I didn't do all that much with the kids this past weekend. In fact, I was scheduled to take my son to see Hamlet at Stratford on Sunday, but he saw it a few weeks ago with his high school class (and I wasn't dragged in to be a chaperone, which is probably just as well). So I returned his ticket (for a tax credit no less!). Anyway he has been quite stressed with his final school projects, so we haven't watched any films at all lately, though we should be able to resume this next week..
I did a fair bit of biking around on Saturday. I almost never hit the art galleries in Yorkville, but there had been a short article in the Star about Claire Wilks at Gallery Gevik, so I though I should check it out. I wouldn't say that she is one of my favourite artists, but I'm glad I dropped in. They are even giving away a nice free booklet covering the exhibit. Just a few doors down at the Heliconian Club they had their own exhibit featuring Claire Wilks and a different free booklet! The schedule is kind of quirky, but their show will be open next Sat. from 1-4 and a few additional afternoons. The exhibit at Gallery Gevikn basically runs one more week as well, so don't delay if you want to see it.
I stopped in at Bau-Xi and then made a quick stop at the AGO. I didn't have time to check out the new exhibit on art and artifacts from the Spanish empire, but I'll browse through it on my next visit. I then biked over to 401 Richmond. Some of the galleries I usually check out like Yumart hadn't rotated their exhibits, but Red Head Gallery had something new. I tried to stop in at this Indian place on the way over to work, but the line was moving too slowly, so I gave up.
After I got home I did a bit of weeding in the front yard and then some reading on the back porch. I read a few short chapters from Station Eleven, and it is quite gripping. I do appreciate Mandel throwing quite a curveball in that she doesn't want a long drawn-out exploration of who survived and who died of this new plague (a la Camus) and she just kills almost everybody off immediately, though there are then some flashbacks covering the early days of the pandemic. It's quite an effective launch, though I know there is no way I could have read this in 2020 or even 2021, as it was just too close to the bone. Timing is everything, however, and I can read it now... (Interestingly, this was one of the books that my son was assigned in his English class!) I'm also reading Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, in part because this appears to have been one of the inspirations behind Angela Carter's short stories.
Sunday was spent almost entirely in Stratford. I decided to risk the bus. (Last summer I rented a car!) The trip there was fairly smooth, though I had to move up towards the front to get away from some chatty students, who were making it quite hard to focus on my reading. I wouldn't say that it helped that I was reading Beckett's Molloy! We got there just a bit early, and I went to the Thai place that is one of my go-to restaurants in Stratford. I ran into a couple of vinyl shops and just laughed at the prices. Same thing with the bookstore on the main drag. Usually the only shopping I do is at the church thrift shop, but that is only open on Saturdays not Sundays.
The weather was still great so I walked up the river past the new Tom Patterson Theatre. No question it is a nicer space, but it does seem perhaps a bit too lavish and grand. I saw some nice work at Art in the Park, and then beyond that were rows and rows of classic cars for some kind of meet.
I had just enough time to run over to Gallery Stratford before the show started. The art there was cute, but I wasn't blown away by it. Probably the more interesting thing was a series of outdoor banners for a different spin on art in the park.
Then I ran over to the Festival Theatre building. This must have been my first time inside since 2019. The attendance was really sparse (perhaps because Hamlet is so tough on step-dads and unconventional families generally). They let us sit almost anywhere we wanted in the balcony, which was cool. I don't have time to do a full review of Hamlet, but basically I didn't care for it. I don't mind modern dress versions of Shakespeare, but I don't like modernizing the play to rely heavily on modern technology. (Ophelia even wore a wire at one point!) There are a number of cuts (in fact Fortinbras is completely cut from the cast!) -- and Claudius confessed to Polonius, which makes no real sense. Slotkin outlines a lot of issues with this production, and I wholly concur with her that this director (Peter Pasik) has treated the play shoddily. I am very unlikely to see his next effort after this. Where I part ways with Slotkin is that she thought the actor playing Hamlet, Amaka Umeh, made up for this, and I didn't. I think Umeh is probably only the fourth or fifth best Hamlet I have seen. Basically I liked the actors playing Claudius and Ophelia, and that was about it. Sadly. I'd go so far as to say that I regret wasting my time with this production, and that is extremely rare for me. It definitely drastically reduces the chances that I come back to see pretty much the same actors in Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman in September.
The bus ride back was not nearly as pleasant as coming. The bus was delayed. Then the bathroom door kept sliding open whenever the bus made a turn, which was often because we were stuck on back roads for a very long time for some reason. It didn't help that I really didn't care for Beckett's Malone Dies, which I was trying to finish on the way back.
My powers of perseverance are being sorely tested by Beckett's novels. I do understand what he is trying to do, but they are just so unpleasant to read (pages and pages of unbroken interior monologue). I think I will push through The Unnamable, but I'm going to discard the books after this. Now that I know how little I enjoy Beckett's novels (his short stories aren't nearly as bad) I no longer feel regret at having taken so long to get around to reading them.* So it felt like a fairly long ride back to Toronto. I'll try to be a bit more strategic on my next long bus ride and not sit so far back and pick a novel that isn't quite so demanding.
* The first half of Molloy wasn't too bad, but was certainly too drawn out. I saw some parallels to Endgame and Happy Days. I've heard that one of his early, slightly more approachable novels, Mercier and Camier, is a bit of a dry run for Waiting for Godot, so I may read that, but generally I think I will stick with his dramatic works and leave the rest behind.
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