Went to the Deer Park library and borrowed Mazo de la Roche's Return to Jalna.
Dinner was corn on the cob.
Saw the DVD of Del Shores' Texan farce Sordid Lives because some of the people in my drama course recommended it. [They said I was suited to play the gay character Brother Boy!] It was bizarre but pretty funny. My favorite performance was Bonnie Bedelia's.
Saw the DVD of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard for the third time. It's one of the best movies about the Hollywood community. Basically, it's about the pressure to sell out.
"How did they figure it out?" "Somebody must have tipped them off!" "It's always somebody tipped them off, it's never the cops are smart"--White Heat
Dreamed of reading a book by a Russian-Jewish writer recalling life in the Czarist era; seeing an unsuccessful movie about a caveman from the past found by some slightly more civilized truck drivers, based on a video game.
Saw Raoul Walsh's White Heat for about the third time. That's the one with James Cagney as a psychopathic gangster with a mother fixation and headache problem, who ends up blowing himself up along with a whole oil refinery. (He should join Al-Qaeda.) The scene where he learns of his mother's death and goes to pieces in a prison dining hall is really stunning.
Dinner was KFC strips.
Saw the video of Wong Kar-Wai's Days of Being Wild, about a rootless young man in Hong Kong. Leslie Cheung was pretty cool.
Went out to the Royal Oak in the east end, where they had a karaoke last year. But they don't seem to have it now.
Dreamed of being US president and spending a night in jail to atone for Ronald Reagan's crimes; leaving a subway through a large elevator (like in the London system).
Vanity Fair has an article on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. They weren't very interesting.
Rented some more DVDs at Suspect Video.
Saw episodes 21-23 of Revolutionary Girl Utena. It's starting to get bizarre! I'm having a hard time perceiving what's "real" here. (No doubt it was intended that way.)
Had dinner with Puitak and Gordon. We went to a Korean takeout restaurant. The food was so spicy I broke out in a sweat! (Like me, they've been going without air conditioning during the post-blackout electric power crisis.)
Saw 3-D House of Wax at the Royal. That's the 1953 movie that launched Vincent Price's career in low-budget horror movies. Pretty corny indeed. When he had the wax boiling, you didn't need the gift of prophecy to guess that there'd be a fight and guess-who would end up falling in. To take advantage of the 3-D format they had stuff like a guy playing with a paddle connected to a ball by a string. (What is that thing called.) [I found out online that it's a bolo bat.]
Went to the local karaoke and sang "Tears of a Clown" (it isn't often I try Motown songs), "Back in the USSR" and "Wake Me up Before You Go-Go." (After that last song, I heard someone saying, "It's been years since I heard that song!")
Dreamed of a new Noddy book [from a British series written by Enid Blyton]; being in a swashbuckling adventure involving getting thrown into jail; the Prince Edward Island ferry.
Found a dead mouse in the dishwater. (Glad it was me who found it and not Mother. Just hearing the word "mouse" scares her!)
Saw Mike Caro's Whale Rider at Market Square. It was really wonderful, one of the year's best movies.
Dinner was the rest of the fettucine.
Atlantic Monthly has a sobering article about the state of chaos on the world's oceans.
Dreamed of waking up and seeing on my clock radio that the time was just before 8:00; visiting Finland and wading through an icy flood up to my chest (for no reason); the children's book Emil and the Detectives (which I reread last year).
Saw Kevin Costner's Open Range at the Uptown (on a nice big screen). It was a beautifully-filmed but conventional western, not unlike Costner's Wyatt Earp. Costar Robert Duvall outacted Costner, like Dennis Quaid did in Wyatt Earp. (I saw the movie mostly for Duvall.) Annette Bening had yet another thankless role: she and Costner didn't have much chemistry. The climax was marred by villain Michael Gambon's Yosemite Sam speech.
Dinner was fettucine.
The Goodenough Association had a get-together at Queens Quay. I didn't stay long because I didn't meet anyone I knew.
Read Bill Bryson's African Diary, a 50-page book about his tour of Kenya, sponsored by CARE.
At karaoke I sang "Hungry Like the Wolf (afterward Doug H. showed me a picture of a wolf he happened to be carrying!) and "Say, Say, Say."
Dreamed of telling Mother about the Lana Turner homicide scandal.
The parents finally left for the Maritimes.
Saw Francois Ozoun's The Swimming Pool at the Carleton. A whole lotta nuthin' going on, but Charlotte Rampling had her tightassed bluestocking character down cold. Adding in a murder seemed rather desperate.
Dinner was corn on the cob.
The Gimme Shelter DVD had some interesting bonus features, including a talk radio show discussing the concert the day after.
[written with a new pen] RIP my Arthur Murray pen after almost eight months of steady service [written with the old pen] (not quite).
"When did Annette Bening turn into Annette Benign?"--Salon review of Open Range
Dreamed of being photographed riding a single horse with two other people(?); watching Bride of Frankenstein (which I have seen) on TV with someone who hadn't seen it.
Went to Suspect Video and rented some more videos.
Watched episodes 18-20 of Revolutionary Girl Utena. My favorite is the one with Wakaba foolishly getting involved with that creep Saionji. [She sent him a love letter, and he posted it on a bulletin board!]
Dinner was pork chops.
Saw the DVD of Gimme Shelter, the Maysles brothers' documentary of the Rolling Stones' disastrous Altamont Speedway concert (for the second time). Pretty disturbing. If you ask me, they needed a higher stage.
Saw the video of Fire Over England, a British movie about standing up to the Spanish Armada. (It was made on the eve of World War II, with all parallels strictly intentional.) Flora Robson had the role of a lifetime as Elizabeth I, but it was a precious production with rather cheesy direction. Laurence Olivier tried too hard.
Dreamed of seeing a grain elevator in Sackville (there aren't any!); hearing I owned a shop there; wondering if I'd go to the Canadian National Exhibition (I probably won't).
Got my hair cut at the Hungarian place. They even trimmed my eyebrows!
Walked down to Suspect Video and rented some stuff.
Father may delay the tooth-pulling until he returns from the Maritimes.
Dinner was KFC.
Saw the DVD of episodes 14-17 of the anime Revolutionary Girl Utena (for the second time). Really Imaginative.
Saw the DVD of Monterey Pop (for the second time), a film of a famous rock festival. My favorite part is Ravi Shankar's sitar music.
Saw the video of The Detective, a 1954 movie of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries. (Brown was played by Alec Guiness, whom Father likes.) Pretty good, though I managed to guess a few of the twists.
The parents were going to depart for Cape Breton today, but they'll be a few days late because Father has to get a wisdom tooth pulled.
In the afternoon we drove to Hollywood Canteen to return the DVDs. Lucky we didn't go 90 minutes later or we would have been stuck in blackout traffic! [This was the time of the big blackout in the northeast.]
Went out to the library to return Land of Oz. It was on the way back that the blackout hit. I was on a streetcar but I was pretty close to my stop.
Skipped dinner because we couldn't cook. I wasn't hungry anyway.
Started reading Samuel Eliot Morison's Oxford History of the American People. [I didn't get far in it. Maybe I'll try it again someday.]
After the sun set and before the moon rose, I went out in my pajamas and saw more stars than I'd seen in years.
Dreamed of trying to sing "I Want to Know What Love Is" as part of a background karaoke chorus and finding the song couldn't be sung that way (actually, it probably can be); a social worker asking me if Moira was a "coject" (fellow reject from the Roman Catholic Church!)--we're actually Protestant.
Baked multigrain bread.
Went shopping.
Mowed the lawn.
Saw the last episode of Band of Brothers, about the end of the war.
Dinner was ham and scalloped potatoes.
Saw some more Carl Dreyer silents. They were Love One Another, about an anti-Semitic pogrom in Czarist Russia, the fairy-tale movie Once Upon a Time, and the Norwegian peasant romance The Bride of Blomsdalen.
The new Harper's has an essay by a veteran schoolteacher, "Against School," and an Evan S. Connell review of the life of Goya.
It turns out that Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself is the U.S. edition of his British publication Notes From a Big Country, which I already read last year.
"He thought you were forthcoming." "Well, I shan't forthcome any more"--I Capture the Castle
Scarecrow to Tin Woodman: "Nothing can resist your kind heart and your sharp axe"--The Land of Oz
Dreamed of Against All Odds, a disastrous 1984 remake of the classic film noir Out of the Past with a wonderful Phil Collins title song; seeing a movie with footage of a mental institution that I recognied from another film; driving downtown in Sackville (in real life, I don't know how to drive).
Saw the episode of Band of Brothers where they found a concentration camp in Germany. A query: When Americans found out the true dimensions of the Holocaust, did any of them say, "We should have fought Germany in the '30s"? (The Europeans are supposed to be grateful that Washington condescended to fight at all.)[It helped that Hitler had declared war on them, of course.]
The parents and I saw I Capture the Castle at the Carlton. It was one of those British period comedies set in the 1930s, with a somewhat familiar pattern. Droll lightweight entertainment.
Afterward we were hoping to meet Donald at an Indian restaurant. But Father couldn't find the place--he didn't even remember the name--and anyway it wasn't clear if Donald could make it. We ended up eating Indian food somewhere else without him.
The Land of Oz is a really crazy book. (I just finished it.) What an ending! [The boy turns out be a transformed girl, and gets changed back.]
Went to karaoke. I sang "Hold Me Now" and "My Way."
Woke up around 6:00. Instead of going back to sleep, I got up early.
Yvonne Ho wrote back to me! [She's a Hong Kong lawyer I met at Goodenough College during my eight-month stay there eight years before.]
Got a new issue of Harper's with an article titled "Against School."
Read an Atlantic Monthly article on the American fascination with the Founding Fathers, arguing that a better way to honor them is in original thinking.
Dinner was spaghetti.
Saw three more episodes of Band of Brothers, involving Bastogne; the later Battle of the Bulge; and facing off the Germans on the Rhine.
Dreamed of looking for a new cottage near the old one.
Started reading Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself while the computer boots.
Dinner was steak.
Saw three more episodes of Band of Brothers, taking them from Normandy to Holland.
John and the girls came over for dinner, after our dinner was over.
Christopher Hitchens had an Atlantic Monthly review attacking Edward Said's Orientalism. Frankly, the review was as much about Hitchens' agenda as Said's.
Saw a documentary about Carl Dreyer. They also showed some shorts (mostly documentaries) that Dreyer made in the late 1940s because he needed the work. They were mostly boring.
Dinner was McDonald's.
Saw the first two episodes of Band of Brothers, a miniseries about a US paratrooper company in World War II. (The first was about training, the second about D-Day.) It was pretty believable.
Dreamed of visiting an elementary school I went to in Sackville; taking the subway far to the east, walking west on a suburban street that wasn't straight, and getting lost.
Started The Marvellous Land of Oz, L. Frank Baum's first sequel to The Wizard of Oz. Pretty imaginative.
Had a meeting with the Mission: Possible people. I may start again at the end of September.
Went to the Hollywood Canteen and rented the WWII miniseries Band of Brothers.
We went out to dinner at Swiss Chalet.
Went to Fanny's karaoke again. I sang two prison songs: "I Fought the Law" (which I heard on the Hullaballoo DVD) and "Black Velvet Band." There was a huge crowd, so even though I only had two songs I stayed to 1:00. Fortunately, Jim drove me all the way home. I danced the twist at one point.
Dreamed of Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo holding a crowded conference outside our Sackville house.
Saw a DVD of Comedian, a documentary about standup comedians like Jerry Seinfeld.
Dinner was boiled ham.
Got a new Atlantic Monthly.
Saw Richard Fleischer's Soylent Green at the Revue. It's a misbegotten, cliche-ridden early-'70s dystopian tale of 2022 New York City with 40 million people, half of them unemployed. Cop Charlton Heston finds out that all the dead people are being taken to a big rendering plant to produce the substance that's preventing mass starvation. He has lines like "Something stinks here!" and "Get off my back!"
Finished Little House on Rocky Ridge (after midnight). A fine book.
Had lunch with Puitak and Gordon on the Toronto Islands. (We were going to go Monday or Tuesday [this was Wednesday], but Pui had to work.) Afterward we walked to the eastern islands and looked at the houseboats.
Dinner was shepherd's pie.
Saw two more Dreyers. The first one was the silent Michael, which I'd seen before at the Cinematheque. It was an unsentimental story of a celebrated artist, who takes a young, restless male artist/ model under his wing. (I perceived a gay subtext.) His protege then forsakes him for a woman the artist has been painting. Dreyer had a great feel for amorous intimacy, as in a scene where the protege comes upon the woman's gloves.
The second one, Two People, was incredible! It's a movie with a couple conversing in their apartment, sort of like a filmed one-act play. The husband is a doctor who's been accused of plagiarism, and now some clues point to him being a murderer, but the wife has some secrets of her own. I'll have to tell the people in my drama course about it this fall!
Dreamed of a non-existent Asterix comic book; an actual 1980s TV ad where David Birney referred to "hundreds of live sightings" of American POWs still being held in Vietnam.
Saw the second half of the Hullabaloo DVD. The high points were the Motown acts, of course. Also Dionne Warwick's song "Message to Michael," which I'd never heard before.
Went shopping.
Dinner was fettucine with pesto sauce, which I cooked.
Saw Green Grow the Rushes, a lightweight 1950s British comedy about a coastal town that tolerates smuggling, with Richard Burton in one of his first roles. It was pretty thin. (Ealing Studios did it better.)
Went to karaoke. I sang "Pink Houses," "Get Back," and "If I Were a Rich Man." Just as I was about to sing the third song, this jerk whom I'd seen flicking cigarette ash onto the carpet right next to an ashtray tried to go ahead of me. When he said "He's sung three times already," I said "Only twice." Johnny Blue stood firm and I sang.
Dreamed of being at the top of a skyscraper in the Vancouver area and looking at high mountains very close by.
Moira went to Kingston. (These things are never planned.)
Saw a DVD of the mid-'60s TV music show Hullaballoo. It's fun in a dorky way. (I wish Moira could have seen more of it before she left.) [One of the show's dancers, Donna McKechnie, became a Broadway star in shows like A Chorus Line.]
Dinner was spaghetti.
Saw a video of Eyes of the Mummy, an early silent movie directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Unfortunately, the subtitles were only in German.
Dreamed of being in the Mount Allison University library and overhearing a supervisory group, some of whose members had a fear of heights; reading a classical music review written by Moira under the name Marion Nickleby (my mother's maiden name was Marion Nicholson); a new cable-TV system for a set with screens on all four sides.
Saw a DVD of educational films from the 1950s. They're good for a laugh.
All our siblings came over for dinner, which was salmon.
Saw the video Baad Asssss Cinema, a fascinating documentary about blaxploitation movies.
Dreamed of finding some old singles in our Sackville cottage, including one by They Might Be Giants(?); visiting a monastery; noticing several of my left hand's fingertips cut off.
Went to Suspect Video at Mirvish Village and rented some videos.
Dinner was pork chops.
Saw Kenzi Mizoguchi's Ugetsu at the Cinematheque. It's based on some famous Japanese stories, all about peasants in the unstable civil war period trying to improve their status in life. A real masterpiece.
Dreamed of walking a trail along cliffs west of the Don River(?); being about to descend steeply; going overseas with the parents; visiting a subway station in Glasgow.
Couldn't watch the Josie and the Pussycats DVD, possibly because some kids got their greasy hands all over it. Too bad--Alan Cumming is always cool.
Went to the Deer Park library and took out Roger Lea MacBride's Little House on Rocky Ridge, a sequel to the Little House series focusing on Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter Rose.
Went to College Park and bought ten tickets to the film festival next month.
Dinner was curried chicken.
Wento to karaoke at Fanny's. There was a huge crowd there, including some great singers. I stayed almost three hours bus only got the chance to sing two songs. (Yes, it was that crowded.) They were "Ring of Fire" and "The Heart of Rock & Roll."
"You know, it's easier to fool a thousand than only one"--Simone
Another headache.
We drove out to the Futureshop to get a stereo adapter for the turntable.
Dinner was Harvey's hamburgers.
Went out and rented the DVDs for Simone and Josie and the Pussycats.
Simone was a fair Hollywood satire, in which a failing director (played by Al Pacino with a suitable sad-sack demeanour) uses computer technology to create a virtual movie star. The script had a lot of funny details, though it was directed by Andrew Niccol with an oddly lugubrious tone. (I could have done without the adagio choral music.)
Went to the local karaoke. I sang "Across the Universe," "Say, Say, Say," and that old reliable "My Way." (Someone said I made a good selection.)
Dreamed of leaving Sackville and returning, both by train; arriving at the Sackville station and walking on the platform with a cap and a suitcase; telling Moira, "You can take the boy out of New Hampshire, but you can't take New Hampshire out of the boy"; a revolutionary street festival just west of our Sackville house; the Marseillaise.
Dinner was roast beef.
Saw two more Carl Dreyers. The first was the silent melodrama The President. It was a little much, all about the trouble caused by three generations of young noblemen sowing their wild oats.
The second was Ordet, a drama about a farming family dealing with crises: one son (who reminded me of Woody Harrelson) thought he was Jesus. It was really stunning in a proto-Bergman way, like Day of Wrath. the black & white visual compositions and pacing were brilliant. [I couldn't really describe it to Mother because she would have thought it was making fun of Christians...]
Dreamed of reading a Harry Potter book about a thousand pages long, where the second half had a completely new story.
I'm now rereading L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz.
Had an interview with Employment Supports that should get me back into the Mission: Possible program.
Went shopping.
Dinner was spaghetti.
Baked rye bread.
Saw Jean Vigo's famous L'Atalante at the Cinematheque. It's the story of a woman who marries a barge captain on the French canals, told in a "magical realism" sort of way. I didn't really get it. (I had the same feeling about Boudu Saved From Drowning.) Moira says she found it boring.
Dreamed of being on a space station; coming down to earth in front of our Sackville house; telling a woman she was "insurance"(?) and an actual dance teacher called Don accusing me of rudeness (he's actually more tactful than that); seeing Melissa an actual 13-year-old dance student, perform a 1920s dance routine (I've seen her do one); "waking up" and searching for pajamas(?); approaching the domes of central London from a distance.
Patti broke off on eharmony.com, leaving only Kathleen.
Had my last dancing lesson. I bought Cynthia three white roses. We managed to get through all eight of my dances (waltz, tango, foxtrot, rumba, swing, salsa, merengue, cha cha).
Dinner was roast chicken.
Another headache.
Read the last 93 pages of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Stunning.
Dreamed of Pope Alexander VI (of the Borgia family); watching cable TV.
Got another eharmony.com match called Patti.
Saw Lawrence of Arabia at the Bloor, for the sixth or seventh time. As an acting student, this time I noticed how Peter O'Toole listens when other people talk. I skipped the last hour again.
Dinner was the rest of the Chinese food.
Read 54 pages of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Dreamed of taking a university course; sleeping in our Sackville house and getting up at 11:35; finding out my window had been left open all night, letting in the wind.
This is the fourth day in a row that I've had corn on the cob for lunch!
John and Rae came over in the afternoon.
For dinner we ordered Chinese food.
Saw Henri-Georges Clouzot's Diabolique (for the second time) at the Cinematheque. It's quite a funny thriller. When you know the twist ending you can notice an extra layer of cleverness in the screenplay.
