Frustrating Trip to Tarragon

For once the TTC travel wasn't so bad, but the lead-up was definitely annoying and then the station had lots of construction that forced all the passengers to make long detours.  Anyway, I'll get to that in a moment.

What really grates is that I ran up to Bloor with a moderate pile of stuff to try to sell off at BMV.  As I was getting closer, I wondered if it was too late to try to sell to them.  And indeed, they are only open until 7 pm on Mon-Wed., which seems frankly silly when they are open until 11 pm(!) on Friday and Saturday.  I could have checked, but 7 just seems so early for a Tues.  Then I thought well at least there is a decent chance Seekers will take the books, though not the CDs or DVDs, and they were closed for inventory!  Grrrr.  So that was really frustrating, and I am not sure when I will be able to haul all this stuff back with me for another go at BMV.

Not only was a huge chunk of the station off-limits, forcing everyone to cross Spadina and Dupont, but this section had been closed off for a few months before and now it is closed again?  The sign said it would be another 6 weeks, and indeed, I will probably try to avoid making the trip to Tarragon until this is resolved.  Then some condo construction forced a closure of a traffic lane and the sidewalk, and the pedestrians were forced into another lane of traffic.  It just was really annoying.

Anyway, I got to Tarragon not in the best of moods.  I thought Icarus did a good job with their production of Julie, which is an update of Strindberg's Miss Julie.  I'm pretty sure I saw Miss Julie (in a slightly modernized adaptation) at the Chopin Theatre in Chicago decades ago.  As it happens, I have a copy of Miss Julie, which I browsed after I got home.  I would say Miss Julie is still a fairly pathetic lost soul in this version, but she is a bit less passive this time around.  Also, I think there was a slightly larger role for Katerina the maid.  It's a fairly downbeat piece, however.*

I'm going to see an early Strindberg work, Creditors, at Canadian Stage next season.  Paul Gross is in it, which was one of the main draws.  I toyed with the idea of seeing Dance of Death at Stratford close to 10 years ago, but didn't go.  I can't remember if the travel was too much of a hassle or the reviews were poor.  I actually saw A Dream Play at Northwestern back in 1997, but I don't remember anything about it.  I suppose if it ever comes through, I would see A Dream Play again.  I would like to see The Ghost Sonata some day, and that might be enough Strindberg.  I am not a massive fan of his work.

There are quite a few other things I was going to discuss, but let's keep this post reasonably short... 

* And this is after a very downbeat movie, Fassbinder's Veronika Voss, at the Paradise on Monday, so back to back misery.  I sort of think of Veronika Voss as Sunset Boulevard but with morphine addicts.  It morphs into a neo-noir film about halfway in.  As I was thinking about it, I don't believe there is a single Fassbinder film with a truly happy ending, though Ali: Fear Eats the Soul has a somewhat open-ended ending that isn't completely miserable.  Just as with Buñuel (or Petzold for that matter), I've gone from seeing virtually none of his work to getting up to 5 films (almost all at the Paradise), though there are several key ones I still need to see (where I feel I've seen all the core Buñuel's).