I could have sworn that when I looked up the Matty Eckler swim schedule, it said lane swimming was 1:30-3, but this is the time for leisure swimming, which is essentially useless to me for exercise, though I guess I could swim sideways laps in the deep end. Obviously, I should have just run over to Jimmie Simpson at noon, but I think it will still be another couple of weeks before I am comfortable biking. While I did get a few laps in midweek in Regent Park, I am far, far behind on my swimming, and without the biking, I am getting badly out of shape. Sigh...
At any rate, I ran back to the mall and got a closet rod which I will attempt to install tomorrow and a couple of things from the grocery store that I had forgotten the day before. I had just enough time to get a model run launched, then I headed over to Hirut. I got there in the nick of time. The back table was full (though honestly I think people were just hogging the chairs, and I probably could have squeezed in...), so I actually sat right at the front, but I did get in and wasn't shut out as has happened a couple of times now! I knew I was only going to stay for the first set, though Dave Young and his group were really good, and it would have been terrific if I managed to get more of it. Dave called a tune by Benny Golson, and we chatted briefly about Benny Golson and the fact that I had seen him twice in Chicago.* Anyway, I went over to Thai Room and grabbed fried tofu to go and ate that on the train to Ossington.
I met my friend Annika at the Paradise, and we saw Rohmer's La Collectionneuse. I liked the fact that it was in color, but this was actually a fairly hard film to swallow (even more than My Night at Maud's), as the men are even more pompous and vain (with very little reason to be in my view) and they are so appallingly sexist to the young woman, Haydee, who does seem to jump into bed with almost any inappropriate man (and only a very few who are at least age-appropriate). I guess it is supposed to be a satire focused on the man who wants to open an art gallery (but shows no real affinity for the work that would be involved), but it is kind of an ugly one. I'm a bit worried that I am not on Rohmer's wavelength after all, as I have so much of his work on DVD. I guess I can slowly watch them and try to sell them off... It took us a while to find a place to eat, as she wanted something a bit less spartan than many of the places around Dovercourt and the first Mexican place we went into had nothing I could eat, which was a surprising letdown. We ended up at this place that was mostly a bar but with a limited Filipino menu (somewhat similar to the Zebra pub in Cambridge). There was only one thing on the menu that either of us was willing to try (a tofu and kale dish), but it was surprisingly good. I didn't appreciate the fact that they hustled us out the door, but I would be willing to eat there again, though it is pretty unlikely I will, in fact, go back. I'll probably stick with Ethiopian or the bahn mi sandwich place, though it is very spartan indeed.
When I got home, I spent a bit more time organizing books and DVDs, as the package from my step-mother arrived! I have an advance copy of Gwendoline Riley's The Palm House, but I want to check on this when the book is actually published in April, as sometimes the final published version is a bit different.
What is a bit more upsetting is that I simply cannot find a few DVDs that I was planning on watching. They were "stored" near the TV, but then they were bundled up during a cleaning jag, and I can't locate them. They should be upstairs, but they don't appear to be. The next most likely place is in the back study, so I suppose I will just have to buckle down and straighten this room up. I imagine there will be more (when I finally come across this missing stack), but I am currently on the hunt for Invader Zim Vol. 3, the Planet Earth DVD box set, and two of the films from Satyajit Ray's Calcutta trilogy: Seemabaddha (Company Limited) and Jana Aranya (The Middleman). I actually had managed to watch the first film, The Adversary, which is about a young man struggling to find work in Calcutta, so it is back on the shelves where it belongs, but the others are in some mysterious place. I do want to turn them up soon, but I really need to focus on getting this new bookcase put together and finishing up my Fringe script. So the straightening up will have to wait for a while.
* I definitely wish that back when I was going to the Jazz Showcase I had a phone that recorded as well as the one I have now! I would love to have saved some of those gigs for posterity. I see that Joe Segal's heirs are starting to release recordings from the Jazz Showcase. Maybe I should write and encourage them to release more shows by Andrew Hill, Benny Golson and Dave Holland, which are ones that grabbed me the most, though pretty much anything from the Jazz Showcase will potentially be of interest to me.
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