January 25, 2004

Dreamed of a fire in the fireplace of our Sackville home; seeing the sun rising in the northwest(?); an old horror movie with a circular bicycle chase; a western serial with the musical theme "Splendera l'essecrable vera" from Lucia di Lamermoor; taking a course in London; the western True Grit.

Saw the Verdi opera Falstaff at the Hummingbird Centre.  Really breathless, with some impressive music, especially the fairy number. (The pre-show lecturer said, "It threatens to come apart at the seams," which is the sort of thing lecturers say.)

Donald, John and Rae came over for dinner, which was lasagna.

Headache.

When Father was driving our guests home, I got him to bring back some Coke. (I would have gone out and got it myself, but I was under the weather.) He's nice that way--he even asked me what kind I wanted.

January 24, 2004

"He knew it was just nerves. 'I'll be all right when the races start,' he told himself, like a man with a poisoned body who believes that all will be well when a single tooth is drawn"--Brighton Rock

"Where do you live?" "No place--anywhere"--Modern Times

Dreamed of dangling from a palm tree on a small island; The New York Times; a broke female pianist trying to pay a medical bill by refunding her excess medication. (The plots of Tokyo Inn and Tokyo Chorus involved looking for a way to pay a girl's medical bill.)

Saw Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times at the Cinematheque, for the umpteenth time.  It's a real masterpiece.  Those were some great factory sets! (They'd obviously seen Metropolis...)

Read the Classics Illustrated comic of Kipling's The Jungle Book.

Dinner was spaghetti.

Saw the Lucia di Lamermoor video.  This production actually cut a small part which we're keeping (just before the start of the mad scene).

January 23, 2004

Dreamed of attending a dance class; receiving a dried bay leaf from actor Matthew Broderick, visiting his mother, crushing it in my hand, and delighting her by scattering it in her carpet like tea leaves; hearing of a hostage crisis in an office where I'd just been working, forming a solitary vigil around the building, and crawling away too slowly when the terrorists came out; recalling the actual introduction to the MGM musical movie compilation That's Entertainment, where they said that these movies were the work of more craftsment than they could acknowledge and said, "This film is dedicated to them." (Very classy.)

Baked whole wheat bread.

Finished reading the first seven issues of the comic book The Preacher.  Pretty strange.

Saw Yasujiro Ozu's silent Tokyo Chorus with Moira.  It tells of a father who loses his job and gets reduced to doing humiliating work for his old teacher, but with redeeming humor.

Read the Classics Illustrated version of The Three Musketeers. It was drawn right at the beginning of the series (the very first issue), and the artwork was pretty lame.

January 22, 2004

Dreamed of Dick Tracy stories that never were.

Went shopping.

Dinner was McDonald's.

The other day President Bush said that nobody can question America's word.  I posted that on the internet with the headline, "Satire is dead."

January 21, 2004

"She took life with a deadly seriousness:  she was prepared to cause any amount of unhappiness to anyone in order to defend the only thing she believed in"--Brighton Rock

Dreamed of spending New Year's Eve in London; going to a sale of someone's old records and his mother's maps from the 1950s; offering ten pounds for the maps, as a joke because everyone knew they were worth far more; going through our Classics Illustrated comics and finding Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs (which we lost long ago); travelling through southeastern England in a tour bus; driving to the top of a hill with countryside visible for miles around, then over a cliff; asking someone in the hilltop visitor's centre if you could see the Valley of the White Horse (the district Thomas Hughes wrote about in Tom Brown's School Days).

Went to Paradise Comics and bought several old Classics Illustrated comics.

Dinner was Jamaican food.

Tonight we did a run-through of Don Giovanni.  I was a few minutes late because I had to wait 15 minutes for a bus.  There are only a few chorus numbers, so most of us spent most of the time waiting around, which wasn't as fun. (We're still in the cafeteria.)

January 20, 2004

Dreamed of meeting a Japanese girl who remembered me from years before; playing a game involving military command; being on a rooftop with a crowd of people when a red-hot projectile flew in, whizzed around and burnt some people before it came to a stop on the roof; using a fire extinguisher to cool it down; being told that some little kids had witnessed the incident and I should talk to them; meeting John and suggesting that I'd dreamed about Donald because he represented me.

Went out to the drugstore and filled my Celexa prescription.  I also borrowed a Lucia di Lamermoor video from the library.

Dinner was chicken curry.

We went through an entire run-through of Lucia di Lamermoor, which took four hours.  We're still rehearsing in the cafeteria. (Some of us still haven't got their whole part memorized!) Tijuana Layne, whom I know from last year's drama course, came by and watched the first half. Apparently she's going to do a report or something on us.  She says she's finalized her short film.

January 19, 2004

Dreamed of the dance teacher Elena (she was at the dance studio Friday); reflecting that the TV show Little House on the Prairie was different from the books and not for the better; recalling that actors weren't allowed to participate in the Chinese Empire's famous civil service examinations [a true fact]; bicycling with Mother (I've never seen her on a bicycle, but I'd just seen a scene in Late Spring where actress Setsuko Hara bicycled with a man) and telling her the story that movie star Victor Mature tried to join a gentleman's club, was told that they didn't accept actors, and said "I'm no actor, and I have thirty movies and a scrapbook of reviews to prove it!" (I'd read the story in his obituary.)

Started listening to the Lucia di Lamermoor CD.

It turns out that we do own a copy of Brighton Rock, so I'll be able to return the library copy and read it in my own time.

Moira came back from Kingston.

Dinner was roast pork.

January 18, 2004

Dreamed of putting coins into a parking meter; playing a pinball machine; the 1970s porno-artfilm The Night Porter (which I've never seen) and a line from Pauline Kael's The New Yorker review:

The movie's claim that it has something serious to say about the spiritual dislocation caused by war is offensive, but it's too crudely trumped up to be a real insult.

The new computer boots really quickly!  I'll no longer be reading while waiting for it to get ready.

Saw Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring, about a father who wants his daughter to marry even though she just wants to go on living with him.  It's a wonderful movie, one of Ozu's greatest.  Setsuko Hara was an amazing actress!

Finished Renny's Daughter and started Brighton Rock.  The latter's first sentence: "Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him."

John and the girls came over for dinner, which was pizza.

January 17, 2004

Dreamed of being unable to complete a crossword puzzle in a magazine; one clue involving a plug on another page of the magazine's sponsor; reflecting on the smug tone of the relentlessly disdainful coverage of the Carter presidency in the magazine The Economist. (An actual memory.  If you ask me, The Economist is the world's most overrated magazine.) [They raise tendentiousness to an art form!]

Father got some salt and I baked raisin bread.

Saw Yasujiro Ozu's silent masterpiece Tokyo Inn.  It was a heartrending story aout poverty, desperation and decency.  Reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights.

Donald came over for dinner, which was lasagna.  He stayed to help set up the Emac. (In the later stages, I ended up watching.)

Headache.

January 16, 2003

"Do you enjoy school?" "We like going there, and coming home.  The only part we don't like is what comes in between"--I Was Born But...

Dreamed of British actor Colin Firth.

I was going to bake raisin bread, but noticed we were out of raisins.  So I went out in the cold and bought some raisins.  Then I realized we were out of salt too!

Dinner was pork chops (which I fried).

Saw Yasujiro Ozu's silent I Was Born But... at the Cinematheque.  It was a cute comedy that became surprisingly profound, about two brothers who move into a new suburb and notice that their father toadies to his boss.

Went to a dance party at the studio.  I told them about how I'd been learning the minuet in the opera chorus.

January 15, 2003

Dreamed of waiting in Mississauga for a train to Toronto; a group of missionaries coming home from China with an inaccurate list of the people returning; seeing a celebrity family passing by and getting the crowd's attention, but not recognizing them myself.

Went to the Forest Hill library and took out Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and a CD of Lucia di Lamermoor (with la Sutherland!).

Dinner was steak (which I fried).

Wore my contact lenses for the first time in a while. (They don't fog up in cold weather.)

Went to the first meeting for the Asperger's support group.  Unfortunately, I went to the Geneva Centre's old location and had to go home and check the internet to remember the new one.  But Father gave me a lift, and I caught the last half hour.  Not that I really regret missing the first part; they were mostly talking about what they're going to talk about.

January 14, 2003

Dreamed of walking along Main Street in Sackville, N.B., and seeing a new cinema and a new disco(?); reading the newspapers at Goodenough College [where I stayed in London in 1995 researching my Ph.D. thesis].

Went shopping.

Dinner was fettucine with pesto sauce (which I cooked). We needed parmesan cheese and Father was willing to go out in the freezing cold and get it.  I wasn't in the mood for arguing.

We managed to carry the new computer upstairs.

Saw Andrew Jarecki's devastating documentary Capturing the Friedmans at the Music Hall.  It's about a Long Island family torn apart by accusations of mass pedophilia in the 1980s.  It's appalling what a community's hysteria can do. [The most interesting family member was the clown brother.]

January 13, 2004

Dreamed of the Peter Pan musical; a handkerchief crawling with insects; a documentary about filmmaker Otto Preminger; receiving a free porcelain dish as a promotion; an old issue of movie magazine Premiere, with a big seasonal preview feature.

We went to CPUsed and bought an Emac computer.  Setting it up should be fun.

Started reading a Gothic comic book titled The Preacher.  Looks nice and twisted.

Dinner was spaghetti.

The heating conked out in the auditorium so we had to rehearse the operas in the school cafeteria at the Bickford Centre.  We also had to tote the sets there.  We learned to dance a minuet for Don Giovanni.

January 12, 2004

Dreamed of a western set in Civil War Texas, with a guy coming to a town whose sheriff had been in the same gang as him and now held a grudge against him; the sheriff pouring liquor on him and his assistant to frame them for drunkenness, just as a Confederate army appeared; the sheriff saying, "Asshole is as asshole does.  By this fine measure, the Confederate leaders were assholes."

Met Dann at Mission:  Possible.  We're now at the job search stage.  We went out to Indigo Books and found an issue of Quill and Quire.

Saw Jim Sheridan's In America with the parents at Canada Square.  It's a very original, Irish take on the familiar subject of poverty-stricken immigrants in New York.

Afterward we ate at the Mandarin restaurant.

January 11, 2004

Saw the Sopranos episode where Tony learned of his ex-mistress' suicide.

John and Rae came over for dinner.  It was fettucine in pesto sauce (which I cooked).

Ran out of nasal spray. (I'm still not completely over my cold.)

I've been reading a couple of later Dick Tracy adventures from after Chester Gould retired.  It's sad how the strip has declined. [It's improved somewhat since Joe Staton and Mike Curtis took over.]

January 10, 2004

Dreamed of accompanying a fox hunt on foot(?) and getting squeezed between two horses; getting a chance to speak to Little Big Man author Thomas Berger on the telephone; reading that Sir Lancelot had Asperger's Syndrome.

Baked multigrain bread.

Donald came over for dinner, which was churrasco chicken.  We discussed what computer to buy.

Saw the Sopranos episode where the feds started extracting information from Adriana.

Saw Bertrand Tavernier's sad Life and Nothing But, about a French officer trying to identify his army's unknown dead after World War I, who meets a rich war widow looking for her husband's body.  Overlong but truthful.

January 9, 2004

Dreamed of looking out the window of our Sackville house and seeing a horse-drawn trolley car(?); being about to see a film festival screening of a Bela Lugosi horror movie (a series of stills like La Grande Jetee) but skipping it because I was already too scared; someone saying that Lugosi had ulcer trouble; seeing a movie about people getting involved in crime, but leaving before they got caught. (That must be from the Dick Tracy stories I've been reading.)

Went to Revue Video and rented some stuff.

The Dick Tracy story with Junior falling in love with Model Jones could have been an opera!

Dinner was McDonald's.

Saw the Sopranos episode where Johnny Sac wanted to have Ralph killed because the latter had joked about Mrs. Sac's obesity.

Saw the first episode of the classic BBC drama The Six Wives of Henry VIII, focusing on Catherine of Aragon (for the first time since I was young). It's very entertaining despite its relatively slow pace.  Keith Michell played the King with charismatic nastiness. [The clip above is from the movie version, but it does have KM!]

Moira went off to Kingston again.

January 8, 2004

Dreamed of visiting our Sackville, N.B. house and seeing that the new owners had added a new entrance on the north side and planted a whole lot of little trees; baking bread; bicycling on through Sackville on my old coaster bicycle; a closet in the Sackville house that had turned into a swamp (with some old railway tracks running through it).

Still recovering from that cold.  I took it easy today.

Dinner was chicken curry.

Saw American Splendor at the Paradise.  It's about Harvey Pekar, a Cleveland file clerk and curmudgeon who wrote comic books about his everyday life and became famous from his appearances on David Letterman's TV show.  Quite good.  I liked their use of the Marvin Gaye song "Ain't That Peculiar." [Pekar seemed to have Asperger's Syndrome, like me.]

January 7, 2004

Dreamed of visiting Los Angeles; a documentary about shipwrecks directed by actress Daryl Hannah, including a clip of a boring conversation from an early sound film; me and my girlfriend playing a virtual-reality computer game, including an exercise where we tried to type a word with the keyboard and on our own eyeballs (both of us failed); coming into a room with lots of bright-colored decoration and telling her, "This looks so much like a playroom that you almost feel like throwing a tantrum!"

Sore throat.

Dinner was back bacon.

Went to the Howard Dean campaign's Toronto Meetup, out of curiosity.  There were about a dozen people there, but I couldn't stay long because I felt unwell. (Maybe the back bacon disagreed with me.)

Brought up the heating element from the basement to my room to make it warmer, because the heating vent doesn't work that well. [Just now we're finally renovating the room, and my brother found that squirrels had eaten big holes in the insulation!]

January 6, 2004

Dreamed of the Sam Peckinpah movie Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (which I haven't seen); visiting a friend of Margaret's in Kingston; a Noddy comic book.

Real brass-monkey weather today!

Went to see Dr. Hassan and gave him a copy of my story.  I also stopped at the travel agency and got my London plane ticket straightened out.

Went shopping.

Dinner was salmon.

Tonight was the first onstage opera rehearsal.  Choreographing the promenade was pretty fun.  My feet got a bit sore.

Baked whole wheat bread overnight.

January 5, 2004

Dreamed of a crossword puzzle clue that yielded several subphrases which were jumbled together to form one big expression; a store selling artificial snow; entering a motel room in Sackville with a TV set that didn't have cable.

It snowed for a change.

Father and I went to CPUsed to look at the computers.  I can't tell the difference between an Imac and an Emac!

Went to the Cinematheque box office and bought a slew of tickets.

We sold a book about Lady Hester Stanhope for US$89!

Dinner was roast chicken.

We've started making a backup Zip disc of our present computer.

Saw the first half of a PBS documentary about the Lincolns, for the second time.

January 4, 2004

Dreamed of travelling through western America by train; reading old British comic annuals and Classics Illustrated comic books; returning home to a small apartment and finding a child being tutored there.

Went to my first Chinese Meetup.  There were only three people there, possibly because the place they chose was out of the way.

Dinner was Swedish meatballs.

Finished writing the story "Invisible." [It's about a guy who finds himself invisible one day and turns out to be dead, sort of like The Sixth Sense.]

I'm now reading The Dick Tracy Casebook.  I've finished "The Hotel Murders" and "The Brow" and started "Crewy Lou." I don't exactly like it, but I'm fascinated by Chester Gould's twisted vision.

January 3, 2004

Dreamed of a Harry Potter-like adventure in which the heroes had to transport over half a dozen objects which shifted shape into people or animals, including one that turned into a villain; a map of Toronto showing an East End neighbourhood called Artica; being in business and my partner's wife developing an attraction with me; considering what to write in describing this night's dreams.

Moira spent a long time on the New York Times crossword puzzle.  It turned out to be a rebus puzzle where the rebus was the "turn" symbol and caused the across and down answers at its square to exchange directions. (So "nocturnal" and "upturnednose" became "nocturnednose" and "upturnal"!)

Unusually mild weather.  I went without a sweater and walked down to Palmerston library to return Yoga for Dummies.  I also bought a used LP of German folk songs at the nearby Sonic Boom.

Dinner was scalloped potatoes and ham.

Finished the second volume of The Cartoon History of the Universe.  Very enjoyable. (I finished it just in time for John to borrow it.)

John and the girls came over for Rae's birthday.  Puitak and Gordon visited too.

January 2, 2004

Dreamed of fixing an apparatus that produced blood; returning later to find that it had spilled out over the floor, causing a big mess; meeting a group of ghosts in front of my Cape Breton aunt's home; trying to ask them questions.

On second thought, I do have a New Year's resolution:  to read a Graham Greene novel.

Went to the store and got some No-Name noodles.  I found them in shrimp flavour for the first time in years! [I've got out of the habit of eating them recently.]

Dinner was spaghetti.

Saw Clint Eastwood's Mystic River at the Mount Pleasant.  It was a grim murder drama, bluntly powerful, with bravura performances and suitably stark photography by Tom Stern.  It was set in Boston and had a superb sense of place. (I liked the Boston accents.) I'll have to see it again someday.  It's a triumph. [Another movie with good Boston accents is Robert Mitchum's The Friends of Eddie Coyle.]

January 1, 2004

"'If only she were different,' he thought, 'I could love her with all my heart.' 'If only he were different,' she thought, but she did not think of love"--Renny's Daughter

"I thought you'd change after your transplant." "Well, I thought you'd change after I did.  Neither of us changed"--21 Grams

Another year.  Can't think of any resolutions yet.

Dreamed of playing hockey against two others in a rink of melting ice, without seats or sticks and with dimes instead of a puck; the ice surface covered in water and completely disappearing in one place; getting my feet wet; a news story about a scandal involving a religious cult in South America with a defective ice-making machine.

Baked white bread overnight.

Saw Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's 21 Grams at Canada Square.  It's about how ex-con Benicio del Toro ran over Naomi Watts' husband, leaving him brain-dead, so she donated her husband's heart, saving Sean Penn's life, then Penn found out where his new heart came from, became attracted to Watts, and decided to kill del Toro... except that the order of the scenes was shifted about.  Depressing story, but told in an unusual, original way. [A bit like The Tree of Life.]

Dinner was boiled ham (and Christmas pudding).

I'm now reading Mazo de la Roche's Renny's Daughter.

December 31, 2003

"If only I could have seen what I was turning into..."--This Is Elvis

Dreamed of driving home to Sackville, N.B., through slow traffic in Boston; walking through a large, unruly crowd of young waterfront celebrants; a Tarantino movie with someone the Mob was after guaranteeing they'd find him by driving a big, flamboyant car in their neighbourhood; already feeling sleepy in the afternoon; considering which U.S. presidential candidates actually deserved to win.

Went shopping.

Saw the famous 1960 TV special of Peter Pan with Mary Martin. By today's standards it was pretty cheesy.  Moira said, "That girl playing Wendy must be the worst actress I've ever seen in my life!"

We got our first ABEBooks payment for the books we sold.  It was almost $600!

Dinner was more turkey pie.

Saw the pedestrian documentary This Is Elvis (for the second time). The early re-enacted scenes and the first-person narration were lame, but the documentary footage was still impressive.

Happy New Year!

December 30, 2003

Dreamed of walking in Amherst, N.S., and trying to find the street with the cinema; an outdoor concert of Wagnerian music; a play being put on with a sexy leading lady at Mount Allison University's Convocation Hall; a wide range of large Muppet-like dolls for sale; waiting to see one that appealed to me specifically.

Went to Indigo Books and got a new diary and the book The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen.

I also got a book reprinting the early years of the comic strip Peanuts, and spent the rest of the afternoon reading that. (Lucy wasn't originally so nasty!)

Dinner was turkey pie.

Went out to see Mystic River, but the schedule had been changed.  On the way back, I found a place that was selling Jonagold apples! (I've been looking around for them a long time.)