Losing Interest

I think the ever-changing deadlines for reopening have finally broken my spirit.  I get a bunch of emails each week about audio plays or other on-line arts, but I am basically no longer interested.  I've decided to pass on whatever they ultimately put on in High Park, though I suppose if something goes up in Withrow Park I'd probably go.  Once in a while I'll order a ticket for some streaming concert at the Village Vanguage, and I still have a subscription for the VSO, but I just have lost interest in pretty much everything else (except for SFYS of course, which looks like it will be happening on June 14).  I think it's pretty unlikely it will be taken, as they really wanted to prioritize new voices (i.e. non-white male authors), so I didn't spend much time on he submission, but Outside the March was asking for audio plays and I submitted the outline of Double Sabbatical as a possible radio play.  (Sometime I do sabotage my own chances with half-assed submissions, but they made it awfully clear that they were looking for other, new exciting voices.  When I am ready, I'll put together a much more impressive cover letter for my poetry anthology pitch.)

Maybe I'll be more interested in August when at least a few in-person things will be on offer.  The AGO will probably have a Warhol exhibit in the late summer and presumably a Picasso exhibit in the late fall.  I'm still very much on the fence regarding a Rembrandt exhibit in Ottawa.  It's closer than Montreal but still a bit further than I'd like to be on the train.  On the other hand, I've had one shot (and the whole family should have their first shot by next week).   I'll think about it again in another month and think about renting a car as well, though I don't really want to do that.

I thought I was going to barbecue over the long weekend, but I cooked something else instead.  I may break out the grill on Thurs. if it doesn't rain.  I thought we'd get to The African Queen but it was not to be.  Instead we watched Playtime and Our Man in Havana.  There is one weird goof in Havana where Alec Guiness's character somehow magically gets turned around and gets the drop on his assailant.  I wish that could have been edited more convincingly, but it was a small flub.  (Same way I feel there is one extraneous scene in Gilda, which may have been inserted by a studio exec to explain the plot.  Oh well.)  As I was reading up on the movie, I learned that it was in fact shot largely in Cuba right after the revolution, and Castro insisted on edits to make the Batista regime look even worse!

We also got through the "Waldorf Salad" episode from Season 2 of Fawlty Towers.  I think I've seen parts of this one, but I didn't recall the ending where an American guest and then most of the British guests tell Basil, to his face, he is one of the worst hotel owners in England.  It's kind of hard to watch but more to the point it's had to imagine him fully recovering from this.  Wouldn't this have made a better finale?  At any rate, it just reminds me that Cleese often pushes the tension much higher than I really appreciate. Sometimes it works but sometimes the situations go too far.