Culture Closing Down (Again)

It's not really surprising but it is disappointing that the extreme contagiousness of the Omicron variant and the fact that it easily infects vaccinated people (and that booster shots still aren't that easy to come by*) has led to a bunch of cancellations, with surely a lot more to come.  So this is the unfortunate and sad rebuttal of this post.

In fact, it was just over a week ago that I was tempted by a live music outing -- The Lowest of the Low playing all the songs off Shakespeare My Butt at Lee's Palace.  I knew that it was fairly risky as lots of people would be drinking (and then conveniently forgetting to put their masks back on) and singing along.**  The new rules about 50% capacity and no concessions weren't in place.  And no question this is making a lot of concert halls and movie theatres wonder if it is even worth staying open!  And as I noted, I wasn't able to get my booster shot in time.  But I decided that this likely would be the last chance to do something like this for a while as Omicron lets rip.  The music was great.  I'm a bit sorry I didn't record the version of Gamble they did as part of the encore; maybe someone else did.  I believe this is actually the fourth time I've seen The Lowest of the Low, which means they've pulled ahead of The Tragically Hip at 3.5 shows!  As far as I know, I didn't catch Omicron at the show.  But it was still pretty risky, and I probably shouldn't have gone.  It's definitely safer, though still not safe, going to the theatre or a classical concert where masks do stay on the whole time and there is no singing along...

In terms of what else I have done this fall, I did see Tafelmusik live, a few jazz shows at the Crows Nest (usually with just a tiny audience and very spaced out), a concert at Koerner Hall and two plays at Crows Nest (one of which was definitely not worth leaving the house for).  And I visited a bunch of museums. Note that even a few museums are closing down again!

In terms of the bad news, Mirvish has already cancelled the new Stoppard play, Leopoldstadt.  It could be years before they are able to bring that back.  They had temporarily paused Come From Away, but just decided to shut it down completely.  That's a shame, and I was considering taking my son to see it.  I expect that their entire 2021-22 season will go down the drain.  And this may well push off the return of Hamilton yet another year.

Smaller indy shows can probably go forward, as they have much smaller crews, though for how long is anyone's guess.  I wasn't entirely sure I was going to go (as it is a looong streetcar ride out west), but Assembly Theatre was doing a play called Two Minutes to Midnight by Michael Ross Albert.  I liked one of the actors in the production, and Albert's piece, The Huns, was one of the highlights of the last pre-Covid Fringe, so I was leaning toward going.  While this probably could have gone forward (small cast and probably no stage crew other than a stage manager), they have decided to postpone.

As of today, Crows Nest is still putting on Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Bagdad Zoo and Coal Mine is putting on Annie Baker's The Antipodes in early January, but I have my doubts that either will happen.  I'll probably try to go to both a day or two after previews are over.

Kronos Quartet is pulling out (for the second time) of their January concerts here.  At the moment, the other TSO and Koerner Hall concerts are going ahead, but I expect most of them will ultimately be cancelled.

It's harder to say about late spring concerts and summer concert tours.  I probably won't buy any more tickets, but I'll hang onto the ones I do have.

Somewhat amusingly, the Toronto Jazz Festival just announced Herbie Hancock is coming to town on April 22, though I don't think this will actually happen.  That is certainly an overstuffed day, as Joshua Redman is supposedly playing Koerner Hall (I have a ticket to that) and Bruce Cockburn is playing Massey Hall.  I suspect in the end, Cockburn, being a Canadian, will make his show and the others will cancel or be moved back, but I guess we'll see.

There are a few things of interest in Feb and March at Factory and Soulpepper (including the Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale, which was already rescheduled), but I am not holding my breath.

* I was supposed to have my booster shot 2 weeks ago, but I got there and their shipment of Pfizer hadn't shown up.  It was pretty random, depending on which pharmacist you talked to, whether they offered you Moderna instead or told you to reschedule.  I was told to reschedule.  I probably could have insisted on Moderna, but the study showing its effectiveness still hadn't come out at that time.  Also, while I am not expecting to travel across the border anytime soon, I didn't want to get caught up in that whole vaccine mixing kerfuffle that happened last year.  I have an appointment for my booster at Metro Convention Centre on the 30th, and this one had better not fall through, or I'll be supremely pissed. 

** In fact, I passed on an opportunity to see 54-40 at the Horseshoe a bit earlier in December, partly because I didn't want to stand all night but also because it feels even more crowded and cramped than Lee's Palace.  But the opportunity to hear Shakespeare My Butt in all its glory was enough to sway me.  What's interesting to me is that while they are a group from the 90s that reformed and still lean a bit on nostalgia, their newest CDs (Do the Right Now and Agitpop) are every bit as good as their early albums.  While I do like some of the songs on the new Camper Van Beethoven/Cracker CDs, it isn't quite as sustained a comeback.

Back to the Gym

I don't begrudge them at all, but I remember when I joined Planet Fitness it was open 24/7.  I think they closed early or opened late on Christmas, but that was it.   This time around with all the general exhaustion (and extra cleaning), they were closing quite early on Christmas Eve (2 pm!), and then were going to be closed on Christmas and Boxing Day.  It's pretty rare for me to skip the gym 3 days in a row, and it meant going on Thurs. and last night if I didn't want it to be a four day streak with little to no exercise.  I really wasn't thrilled about going on Thursday as I had actually gone swimming twice in one week (the first time in years!)*, and my arms were sore.  In the end I cut the workout a bit short, but at least I had gone.  

As it happens, it rained most of Christmas Eve, and there was basically no snow left on Christmas Day.  On the other hand, that meant that I was able to bike downtown on Boxing Day.  I'd like to bike today, but we had a bit of freezing rain last night, and I am not sure the roads are clear.

In any event, I went to the gym on Monday and pushed through for a full workout.  I'll probably go swimming tonight or tomorrow and be more or less on track.   It's fairly likely that they'll close the gyms at some point during this latest surge, so I might as well keep going while I still can. 

Edit (12/29): I probably should have gone swimming last night but just wasn't up to it, though I did bike downtown.  I think I will go to the gym tonight and then see if my arm is up to swimming a few laps on Thurs. after I get my booster shot.

* Last Monday, I actually swam 20 laps, which turns out to be 1000 yards.  If I had made it to 22 laps that would have been 1 km!  I should be able to make it to that mark at some point, but it will have to be on a day I have the entire 45 minute time slot.  (I usually show up late and lose 10 minutes or so.)

Best Reads of 2021

I should perhaps consider adding poetry to this list, but that might just end up being too confusing.  It is true, however, that between reading a lot more poetry over the past two years, watching more classic movies and not taking transit, I am simply not reading as much as I used to.  That said, I did read Don Quixote (and Nabokov's Lectures on Don Quixote), Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and Joyce Cary's First Trilogy, though it often felt I was reading things I felt I ought to read out of obligation rather than books I was actually enjoying on their own merits.  

I cut it extremely close with the Bulgakov.  I was rereading this in anticipation of watching a live musical version of The Master and Margarita at Crows Nest.  In the end, I wrapped up all but the last few pages of the epilogue during the intermission!  While I thought the adaptation was done well, I do think it would have been fairly hard to follow if one wasn't quite familiar with the source material.  Several years ago, I reread Melville's Moby Dick before seeing Lookingglass's adaptation.  In that case, I think I finished the morning of the performance.  Of course, I was on holiday and had a bit more time for uninterrupted reading...

Top 3 of 2021
Coupland Binge
Raymond Kennedy To Ride a Cockhorse
Barry Dempster The Outside World

Best novel reread
Bulgakov The Master and Margarita

Honorable mention
Coupland Shampoo Planet
Tomson Highway The Rez Sisters
John Williams Stoner
Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence
Nick Hornby High Fidelity
Shankar No End to the Journey
Patrick Hamilton The Slaves of Solitude
Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano 

It's a little hard to tell where I will focus in early 2022, but probably Crime and Punishment, followed by Arlt's The Seven Madmen.  Perhaps Desani's All About H. Hatterr, Beckett's 3 Novels and maybe even some Celine. And presumably some lighter fare interspersed between the heavier novels.

Boxing Day movies

There really is not that much to do in Toronto on Boxing Day, esp. if you don't want to head over to the mall.  I have booked a slot to see the Picasso show at the AGO -- for what surely will be the last time.  While I'm there I will check out the Robert Houle exhibit as well.  It doesn't look as if there are any other blockbuster exhibits on tap for 2022.

I had been planning on seeing The Matrix Resurrections on Boxing Day, despite some decidedly mixed reviews.  But when I dug into them a bit more, the convincing ones said that the action sequences weren't really great, the plot was fairly nonsensical and the only real reason to watch was the love story between Keanu and Carrie-Anne (easily the least interesting element from the original Matrix).  Given that they recast Morpheus (sort of) and Agent Smith and yet recycled lots of footage from the original (and the plot really does make no sense), I think I will have give this a hard pass and essentially pretend it never happened.*  I do wish Almodovar's Parallel Mothers was out, but I don't think that opens here until March.

I toyed with the idea of seeing Drive My Car at Tiff Lightbox, but it's 3 hours long!  Ridiculous.  You could film someone reading the Murakami short story it's based on, and that would take less than 60 minutes.  There's a small but non-zero chance I'll go watch the Summer of Love documentary at Hot Docs around 2.

I certainly have not seen a lot of movies in the theatre in the last two years.  Tenet (and the rerelease of Inception) took place in the summer of 2020.  I don't recall seeing anything this summer at all.  I tried but failed to catch Free Guy (when all the good seats were booked at Market Square).  I did watch Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch when it finally opened here.  It was ok, but it was peak Wes Anderson for sure!  I managed to see The Humans at the Fox (I think only the second time I've watched a movie there).  I preferred seeing the play live, but this was a reasonable proxy. And I think that's it.

In terms of watching things at home, I was surprised at how quickly I was able to get the DVD of Free Guy through the library.  I watched that with my son last week.  I'm hoping to watch Dark City on Boxing Day proper, but sports may well get in the way.

Today we watched Chaplin's City Lights.  I think this may well be the first time I've seen the whole thing.  This means that we've gone through his best films (The Gold Rush, Modern Times, City Lights and The Great Dictator) and I watched The Circus on my own.  I'll probably watch the late Chaplin films (Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight and A King in New York) on my own.

A couple of weeks ago, we saw the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera.  We've pretty much gone through the best of the bunch, but I'll probably watch A Day at the Races and maybe Room Service and perhaps Go West with him.  The remaining few aren't nearly as good, and I'll just squeeze them in here and there on my own.

I'm a little surprised at how long some of Harold Lloyd silent films are (often 90+ minutes!), so that makes it a little harder to fit in, around all the other great movies I'd like to watch with him before this fall (and he goes off the college!), but I'll see what we can get to.

We still sometimes watch comic TV shows in the middle of the week (though less often than I would like, due to such things as him having homework to do, of all things).  Currently we are about midway through Season 2 of Slings & Arrows and just starting Season 4 of The IT Crowd (both of which are new to me).  Assuming we get through them by mid January, we can probably make a serious dent in Red Dwarf, but I don't think we'll get through (or indeed even start in on) Futurama, Max Headroom and certainly not Northern Exposure.  C'est dommage.

* I`m sure I would have gone if they had at least brought back Hugo Weaving, so this does feel like an own-goal on their part...

Edit (12/27): In the end I did watch Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions in preparation for Resurrections, and they are generally better than I recall, at least the action sequences.  The dialogue still sucks and the whole Neo as Christ-figure still grates.  

We did end up watching Dark City on Boxing Day, but my copy of the Director`s Cut had a complete malfunction/shutdown in one of the last chapters, and we had to switch to the theatrical version.  That kind of burns me up.  I completely forgot that Dark City actually came out the year before The Matrix, and The Matrix even used some parts of the Dark City set! 

Library Runs

I learned my lesson earlier in the pandemic that it never pays to delay things.  If something is open, and you want to go, you should go.  So I had a very long list of books that I wanted to check out at Robarts (close to 18 months of backlog).  Mostly these were things either completely unavailable in the Toronto system or were reference only.  This fall, Robarts set it up so that alumni could reserve books and pick them up at the circulation desk but not go up into the stacks.  I suppose this was a reasonable compromise, but still was fairly restrictive.  You could only request 10 books at a time, though I think alumni can have 30 or so items checked out at any given time.  So that meant a lot of extra trips to the library.  I actually managed to work my way almost completely through the list by mid-December when they shut it down.  (This seems more to do with UT's winter break and less about Covid).  I think there are only 3 items that I really had hoped to check out and a handful of less pressing books.  I'll see if the reserve system opens back up in mid January, or if Covid protocols mean that Robarts is just out of reach again.  At any rate, I had a pretty good run.

As it happens, I have 4 books still out and they extended the due dates to March 1, so there is no real rush to read these books, though they are relatively short novels by Selvon, so I'll probably just go ahead and read them quickly.

I accidentally returned a Toronto Library book to Robarts.  I went back the very next day, but it was in processing, and I couldn't retrieve it.  It did eventually get returned and taken off of my card, but it was quite stressful at the time.

I've been quite pleased that a number of art exhibit catalogues have made it into the circulating collection (Picasso Painting the Blue Period, Uninvited from the McMichael, and even Surrealism Beyond Borders from the Met), so I have been indulging in those (rather than buying any more art books).

It's nice having access to both systems, though I suspect that if they don't open the Robarts stacks to alumni this fall, I probably won't renew my card there.  It's just that tiny bit too frustrating compared to how I like to use the library.  Also, it is hardly set in stone, but I may be moving offices and the new location is a lot less conducive to running up to Robarts after work.  All the more reason to try to get through everything I want to read at Robarts this summer/fall, as if such a thing were possible... 

Reading Updates

There are so many things on my mind, but I'll start small and perhaps catch up on a few other things over the holidays.  I ended up reading The Lonely Londoners in a couple of days, as I was kind of hoping it would make my best of 2021 list.  While it had some interesting moments, the fact that it was written in West Indian dialect and the men treated women absolutely horribly (mostly their long-suffering wives and girlfriends, often left back home, but also the English women they were always chasing after).  It really felt like looking into an alternative universe where women's liberation never happened and feminism essentially didn't exist.  While Selvon lets up a bit on this theme in his later books,* there is still so much chauvinism going on.  I couldn't really relate to any of the characters, and in that sense I found this a quite inferior work to Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin.  That said, I haven't reread that book since my 20s, and I might be just as unforgiving of it.

I was briefly reading Anita Desai's Feasting, Fasting, but I couldn't stand any of the characters, and it was just so boring.  I gave up fairly early on.  What amazes me is that this was considered the runner-up for the Booker Prize in 1999.  While there is a wide variety of reviews on Goodreads, the 2-star reviews (that said the characterization and plot gets even worse when Arun, the spoiled only son, lands in America) convinced me that abandoning the novel was the right decision.  (However, after perusing the plot of Coetzee's Disgrace, the actual winner in 1999, this sounds like another novel I want to avoid at all costs...)

So I am back to The Horse's Mouth.  I also don't really like these characters very much, and in particular I am fed up with Jimson.  It seems he has literally no self-control and is constantly ending up in jail because he threatens former friends and patrons, steals incessantly, breaks windows, etc.  Some people like these cheeky anti-heroes, but I can't stand them.  The only characters that I recall detesting more are Harriet from After Claude and Mickey Sabbath from Roth's Sabbath's Theater, which I definitely should have dropped.  I think the only reason I haven't dropped The Horse's Mouth is that this sits on a bunch of top 100 novel lists, which is a terrible excuse for sure.  I probably will wrestle it down to only 100 more pages by tonight, and then maybe I will be done by the weekend and I can toss it away.

Almost all the books and other presents have made it here, which is great, though I am still waiting on Crime and Punishment to show up from the UK.  That's the next major thing I expect to read, though I do have a lot of poetry to go through and perhaps the rest of Selvon's Moses Trilogy, even though I don't have particularly high hopes for it.  Maybe I'll only have two books on my best of 2021 list.  It has been such a disappointing year in so many ways that is probably appropriate...  Alternatively, I guess I could move Dempster's The Outside World up, though it wouldn't have made the final cut in most years.

* Perhaps only in The Housing Lark does it get muted.  The out-and-out sexism of Moses Ascending is even worse than in The Lonely Londoners to the point I can't imagine this showing up on a university reading list for example.  

Updated Reading

I'm still plugging away at my list.  I mentioned before that I was taking a break before starting in on The Horse's Mouth.  I managed to finish both The Age of Innocence (not really sold on the ending) and High Fidelity today.  (I probably could have biked in today but wimped out, so I had some reading time on the train.)  I'd say there is a reasonable chance I will get though The Horse's Mouth in the next week or so (if I can get past the domestic abuse angle...).  An interesting side note is that all three novels were made into pretty decent movies, as well as Wise Blood, which is fairly high on the revised reading list, but I still may not get around to it for a while.  I might show High Fidelity to my son; I don't think he'd really appreciate the others.

At any rate, I'm waiting on a copy of Crime and Punishment to show up in the mail.  That will likely be the next thing I read after The Horse's Mouth, followed by The Man Who Was Thursday (even though I don't like the ending) and then Arlt's The Seven Madmen (where many critics say there is a very strong connection to Crime and Punishment).

I've been tempted by immigration literature lately (perhaps because I am weeks away from becoming a citizen myself), and I'll probably reread Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin.  I vaguely remember reading this and The Emigrants back in my 20s!  I'll skim through The Pleasures of Exile also, which is Lamming's personal critical response to the portrayal of Blackness in literature (Caliban, Queequeg from Moby Dick, etc.).  Right before the pandemic hit, I was going to pick up Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners from the Pape Library, but I never got around to it.  It seems to have vanished from their shelves, but I can request a different copy.  If I like that, I may read a few of his other novels as they are generally pretty short, which is quite appealing to me now.

After that I'll mostly be reading books that are destined for the Little Free Library.  Interestingly, it is really crammed full these days...