Negative!

I really didn't think I had caught Coronavirus, even though I was in the office (on the last day I was allowed in the office!) with a co-worker who indeed was infected.  As far as I know, he had a mild case and is recovering, and I certainly hope this remains so!  I realize some people have only mild symptoms and it can remain hidden for a while, but it was roughly 10 days since I had last seen my co-worker, and I didn't have any symptoms.

I learned this on Monday and went in for the test as soon as the walk-in clinic opened on Tuesday.  It took slightly over an hour to be seen.  The test results were supposed to be ready in 3 days (Friday late afternoon) but in fact I found out Sat. morning.  The long wait itself becomes a bit unnerving.  Fortunately, the test came back negative.  (So I guess I'm helping drive down the positivity rate.  Given that it is over 10% in most of Toronto, almost certainly someone in line on Tuesday had it...  Obviously the very worse case scenario would be getting infected at the test site and not knowing it for a while, and of course feeling a bit invulnerable because of the negative test result.)

While I do try to give people space and am avoiding transit -- and elevators -- I'm probably just lucky (not smart) so far.  I do a bit more in-person shopping than is really necessary.  I assume if the gyms were open, I would likely be going, and to some extent it would just be a matter of time before I had more significant exposure.  I absolutely would be biking in to work.  While the office itself is almost entirely deserted, I did go to the food court more than was truly wise (trying to help these places stay somewhat afloat).

At any rate, it looks like they are dropping the age limit on the AZ vaccine to 40, and perhaps I can attempt to navigate the system starting on Tuesday, though I think it might be a bit hard to get through for the first few days at any rate.*  I still think the spring and early summer are pretty much a lost cause, and certainly major concerts are all going to be pushed off one more year, maybe art galleries and limited capacity and/or outdoor theatre may be allowed towards the end of summer (and perhaps I will have had at least one shot by then most likely).  I guess we'll see.  Not a lot of light in the tunnel, but the vaccination campaign is still happening faster (though far more chaotically) than I would have expected roughly a year ago.  I mean it's still going to be a lousy lockdown birthday, but on the other hand no one in the family is actually sick and I'm still employed, so some perspective is in order.  

And with that, it's time for me to sign off.

* Actually, my wife was able to book an appointment for a couple of weeks from now for the AZ vaccine!  She's quite excited.  I'll probably wait another week or two for the fuss to die down and then try to book something (perhaps even at a downtown clinic).  Anyway, finally some positive movement.

To Stream or Not to Stream

It can be quite the question in these times.

I seem to keep missing the small, very short-run productions that some of the actors I know from SFYS are in.  This is unfortunate, but clearly tied to the fact SFYS has been on hiatus for months and months and months, and so I don't check the website and of course I don't have the interaction with the actors to flag these short-run streams.  However, it looks like we are back in business for May 3, so I had better stat writing!

Anyway, I've enjoyed a few of these on-line productions, but not universally.  I bailed on something that UMichigan pulled together as it seemed to basically be lazy sitcom writing (as exciting as it was to see people interacting in real time was, i.e. it wasn't just a Zoom call production).  In general, I am tired of Zoom conference calls and can't muster up much enthusiasm for Zoom-based drama.  That's a major problem facing theatre-goers and theatre companies these days.

As it turns out, Tarragon is trying to go forward with radio plays.  I listened in on Forever Yours, Marie-Lou by Michel Tremblay, but I just don't think it worked well at all.   Without the visual cues, I personally found it too hard to follow what was going on as the dialogue bounced back and forth between the adult sisters and their parents (before the tragic automobile crash).  To be honest right now I couldn't tell you if the sisters also play themselves as children when talking to the parents or if the two sets of actors don't directly interact.  I really liked Albertine in Five Times (when I saw it live) but I think this would be even worse.  Maybe Hosanna would work as a radio play but so few of his other plays would (in my view).

I wasn't that grabbed by the rest of the series (there are currently 4 left), but I was debating tuning in to the incendiary Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad.  But now I am just not convinced they would handle the various reveals well in an audio format, so I am going to pass after all.

I wonder if Soulpepper will deal with the audio play format better, as basically all of its productions in its Around the World in 80 Plays series are audio plays.  I have grave doubts that The Seagull would work, and I was going to give this a miss anyway.  I suspect Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author would translate reasonably well, and I might check that one out in early May.  I think perhaps also The Parliament of the Birds and She Mami Wata & The PxssyWitch Hunt (which is actually a solo storytelling outing so video should in fact be fine) would work.  Now I am not all that interested in these plays anyway, and the rest of the batch seem to me to be problematic in audio play format, so I don't think I will end up supporting Soulpepper much until 2022 at the earliest.

One play (in Zoom-type format) that I will take a chance on is an adaptation of Chekhov's The Three Sisters by George Brown.  Note that this will be performed in real-time so each performance will be slightly different.  Three Sisters runs through this Sat. with showtimes at 7:30.  Performances are free, though donations are greatly welcomed.

Factory apparently is doing some audio plays, and Glenn Sumi was impressed by the latest one.  I may give them a trial this weekend as there is so little to do otherwise.

Another time limited performance is the TSO's performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, which disappears tonight (Thurs. evening).  Tickets are $17.  Presumably this was recorded a while back when small ensembles could still perform in one space.

The current rules in Ontario still allow for the tv/film industry to shoot but blocks musicians from recording, even to put a live-streaming performance together.  No question this seems arbitrary and unfair, like so much of living under COVID.

I was wondering whether the livestreamed Barenaked Ladies concert scheduled for this weekend would be cancelled, but apparently they shot this at Danforth Music Hall in March or even before (so obviously it is not remotely live).  I'll probably watch the Sat. show.  I would have sworn when I was checking yesterday they had summer concert plans (mostly in the States) for this summer, but right now the dates have all been "flipped" to 2022.  Sigh...

I need to wrap this up pretty soon, but it is interesting how differently the Shaw and Stratford Festivals are handling summer planning.  While the theatre capacities are going to be lower at Shaw, it basically looks like they are just taking their 2020 season and dropping it into 2021.  They are even planning on running a bus down from Toronto!  I have to say this seems completely unrealistic and more than a little negligent.  Basically the only acknowledgement that things are "different" is that they have cancelled all the musicals.

The contrast with Stratford couldn't be greater.  As far as I can tell, the bus is completely kiboshed, which is understandable but unfortunate.  They are planning some smaller musical cabarets in place of the big musicals.  They also expect to do all the plays outdoors and are keeping audiences well spaced out with no more than 100 guests.  Plays will be kept to 90 minutes with no intermissions (and no mingling)*.  I do wonder if they will go to the extreme of just Porta-potties like Bard on the Beach in Vancouver.  Part of me thinks this would be a really interesting and memorable experience, but the other part worries about rain and just how hard it would be to arrange to drive there.  So I probably will pass for one more summer.  They also seem to recognize that some people still won't want to (or be able to) come (particularly without the bus) and they will be filming some performances for in-home streaming.  I suspect this is how I will watch Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters, which I had so wanted to see last summer.  That said, I will at least consider going in person, but I think it is unlikely.

It's just too early to tell if there will be outdoor theatre in Toronto proper this summer, but I expect a lot of companies will try, so that is something I will keep an eye out for, as it is, in almost all cases, a step up from streaming.  However, the Toronto Fringe has already decided to not try for outdoor performances but will be digital, so that naturally dampens my enthusiasm.  Oh well.

* This cuts deeply into how much Shakespeare they can put on!  It will only be Midsummer's Night's Dream and an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet this summer.  That said, they are doing Albee's Three Tall Women and you have to come back for the second act at a later time the same day, which doesn't seem to be to make any sense at all.  I think this probably should have been pushed to 2022.

Blasts from the Past

I don't think I'll ever have the time to truly keep up with this blog the way I would like, in part because it isn't quite a journal, and I find that I have to second-guess myself on whether I really do want to write something that will in all likelihood be taken the wrong way and held against me at some point (and this just bogs me down).  Indeed, there is basically nothing so innocuous that someone won't take offense.  The latest stupidity is that Hawaiian shirts are making a come back, and the Twitterati are warning that this may be offensive because it reminds people of the forced colonization of Hawaii.  I'm so glad I never joined Facebook or Twitter.  There just isn't enough time in the day for that much outrage.  That said, it was interesting looking a year back at my posts where it was becoming clear that this was going to be much more serious than SARS, though I don't think it had really sunk in just how much this would upend our lives.

In March I was mostly writing about toilet roll shortages and how many things had already been cancelled (and indeed how many of these I had bought tickets for and in almost no cases did I get a refund!) whereas in April I was writing how the summer and fall were already called off (and how I was slowly pivoting to ebooks at the library).  I have generally been writing less because there has been so little change - gyms open, gyms close, patios are allowed before they are forbidden, etc.  I generally am not that interested in on-line arts events, though I am listening to the TSO play Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and I'll touch on that in the next post.  The biggest change for me really was whether I could go in to work or not, and that also got a bit tedious to detail.  The issues surrounding the school closings are even more distressing to me, and right now I am in such a funk that it's better just to avoid  going into my real feelings about life in general and humanity specifically.

One of the last things I did in the office before it was shut down (or rather second last when counting preparing my taxes...) was to scan a lot of old journals and emails from my past that I had printed out.  And I do mean old! 

The oldest hand-written journals were from 1984, continuing to about 1988, while the printed out emails were mostly from 1993-4 (as my initial adventures in academia were coming to an end).  It's just as well that I went the hard copy route because none of the electronic media from that time would still be readable.  As it happens I have scanned them back to PDFs, which probably has another 10 years (?) before it too will be obsolete and need to be upgraded to something else.  I'm not going to go into great detail today on these old journals, but I will say that I have forgotten a lot that mattered a great deal to me at the time.  Usually reading the journals is enough to help restore my memory, but there was a note about a high-school crush I had (Karen), and the name means absolutely nothing to me any longer...

Probably as I go through the files to make sure no pages were dropped during the scanning process, I'll pull out a few interesting threads.  Maybe my thoughts on Desert Storm 1 and how I marched in an anti-war parade through campus or perhaps my trials and tribulations as a high school teacher fresh out of university.  There certainly is a lot of raw material, though I am not sure whether it really is compelling enough to do anything with it all.  I simply never became famous enough for anyone to care, which is putting it mildly...

And with that, I think it is time to turn back to the timeless Vivaldi.

Back to Square One

Well, the great loosening lasted just about 3 weeks before the cases, particularly serious ones that landed people in hospital ICUs, spiraled out of control, leading to a Province-wide stay-at-home order (and naturally the promise of going back to the barber/spa was taken off the table).  I'm certainly very disappointed by this.  I stayed quite late on the last day before the order took effect, making the first pass through our Canadian taxes (with the US ones having been done about a week before that).  

As it turns out yesterday we heard that an employee in my division had caught COVID and had been in that day.  I did see him from afar though didn't talk to him (and he stayed behind a glass office door).  I think my exposure risk is extremely low, but I agreed to get tested today.  So I biked over and stood in line for a bit over an hour at the East York Community Centre for a drop-in test.  One of the more amusing moments was when a minivan pulled into the parking lot and 6 high school basketball players got out, not too dissimilar from a clown car emptying out.  I hope for their sake that no one has it, because I'd say the whole team is likely to have it if anyone does.

This was my first time taking the test (and it was certainly uncomfortable), though everyone else in the household had been tested before.  I'll probably have the results tomorrow, but I would be very, very surprised if I actually had caught COVID as it has been about twelve days since I saw that co-worker who did get it, and I have had no symptoms, in particular no loss of smell or taste.

What this does mean is it will be particularly challenging to stay in shape, as I don't like riding around for no reason (and the office is closed unless you have an extremely good reason to go in).  I did agree to drop by the office if any of the modelling machines need to be restarted, but I likely won't be going back until May.  It's a shame as I was starting to fit into those snug jeans a bit better...

I can tell it's going to be another lousy lockdown birthday, and I'm not going to even pretend to have any fun.  Most of all, I just don't see how the musicians and theatre artists can keep going with one more lost year.  (I guess in the States there is some return to normalcy, but here it's looking more and more like very late fall before things get back on track.)  I haven't done a very good job in terms of staying on top of digital performances (and I honestly haven't been blown away by the ones I have seen with a few exceptions).  But I'll try to pull together a post with the things I probably will get around to watching.

I'm kind of bringing myself down, so I think I'll just stop now.  Ciao.

Watching Movies Together

Trying not to be too maudlin (or to rip off  Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays too much), but I do wish I had started watching movies with my son a bit earlier.  I am working on getting through a lot of classics, giving him a good grounding, but I probably could have started a couple of years ago with some of the Chaplin and Keaton silents and some of the more G-rated movies (Casablanca, The African Queen and Some Like It Hot, for example).  Now I did take my son and often my daughter to Pixar movies, starting with Wall-E and I guess ending with The Incredibles 2.  I also took him to Black Panther, which he adored, and the final Star Wars trilogy and 2001 (when a 70 mm print was being screened).  And we did venture out during the pandemic to see Inception and Tenet.  As it happens, I did make more of an effort to take him to live theatre, pre-pandemic, but it's just going to be going through my stockpile of DVDs for the foreseeable future...

Part of the problem is there are just so many great movies to try to get too (balancing French films vs. Japanese films vs. the "classic" 80s films from my youth), and during the school year, I can pretty much only squeeze in a full-length feature or two on the weekend -- and only an episode of a Britcom on a typical school night...

In terms of British television comedies, we did get through the whole run of Monty Python and are 4/6ths through Blackadder III.  So we'll finish all of Blackadder, even the specials, then most likely Fawlty Towers, followed by Father Ted.  I'm thinking probably The IT Crowd next, then Black Books, then perhaps Red Dwarf, though that will take quite a while if I go through all the episodes that originally aired on Dave!  I have no idea what would follow, either Futurama and maybe even back to Get Smart, which we stooped somewhere in the middle of Season 3 I think (several years back now).  Maybe I'd consider The Young Ones, assuming he's mature enough for that, at that point.  Or indeed if he hasn't moved away for university!

On to the movies we've seen starting this year.  I won't go into too much detail on Bond or the Pink Panther movies, which I discuss here.  They're sort of in the mix, but not really that high on my priority list anymore.

This year, we've seen:

• Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Monty Python's Life of Brian
• Monty Python and the Meaning of Life
• Gilliam's Brazil
• Juzo Itami's The Funeral
• Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight
• Fellini's 8 1/2
• Satyajit Ray's The Hero 
• Satyajit Ray's Mahapurush (The Holy Man)
• Tati's Jour de Fete
• Tati's Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
• Etaix's The Suitor
• Etaix's Yoyo
• Huston's The Night of the Iguana
• Huston's The Maltese Falcon

I'm sure I'm missing a few, but this is what I can recall.  I did watch Truffaut's Day for Night by myself when he was quite tied up.

The Pierre Etaix set from Criterion is a major discovery for me.  It really is like watching Keaton filtered through Tati's sensibility.  I also really liked The Hero a lot; while clearly inspired by 8 1/2, it felt more focused.

In terms of immediate next steps, I think it will be to finish off Tati (Mon Oncle, Playtime and Traffic) and Etaix (As Long As You've Got Your Health and Le Grand Amour). And then Casablanca and a few of the truly classic film noirs: The Big Sleep, The Third Man, Out of the Past, The Lady From Shanghai, Laura and Gilda.  

Based on his reactions and general preference for comedies, I think I'll probably watch most of the French New Wave classics by myself, maybe making an exception for Shoot the Piano Player (not a comedy) and Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.  I know that much of Eric Rohmer's work is comic, but I'm still not sure it would be something that would grab him.

I don't think there are too many Satyajit Ray comedies left, so I'll likely watch these on my own as well.  (It is somewhat shameful to admit I've never gotten around to The Apu Trilogy, but think I'll correct that this summer.)

While I am not entirely sure he would really be up for La Dolce Vita (not least because it conveys such a jaded world view and is so long), I think he might be more interested in Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits and Amarcord.

I think most Ozu films are a bit too "interior" for him.  I'm not as sure about Naruse, many of which I've not seen all the way through myself.  However, I probably will screen him Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs and Ozu's Good Morning and just possibly Mizoguchi's Street of Shame.

Which brings me in an indirect way to Kurosawa.  I actually own a massive box set of his work but stalled out after getting through his very early work.  I don't think my son is too interested in samurai movies in general, though Ran and Rashomon are kind of unskippable.  And of course, he should watch Ikiru, and I have been meaning to rewatch that as well for a while.

This program should easily last through the end of the year, especially if I sprinkle in some 80s films, and after that I can think about circling back to pick up some early silent films or Hitchcock, especially Rear Window, Vertigo and North by Northwest.  Maybe he will be ready for Bergman by that point.

Getting Sort of Fit

Last week I biked downtown 6 days out of 7 (typically 25 minutes each way, so a decent cardio workout).  Note that this was before the clocks moved ahead, so it was pretty dark when coming back from work.  This week is likely to be 4 days biking in, partly due to rain in the forecast for Thursday.  It is definitely warming up.  Strong winds aside, it will just get more and more pleasant through the summer, so that's something to look forward to -- and perhaps by late summer there will be more clarity around when I am eligible for a vaccine shot, so something else to look forward to.

On a bit of a tangent, I ended up wearing the same pair of jeans over and over (and not breaking it up by wearing slacks as I normally do).  The knee ripped out, and I patched it up, only for another big rip to appear right at the end of the patch!  Then they started disintegrating all over.  It's frustrating because it is so hard to go in and try on jeans (during the pandemic).  Also, Old Navy didn't have any loose or relaxed jeans.  (I guess a lot of other people were packing on the pandemic pounds.)  Anyway, I ended up with a pair of straight cut jeans from Old Navy and a loose pair of Walmart jeans.  In both cases they were painfully snug, though after the last couple of weeks of biking they are just snug.  If all goes well, in two more weeks they will fit comfortably, and then ideally as we head into May I may be able to go down one size (and fit into my pre-pandemic jeans).  It's a modest enough goal, but I will be pleased if I can maintain the weight loss, even in near lockdown conditions without access to the gym.  (Of course, if we go back into full lockdown, then all bets are off...)

Back on the Bike

Today was a pretty nice day, weather-wise, even by Spring standards.  Yesterday wasn't as nice, but it was bearable.  I mention this, as I took advantage of the fact that Toronto moved back to the grey zone (after 100 days in full lock-down, which was actually a North American record...) to go in to the office two days in a row.  I am still getting my biking legs back.  While I probably would not have actually biked in that many days this winter, esp. February where the local streets were kind of slushy, not having the choice at all made it quite a challenge to stay fit in any way (as I am very bad about working out at home and kind of need the gym or some out-of-home exercise).  I'm trying to make the most of it, since our medical officers are clearly having second thoughts about even moving to grey, and things may be rolled back before you can say Boo.

I've certainly seen a fair number of delivery bikes out and about, but not that many regular riders.  It's still a bit early.  I did decide to try to beat the rush and dropped my bike off at the bike shop last week for a tune up, so that it would be ready on Monday.  So that worked out fairly well.