Melville-Darwin Link

There is an interesting (to me) historic link between Charles Darwin and Herman Melville in that both visited and wrote about the Galapagos Islands.  Darwin of course featured them in his write-up of his trip on the The Beagle.  Melville wrote a series of 10 sketches called The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, which I just wrapped up.  I was not sure whether Melville had actually visited the Galapagos, but indeed he did visit them on his first whaling voyage.  It's less clear whether he himself hunted for tortoises (the text suggests he did unsuccessfully though this may be fictionalized) or simply helped load them on board.  I did think his vision of the ancient tortoise carrying the world on its back (as in some mythologies as well as Pratchett's Discworld) was pretty interesting and perhaps the highlight of The Encantadas.

I also wrapped up Billy Budd.  For the most part, it felt too abbreviated.  I did find the last few chapters showing how "broken telephone" led to a completely false version of events among the general public while a very different (and more broadly accurate) version was circulated among the crew as a sea chanty.  This seemed a bit reminiscent of what Faulkner was up to in A Fable, though I didn't like A Fable at all.

I had mixed feelings about Manu Joseph's Serious Men, particularly the well-worn trope (at least in novels written by middle aged men) of a beautiful young woman falling for a man old enough to be her father and then trying to destroy him after she was scorned.  I could have done without that for sure!

I didn't like the first one-third of DuPont's The American Fiancée, mostly because of some lazy magic realism where the grandmother dies but then hangs out at a funeral home (and later a convent) for many decades waiting her second death.  There just didn't seem to be any point to it.  I can't remember off the top of my head if the same sort of thing happens in Kroetsch's What the Crow Said, but I thought so.  (What may be more curious is that I am negatively comparing DuPont to Kroetsch, but at the time I wasn't all that crazy about What the Crow Said either, thinking it had too much pointless magic realism!)  But the later sections focusing on the great-children and what they get up to in Europe is much more interesting to me.  I have a bit under 200 pages to go, so I will likely finish this up as soon as I am back from NYC and DC.  After this, I have short stories by Lucia Berlin (A Manual for Cleaning Women) and Alice Munro.  I haven't completely given up on Munro, though I am certainly not rushing to get through her work.  I did get a few stories into The Love of a Good Woman, but I really need to read the 3 stories from Runaway that Almodovar used as the basis of Julieta, so I'll make sure I get to them soon.  And then I'll finally read Osipov's Kilometer 101 (NYRB).

Speaking of the NYC trip, FedEx did get me my ticket to McNeal, so I will be going to that.  (The poetry books haven't turned up at my friend's house, but there is another day or so, so I have some hope...)  I haven't 100% decided on whether I will try to get to the Jewish Museum or MoMA on this trip.  I'm leaning towards squeezing them in, but it just depends on how quickly I get through the Met and the Guggenheim on Wed.  I would like to try to see The Phillips Collection on Friday, but I don't think that will happen.  I will say I don't feel ready to make the trip, but it is just around the corner (tomorrow actually)!  So I had better drop off and start getting ready for the rest of the day.  Ciao!

Last(?) New York Trip

As I indicated, I am beside myself with despair on the terrible choices the US has made.  I haven't made a solemn pledge or anything, but I don't think I will travel to the US again after Jan.  Maybe I will make an exception to pick up a few things from my stepmom in North Carolina, but that is not guaranteed.  Indeed, I am thinking I may well make a one-day trip to Buffalo in mid Dec. to see Marisol at the Albright-Knox, and then put my passport away for a long time.

I thought I would organize in my own mind how next week is going to look.

On Tues. I will be at work, and I even decided to go see Timon of Athens at the Theatre Centre.  Perhaps a mistake, though I think this is a somewhat shortened version.  Then on Wed., I wake up quite early and catch an early Porter flight to Newark.  It will then take an hour or so to get into Manhattan proper.  I will only need to buy a one-way NJ Transit ticket this time, however.

The plan is to go up to the Met first and see the various exhibits.  They don't have any blockbuster exhibits on, but I definitely want to see the Mexican print exhibit and the photographs by Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans.  I had thought there was a new book about Samoylova, but now I don't think so.  I will then run over to the Guggenheim, at least in part because I get free admission there!  But the exhibits look at least somewhat interesting.  

This will likely take the full day, but if I am exceptionally efficient, I may have a couple of hours to hit the MoMA.  I hadn't planned on going on this trip, but it might be my last visit for a very long time.  I also am intrigued by their small exhibit on German expressionism, and the fact that they have a Beckmann triptych (Depature) on view and the Met has The Beginning on view as well does make it more appealing.  There is no question I would go if I had the time, but Thurs. I have quite a few things that will eat into my museum time, so if I can't squeeze it in on Wed., I probably can't go.

Anyway, I'll meet up with a friend for dinner, and then we are off to see the Pacifica Quartet at the 92 St. Y.  (This performance is being live-streamed and you can watch up to 72 hours later, so I am toying with the idea of purchasing the live-stream as well for when I get back.  I also found out that Abdullah Ibrahim is in NYC on Friday and at the Y!  But his performance is not available as a live-stream, which is incredibly disappointing to me.  So I will not be able to make up for missing him in Markham a few years ago.  I might have rearranged the whole trip had I realized he was playing so soon after Pacifica.  C'est la vie...)

Then I go crash at the Youth Hostel for the night.  (Even though my bag will be pretty full, I do need to remember to bring my lock!)  Then I will probably head over to the Strand at 10, and then I meet someone from work and go sit in on one virtual meeting at the office and then I think I will probably head over to Bleeker St. Books and Howl Arts.  However, I could perhaps run over to MOMA first and then these bookish places afterwards and then make a short visit to the Whitney.  (I used to have free admission to the Whitney, but not any longer.)  As it happens the Whitney is open longer than any other museum on Thurs. (until 6 pm), and there is one Jane Dickson painting on view in their Shifting Landscapes exhibit.  

Jane Dickson, Heading in—Lincoln Tunnel 3, 2003

But I probably wouldn't spend more than a couple hours at the Whitney, so maybe I will fit everything in after all.  It's a bit hard to tell at the moment.

Anyway, I have a ticket to see McNeal, which is Ayad Akhtar’s new play starring Robert Downey, Jr.  So it's a fairly hot ticket, and I waited a bit too long to commit to going, so the ticket prices were pretty high.  I actually found a reasonably priced ticket on Stub Hub.  However, I had just completed the purchase when I read that they were going to send me a physical ticket rather than an e-ticket, and I felt sick to my stomach.  It is being FedExed and it should be here Sunday or Monday, but so much can go wrong.  I absolutely would not have ordered this if I had realized that was the situation.  So one more thing to stress me out.

Then I head over to the Amtrak station.  There is a night train that leaves at 11 pm, and gets in to DC at 6 in the morning (it actually pulls over somewhere near Philly for a couple of hours).  Basically everyone just sleeps on the train.  And the ticket costs only $25!  Wild.

Friday I will likely go to the Hirshhorn, maybe the Freer and Sackler Galleries, then the National Gallery.  I should be able to meet someone else from work and we'll chat and look at art, which sounds like fun to me anyway.  I see that Beckmann's triptych The Argonauts is on view, which is great, but Falling Man is not.  I have not seen this in a very long time, which is getting more than a little frustrating.  

I will keep my eyes peeled for one new acquisition, a Remedios Varo painting, which I don't believe was part of the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition I saw last year.

Remedios Varo, Banqueros en acción (Bankers in Action), 1962

There also appear to be a few Joseph Cornell boxes on view, and I always enjoy looking at those.

The current plan is then to head to the Smithsonian's American Art Museum, as it is open the latest of all the Smithsonian museums.  Then I am staying somewhere in Adams Morgan, which I picked because I like grabbing Ethiopean food there.  Then I have a fairly early flight Sat. morning (at least it's out of Reagan National, not Dulles!).

I'll probably stop briefly at the Toronto Reference Library book sale on the way home, then crash for a bit.  Then I have a TSO concert that evening.

Sunday, there is a small chance I'll have to take my daughter to a volunteer opportunity, but mostly likely I will sleep in a bit.  I am then off to see Shakespeare Bash'd doing a staged reading of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, and if I am not completely wiped out by that point, I may go to the Paradise to see Varda's Murs Murs.  I don't think I've seen the whole movie, though bits and pieces of Murs Murs showed up in her later works.  So I think I will end up completely exhausted from this trip, though what else is new... 

Edit: I took a quick look at some other museums in NYC.  The Neue Galerie has an Egon Schiele exhibit up, which looks somewhat interesting but I think I did see enough of his work in Vienna.  I'm a little more torn by the Guston exhibit at the Jewish Museum.  This exhibit focuses almost exclusively on Guston's KKK paintings and then the critical response by Trenton Doyle Hancock, an African-American artist.  I find his KKK paintings to be less interesting than a lot of his other late paintings and also I've probably seen almost all of these already at the big Guston exhibit in Boston in 2022.  However, I should write to see if they have In Bed as part of the exhibit.  I would probably go to see that, esp. as I could hit the Jewish Museum after the Guggenheim.  Actually, if the Broadway show was 8 (instead of 7 pm) or indeed if my tickets doesn't reach me in time(!), there is a talk between Hancock and Musa Mayer, Guston's daughter, on Thurs at 6:30.  That would have been worth checking out.  Ah well.

Second Chance Books

Generally it isn't nearly as hard to track down books, so the whole "second chance" concept doesn't apply as strongly.  That said, some art books do vanish and become extremely expensive.  It took quite a while to finally track down a copy of Alex Janvier's catalogue (perhaps because most of them got shipped back to his studio, which is where I got my copy*).

While the postage was a killer, I did manage to get a copy of The City by the photographer Lori Nix, even after it was OOP everywhere else.  The one I got might even have been one of the last ones available directly from the publisher.

I wasn't as lucky with this Michael Wolf catalogue that Bau-Xi was stocking, though I do have a couple other books by Wolf.  

One that got away that still bugs me from time to time is a small Sarah Sze monograph that the MCA in Chicago carried.  I have several other books by her, but I just wish I had picked that up back in the day.

Now one that was not my fault, as it were, was there was an interesting catalogue of an art exhibit held out at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver.  I kept trying to get a hold of it, and I think the publisher never actually published the book, even though several libraries (in Vancouver at least) said that they had pre-ordered it.  Somewhat amusingly, one of my favourite paintings was by Freida Kahlo and that turned up fairly recently in a different art book that I picked up (though I would really struggle to remember off the top of my head which one).

There was another book that I had ordered from a Vancouver gallery, because it wasn't quite ready at the time of the exhibition and then they were going to mail it to me, and anyway I never got it, which was annoying, given I had already paid for the book!

I have managed to pick up nearly all of Jane Dickson's official monographs (like Jane Dickson in Times Square** and Peepland) though there are a few (quite pricey) very small gallery publications like Night Driving or Paradise Alley.  I have debated picking them up, but it turns out that Karma is publishing a very extensive (over 400 page!) monograph on Dickson at the end of Nov., and I assume it will have a lot, if not all, of the paintings from these recent gallery publications.  I did find out that Hot! Hot! Hot! is (surprisingly) still in print from Howl Arts, so I decided I might as well pick that up on my visit to New York next week.  I will try to remember to call Karma just to see if there are any advance copies of their new book as long as I am in town, but I assume that will not work out, and I'll just order a copy later (and not let it drag so long that it goes OOP).

I do recall on my last trip to Seattle, there was a copy of Craig Nova's Turkey Hash sitting outside a bookstore in Pike Place Market on their bargain shelves (for $1 I think).  The bookstore had closed but oddly enough had left the books outside!  I was so, so tempted to grab it, and I definitely would have if there had been a slot to drop $1.  I even bugged someone that worked in Seattle to get it for me later, but they wisely ignored me.  Anyway, I was poking around in BMV a couple of months later and got Turkey Hash and The Geek, so that worked out ok, though I did pay more than $1.  I found a couple of other Nova books with cheap shipping to Canada, so I ordered those as well.  (I had read a lot of Nova in my 20s and am feeling like revisiting him, I guess.)  On this trip to New York, after I stop by Howl Arts, I should also be able to go to Mercer St. Books and the Strand.  I'm still sort of on the lookout for Nova's Trombone and The Congressman's Daughter and maybe The Good Son as well.  I don't have a whole lot of other books I am looking for, and I am going to try to keep everything in one small backpack, so I really can't go wild while in the bookstores, as tempting as that always is.  In fact, I was thinking of bringing a few books along, but maybe I should only bring one book for the plane/train and then just supplement with whatever I do get at the Strand.  I have to remember that Hot! Hot! Hot! will also take up a fair bit of space, and I'll probably need to take my laptop along though maybe not the charger, so the laptop is going to be jammed from the start.  That said, I might still get the Nova books and maybe Joy Williams's Taking Care if I see it and one or two other random books in the Vintage Contemporaries series.

* I eventually bought one of his paintings as well, and I am finally going to pick it up from the framers tomorrow after a very long wait.

** This is one of those annoying cases where I ordered a book fairly early because I didn't want to lose out, and then the price dropped pretty significantly.  I don't know why that happened in this case, and I don't really expect this to happen with this new Dickson publication.

Second Chances

This was going to be a much more positive post on how I am sometimes able to make up (at least partially) for things that I missed because of double booking or indeed things that were cancelled outright due to the pandemic.  Many of the shows that were cancelled came back eventually.  For instance, Come From Away is back in town, and I am hoping to get tickets to that shortly and probably bring my son along.  Squeeze eventually did come back to town (and were great!).  Hall and Oates split up, however, and only Daryl Hall came to Toronto.  While it was an entertaining show, his voice is not what it was, even from a few years back, so that wasn't nearly as satisfying.  I have yet to learn if The Fixx will tour again.  While I had previously been willing to go back to NYC to catch them, now I am not so sure, and I think I will write to see if they will come to Toronto or at least Buffalo.  (I might once in a while break my upcoming embargo on the US to visit Buffalo, but perhaps not.  I could pick some weekend in Dec. and catch the bus to Buffalo to see the Marisol exhibit at the Albright-Knox and then say that is my last visit for the foreseeable future.)  I have seen Love and Rockets in the recent past, but I think I would still go again if they pull off one more tour, since the Toronto date was cancelled due to that tool, Perry Ferrell.  So frustrating.

As I have already alluded, however, the US has idiotically given Trump a second chance, as well as the opportunity to wipe out all his criminal behaviour due to the horrible enablers in the Senate and the Supreme Court (as well as the nihilistic voters in those swing states).  Given that the GOP has also won the Senate and quite likely the House, the US is going to be a criminal cesspit for years to come, to say nothing of the impact this will have on climate change goals.  We're all fucked basically, and the best thing that can come out of this is a violent uprising and a civil war splitting the US into a few parts, so that the smart, productive people in the States can leave the rest of the troglodytes in the dust.  Yes, I am more than a little bitter, and I don't think I'll be travelling back to the States any time soon, so I guess I will think more seriously about travelling to Europe (my carbon budget will be shredded, but it's all pointless even trying anymore).  I probably will renounce my citizenship soon enough.

Back to the matter at hand, I was very frustrated at missing out on seeing the Pacifica Quartet in Toronto (due to a work trip).  I found out that they were playing largely the same program (but substituting Crumb's Black Angels for a Shostakovich quartet) at the 92nd St. Y in New York, so I decided to just go ahead and travel to see that, and then see some museums and then travel down to Washington DC.  I don't normally travel that far just for a concert, though I did travel across states for a few exhibits (mostly Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden) and will travel a bit out of my way to see Stoppard's Arcadia.  As I said, I generally stick closer to home for concerts, though I have been known to take the train (or bus) to Montreal for a concert now and again.

It was a combination of traveling for work and competing concerts that has caused me to miss out on many of the Queer Cinema Club offerings over at the Paradise, with the ones that were the most disappointing that I had to miss Almodovar's Law of Desire, though I also would have wanted to see Saving Face and Tangerine.  Fortunately, the last two were available on DVD, so I borrowed those.   I can't believe what a short run Rumours had both at TIFF and then at Market Square.  I had wanted to check that out but was getting ready for a trip to Edmonton.  It vanished in about two weeks!  My best bet is that it turns up at some point at The Review or The Fox, but I don't see it in either of their calendars.  I asked if they were going to bring Rumours back to TIFF, and the woman at the box office said no.

At any rate, TIFF decided to end 2024 with a major Almodovar retrospective.  Now it is as annoying as ever, with almost every seat snatched up by members who just might happen to see the movie or may not.  I've learned that you have to have patience and do some lurking but eventually you can usually see the movie you are interested in.  This was certainly the case for their Christian Petzold mini-feature where I managed to see three in-demand films, with my favourite (and his least characteristic) film being Afire.

Anyway, I just managed to snag the last seat (for now) for Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, which is a film I decided to avoid on first release because the sexual politics of it kind of appalled me (and indeed they remain appalling but I am ready to see the film now).  So I am making up for that now, as well as catching a lot of his other films.  In the end,* I am going to see quite a few of his films, and certainly his best:
Broken Embraces (tonight!)
Volver
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
Pain and Glory (for 2nd time on big screen though I think I saw it somewhere other than TIFF)
The Skin I Live In (another one I missed at Paradise)
Law of Desire (with an intro by Peter Knegt! though I would still have preferred to catch this at Paradise)
Talk to Her (and taking my son!)
Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (my 2nd time seeing on big screen and my son's first time)
Julieta
All About My Mother (my 2nd time since this is one I did manage to catch at Paradise!)

This is really quite the program, with most of these falling late in December.  (I own many but not all of these on DVD, but just find it so much better to see his work on the big screen.)  I suppose this is a great way to go out of 2024 with a bang, and it is also a fine way to wrap up my membership, as I don't plan on renewing for 2025, unless they fundamentally overhaul the way that membership works at TIFF.

Here's hoping 2025 and beyond isn't nearly as shitty as I fully expect it to be.

* This is certainly a very full plate already, but I will try to keep Nov. 29 open for The Flower of My Secret and Dec. 22 for What Have I Done to Deserve this, and will check in every couple of days to see if a ticket opens up.  That's how I managed to score a ticket to Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!  I enjoyed Broken Embraces, particularly the film within a film, Women and Suitcases, which is sort of a parallel universe version of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, with several characters from that popping up in it.  They even showed The Cannibalistic Counsellor, which is essentially several additional minutes of this film.  Very droll.  I also managed to get a hard copy of my membership card to get my discount at the snack bar on my next visit.