going to do weird automatic backups and further degrade this computer.  The constant Windows upgrades are already as bad as a virus.  And most of these services are pretty costly, but the biggest single stumbling block is that none of them actually guarantee the privacy of your data, with Gdrive being the worst, with Google clearly letting AIs have access to data in the cloud.  I had better go off to the gym, as I have already been delayed enough by this setback.

 

Edit (01/06): I managed to get the hard drive sent out by UPS this afternoon, though for 4x what I was expecting to pay!  (To be fair, this included some bubble wrap and them packing it up for me, but still...)  I only hope this isn't a harbinger of what it will cost me, assuming that Recovery Force actually can recover the data.  There will be the cost of a new blank USB stick or hard drive, depending on how much data can be salvaged, plus shipping, and maybe even a disposal fee after they are done.  I saw on the website that they change an additional $500 if the drive was opened by someone else.  I didn't do that in this case, but the older drive that failed was clearly opened by someone at that other recovery centre.  So it is almost certainly not worth it at this point, but if this goes well, I might end up in a bit of a back and forth discussion on what they would actually charge to attempt to recover data off a second hard drive.  

Edit (01/09): Well, I got the quote, and it is something like 3x what I was expecting to pay.  I guess I will go ahead and see what happens.  They think they can recover most of the data, and there will not be a charge if they cannot recover 75% or more of the data.  Clearly, I need to just buy a couple of blank hard drives and keep them handy to back up important things (like photos and videos off my phone) so this doesn't happen again.

 

Belated Thanks

I meant to get this post out between Canadian and US Thankgivings, and then after US Thanksgiving, and I just never found the time.

It is always worth considering what one is thankful for, particularly in these extremely stressful times.

I am not particularly thankful for the TTC, which has only provided really good service on 2 occasions over the past 20 times I've ridden it, with really dreadful service on a couple of days.  I am definitely not thankful for Ford and certainly not for Trump.  I am thankful that Carney does seem to be governing like a centrist technocrat, though I disagree with his pivot away from climate change initiatives and trying to appease Alberta (which I feel is foolish in the extreme).

I am glad that my health is overall quite good and on the rare occasions I do get sick, I recover very quickly.  I only had actual COVID symptoms for a day or so, and they didn't knock me out.  Indeed, given how well I managed COVID, it's fairly likely that I did have it once or twice before but was asymptomatic.  (Unfortunately, my son seems to have a much more compromised immune system and has caught COVID at least 5 or 6 times, usually needing several days to recover.)  I would like to lose more weight of course, but in general things are decent health-wise, and while I certainly have lost that spring in my step (and walking through museums for hours on end is harder for me now), I still get out and stay very active.

I'm glad we added the kittens to the household.  I think it actually does make me a somewhat more patient person and a marginally calmer one.  I'm also glad that cat litter has improved drastically from the really acidic smell from the 1980s and 1990s, though this clumping cat litter does have a tendency to clog the toilet a bit, and I am not thankful for that!

 
I'm grateful to be employed,* even though I am not in love with my work.  It has always been the case that the best, most rewarding work has been in places that I really didn't want to live, setting up a challenging dynamic.  I do overall enjoy Toronto, particularly its cultural scene, and I take full advantage of that.  However, I am not very happy with the way the generally incompetent and often venal politicians running Ontario make my work harder (or certainly less fulfilling) and they also have had some direct negative impacts on my personal life as well, though I won't go into that at the moment, aside from noting that Toronto really would be better off with charter city powers to insulate it from the terrible policies constantly emanating from Queens Park (with ripping out bike lanes and now forbidding speed cameras being only the latest outrage du jour).

But to put a more positive spin on work, they generally do let me pull together material to submit to conferences (even if I can't put all of this time down as chargeable on my timesheet).  I was not able to go to conferences at Metrolinx after Ford took over and wanted to show there would be no government employees enjoying themselves at public expense...  Anyway, I have managed to go to a few conferences, and I think in a couple of cases, I will actually be able to translate the work into a publication for greater reach.  (This is something I sort of stopped doing after my dreams of becoming an academic died, but I have a list of topics that I think would (still) make good papers, and this seems like a more useful thing to work on in 2026 than many of my other late-night activities, even though I do keep the doomscrolling to a minimum!)  

I also probably don't focus enough on that I am thankful I got out of the US in time.  I had pretty much wanted to leave since 'W' was re-elected, and we did end up in the UK for a time but didn't like it very much (and it has been truly terribly under the Conservatives and now it seems inevitable that the even more dreadful Reform will take over, so that was definitely a good move in leaving that sinking ship...).  I was pretty fortunate in making the move before the immigration policies tightened up (and I simply got too old).  I don't agree with pulling up the ladder after me, though I don't think there is currently a party (I could vote for) that is endorsing unlimited immigration (or only a few limits).  I am grateful in a small way that they did loosen immigration for foreign-trained doctors, so my family doctor will probably get to stay after all.  

Given that immigration is back in the public imagination (as an "issue") maybe this would be a good time to finish up that thing I was writing about my own imagined journey had I actually tried to do an endrun around 1990s immigration policy by marrying a lesbian.  (This was something one of my friends had proposed, though I don't think she was particularly serious about it.)  I have written it up as a play, but I think it would likely work better as a novel.  I'll have another close look at it, but only after I have made more progress on my other creative writing, which is going reasonably well, which indeed is another thing I am thankful for.

I might have to think a bit more if I was going to add any more things for which I am thankful.  It is one of the downsides of my personality that I don't generally see the positive side of things and often can't even point out the positives without also focusing on negatives, which undermines the goal of a post like this.  

* While my work is mostly pattern recognition at heart, there is still enough interpretation that clients don't believe machine learning and/or AI can do it all without some senior people (like me) to interpret the results for them.  This may last another 5 years before the price of this sort of work is driven completely down to the point where I will be out of work.  I guess we shall see.  I am definitely glad that I am towards the end of my career (12-15 years left I suppose) and not a bright young thing, as it is the juniors that will be impacted the most by the AI revolution, not only in not getting very good training but not even being hired to show off their skills in the first place...

Godard/Rohmer

I'm not sure if these two film makers really have that much in common, though I found in the relatively few movies I've seen by them, there was a lot of philosophizing and both were very much aimed at intellectuals, even moreso than other French directors like Demy or Truffaut.  I know for certain that Godard moved even further into this space, mostly working on documentaries of the cinema and away from pure entertainment.  I'm less sure that's the case for Rohmer.  It might be that My Night at Maud's was actually the high-point of his intellectualism.  I am fairly certain, however, that Rohmer ultimately believed entertaining the audience (unlike Godard who frankly had contempt for the audience and his fellow directors by the end).

Anyway, I have an awful lot of these films, and I should just try to track which I have actually watched.

I bought the ultimate Godard box set years and years ago.  So long ago I can't find the invoice, but I recall it was a pretty good deal at that time.

I keep forgetting that it does have A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) (1960) in it.  I actually just requested a copy of Breathless from the library, but this is the Criterion with better special features, so I'll watch that version when it arrives.

The rest of the set is comprised of:
Une Femme Est Une Femme (1961)
Le Petit Soldat (1963)
X Le Mepris (1963)
X Alphaville (1965)
Pierrot Le Fou (1965)
Made In USA (1966)
La Chinoise (1967)
Passion (1982)
Detective (1985)
Helas Pour Moi (Oh Woe is Me) (1993)
Eloge De L’amour (In Praise of Love) (2001)
Notre Musique (2004)

I then picked up separately:
X Vivre Sa Vie (1962)
Une Femme Mariée (1964)
Band à Part (Band of Outsiders) (1964)
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967)
Tout Va Bien (1972)
Slow Motion/Every Man for Himself (Sauve qui peut (la vie)) (1980)

So this is fairly comprehensive coverage of his oeuvre, though I don't have Weekend (1967) (which I watched recently and didn't care much for) nor Masculin Féminin (1966), which I have just requested from the library.  I think I decided not to buy these, as they are pretty easy to grab from the library.  Depending on how I feel after getting through all of these, I might add Prenom: Carmen (1983) and Hail Mary (1985).  How's It Going (Comment ça va) (1976) sounds pretty dire honestly, as does Keep Your Right Up (Soigne ta droite) (1987).  I'm pretty sure my enjoyment of Godard films will drop off radically by his mid 1970s work, but I guess I'll find out.

As far as Rohmer goes, I mostly picked up a number of box sets:

Six Moral Tales (Criterion):
The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963)
Suzanne's Career (1963)
La Collectionneuse (The Female Collector) (1967)
X My Night at Maud's  (1969)
Claire's Knee (1970)
Love in the Afternoon (1972)

This first set I actually found used in Chicago, but the rest were ordered, mostly through Amazon.co.uk.

The Essential Eric Rohmer (either very early or very late films):
The Sign of Leo (1962)
Rendez-vous in Paris (1995)
Triple Agent (2004)
The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007)

Eric Rohmer Collection (Arrow), which contains his Comedies and Proverbs and two "bonus" films:
Love in the Afternoon (1972) (duplicate)
The Marquise of O (1976)
The Aviator's Wife (1981)
A Good Marriage (1982)
Pauline at the Beach (1983) 
Full Moon in Paris (1984) 
The Green Ray (1986) 
My Girlfriend's Boyfriend (1987) 

Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons (Criterion Blu-ray):
A Tale of Springtime (1990)
A Tale of Winter (1992)
A Tale of Summer (1996)
A Tale of Autumn (1998)

Between all these sets, I really have all but maybe 3 or 4 mid-career movies, so I just need to work my way through this.

I have no idea how long it would take to watch the Godard and Rohmer listed above.  Only a couple of months if I was diligent and didn't do anything else, but that isn't likely to happen.  I think the next post like this, I will focus on Fellini (relatively straight-forward, though I don't own that much) and Bergman, which is completely tangled, though I think I do have almost all his work one way or another.  Watching this sounds like a project for 2027, however! 

And despite my best intentions, as I was researching this, I was also researching Claude Chabrol (sometimes called the Hitchcock of French cinema).  I own a decent box set of his films from the late 1960s and early 70s, though I haven't watched any of them!  I then came across a good-looking box set of his later films, only to find out it doesn't have any English subtitles!  Fortunately, I hadn't pulled the trigger.  Of his later films, the ones that were of the most interest to me were L'Enfer (Torment) and La Fleur du Mal.  I found a reasonable stand-alone of L'Enfer (where my plan is to watch it and then donate it to Robarts) and La Fleur du Mal.  I almost bought the second one, but found that TPL actually has a couple of copies, so I reserved one.  (I had done a search previously, but somehow it slipped through and fortunately I hadn't pulled the trigger on it, as I was trying to figure out a way to get free shipping!  So I guess you could say my avarice saved me...)

Edit (01/10): I still would like to get around to Breathless this weekend, but I might pause on Masculin Feminin for a few days at least, because I will be seeing Le Mepris/Contempt over at the Revue tomorrow, and three Godard films in one weekend is really a bit much...