May 16, 2004

"We landed in some kinda nest....  Reminds me of where I was first laid"--Howard the Duck

Dreamed of doing research.

Bought a $10 dreamcatcher from an Indian on the sidewalk. (I had to go to a drugstore to break a $20 bill.) Hopefully, I'll catch more dreams than this last night. [It's still hanging in my room.]

Howard the Duck is one strange comic!

The rest of the family returned from Kingston.

John and Rae came over for dinner, which was pizza.

Copied my CV onto Appleworks and posted it at workopolis.ca .

May 15, 2004

Dreamed of hearing a report of the death of Raquel Welch; being in a jet landing at an airport on the north coast of Kent; meeting a Japanese pilot who turned out to be a war criminal (the evidence being a dead cat he was carrying); dressing in a locker room close to closing time, and being unable to finish; stuffing a cantaloupe and a zucchini into my backpack.

Joined the Japanese-Canadian Student Association Group and conversed in both languages.  My spoken Japanese is very limited.  I was talking to a Japanese girl called Minako.

Dinner was McDonald's.

Went to the Toronto Centre for the Performing Arts and saw the Royal Opera of Canada production of Verdi's Aida.  That's a great opera, one of the best.  They brought on some animals (including an elephant!), which was rather silly.  I think my favourite part of most operas is the choruses.

May 14, 2004

"You can't change the world, but you can make a difference"--Edward Norton's self-contradictory motto in Death to Smoochy

Dreamed of the song "Bad Bhrama Bull," which we had on a record when I was little; the scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where they floated up to the ceiling.

The others went off to Kingston for the weekend.

Finished the spading.  Glad I did it in the morning before it got really hot!

Went to the Eaton Centre and had dinner at Arby's.

Visited The Beguiling and bought a collector's comic book of Dick Tracy vs. Flat Top and one of Howard the Duck.

Saw Danny de Vito's kiddie-TV satire Death to Smoochy.  It's a black comedy, quite vulgar and tasteless.  Pretty uneven overall, but some of it was funny. (Robin Williams got to play nasty for a change.)

May 13, 2004

Dreamed of bumping into someone and getting knocked down; the John Wayne movie The Searchers; a stage show on the history of blindfolds(?).

Mother has $6000 coming due and she doesn't know what to do with it!

Started spading the garden.

Dinner was pork chops.

Went out to an Anime Meetup, but I couldn't find the place.  Scarborough is a jungle.

May 12, 2004

Dreamed of the humiliation I felt when I was twelve and took a swimming course, only to fail. [If I'd been smarter, I would have just quit--but I didn't want to be a quitter.]

Went shopping.

Finally got the compost on the garden.  I put it on between layers of peat moss to lessen the smell.

The hot weather has arrived!  I sweated so much while working in the garden that my shirt got soaked. (I turned on our refrigerator's ice machine.)

Dinner was pork roast.

The chorus performed at a Woodbridge church in Vaughan, during a mass in Italian.  We sang "Inno a San Pancrazio," Lorenzo Perosi's "Kyrie," "Gloria," Bonfitto's "Alleluia," Gounod's "Sanctus Dominus," "Ave Verum Corpus," Bonfitto's "Agnello di Dio," and Cesar Franck's "Panis Angelicus." Father drove me up and had to cool his heels for two hours until we were finished!

May 11, 2004

"'Good girl,' he said, 'You have a lovely baby.  I'm proud of you.' And his pride in his horses seemed to enter their consciousness.  They moved, and low whickers came from stall and loose-box at the sound of his voice.  He felt pity for the man whose pride was in his motor car, that showy piece of mechanism whose glamour perished with its glitter, whose life blood was gasoline, which rolled out of factories in mass production"--Variable Winds at Jalna

Went to see Dr. Hassan, and forgot to bring my December diary entries.  I bought some more comics too.

Dinner was lasagna.

There were only three people at the Japanese Meetup, including Kam, whom I knew from the Chinese Meetup, and an Iranian. (Still no Japanese people!)

Baked whole wheat bread overnight.

May 10, 2004

Dreamed of a band playing "Hail, Columbia" [or was it "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean"?]; a booth that turned the person inside into a child.

Went to the library and pickedup Mazo de la Roche's Variable Winds at Jalna.  On the streetcar, someone said that I looked like Woody Allen. (His friend didn't notice the resemblance.)

Dinner was roast chicken.

At the chorus rehearsal I did the Congiura chorus from Verdi's Ernani for the first time.  It's pretty difficult.

May 9, 2004

Dreamed of Moira and I visiting London; Moira wanting to return home for just one day.

Went to a SCRIPT planning session at the Piccinini Centre at St. Clair and Lansdowne.

John and Kathrine brought over a vegan dinner. (Donald came too.)

I'd planned to go to an Anton Kuerti piano concert, but dinner came late. (I knew that would happen!) Oh well, I had a headache anyway.

Finished the third volume of A Cartoon History of the Universe.  The last chapter was about the Black Death and the Renaissance.

Printed out my December diary entries!

May 8, 2004

Dreamed of building a fire in the fireplace of our Sackville home; visiting New York City as part of a tour group; losing my pants on a train to Mississauga.

Dinner was KFC.

Saw Chris Marker's famous La Jetee at the Cinematheque.  It's a science fiction photomontage (almost no live action, just a series of stills with sound and narration) about a survivor of World War III forced into a series of experiments where he travels into the past and the future.  Very odd.

There was also the documentary Remembrance of Things to Come, a photomontage based on the work of Denise Bellon, a French photojournalist in the late 1930s who was close to the surrealist movement.  Quite interesting.

Finished reading Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure of English.

Read the chapter in A Cartoon History of the Universe about the Crusades and the Mongols.

May 7, 2004

Dreamed of passing through the Mount Allison university chapel and seeing large sculptures on the floor (like the sculptures in the Victoria & Albert Museum); seeing new buildings in my Sackville hometown in a "new traditional" style and comparing them to gingerbread houses; seeing the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral on Sackville's horizon, turning into the Taj Mahal; driving alone along St. Clair Avenue (I don't drive); failing to signal or slow down or change direction quickly enough; meeting a large demonstration (against the St. Clair streetcar right of way) and accidentally squashing the toes of a few people; singing Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire."

We had dinner at Red Lobster with Donald.  I ordered Tilapia.

May 6, 2004

Dreamed of imagining how to film Kipling's Captains Courageous (I hated the 1930s MGM version); reading a book that seemed a whole lot like Harry Potter but turned out to have been written in the early 1960s; setting up an electric train near a beach on Prince Edward Island.

Went shopping.

Dinner was spaghetti.

Went to a meeting at the Geneva Centre, where we played Trivial Pursuit.

May 5, 2004

Dreamed of meeting actress Ali McGraw; seeing a DVD of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure released back in 1999, before the Lord of the Rings movies; walking outdoors in the winter snow in my pajamas; visiting a library in the evening; getting cast in a play as a young woman in the 1930s.

Read the Cartoon History of the Universe chapter on Europe in the Dark Ages.

Dinner was salmon.

Went to a Goodenough Association reception at the British Consulate-General in Forest Hill.  I only stayed for about half an hour because I wasn't sure how much time I had to spare. [The Goodenough Association is a group for people who've stayed at Goodenough College, as I did in 1995.]

Then I went to see the last of the Victor Sjostrom movies at the Cinematheque:  The Crucible of Love, a medieval melodrama about an unhappy wife accused of witchcraft after her husband drops dead.  Great fiery climax.

May 4, 2004

Dreamed of a thriller set in wartime Britain about a dupe of Nazi spies (just in it for the money), who ends up on the run, and tries to play both ends against the middle.

Father and I updated the accounts for our book business  Our income in the first quarter of 2004 was over $3000!

Finally started typing my diary's December entries. (I'm now using the Appleworks software.)

Dinner was sukiyaki, which Moira cooked.

Saw two more Victor Sjostrom silents.  The first was His Lord's Will, a farce about an old lord writing his will and choosing a husband for his niece.  The second was The Monastery of Sendomir, a dark drama about a Polish nobleman avenging his wife's infidelity.

Baked cheese bread overnight.

May 3, 2004

Dreamed of meeting abortion doctor Henry Morganthaler; planting seeds in garden soil then moving the soil to another town; sinking up to my armpits in quicksand-like soil, and reaching out to grab nearby paving stones.

Read the Cartoon History of the Universe chapter about the Turks and medieval Asia.

Dinner was spaghetti and Swedish meatballs.

At chorus rehearsal, I sang the Jerusalem Chorus from Verdi's I Lombardi for the first time. [I greatly enjoyed my first year with the Giuseppe Verdi Chorus when all the music was new to me and everything was a challenge!]

May 2, 2004

Dreamed of Rocky and Bullwinkle; thinking that the female matador in the Spanish movie Talk to Her (who, it turned out, was about to leave her boyfriend and return to her loutish ex just before she got injured in the ring and left in a coma) was like Donna Anna in Don Giovanni (also Spanish), who seemed to prefer Don Giovanni to her nicer beau Don Ottavio.

Went to a Chinese Meetup at the Cafe Next Door.  There were eight of us, including someone who'd been in Canada just one week.  He asked me if there were any gun clubs in Canada, and drew a sketch on an AK-47!

Read the chapter about Africa in A Cartoon History of the Universe Volume III.

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

May 1, 2004

Dreamed of living on a hilltop with few trees; the young people on the TV show The O.C. (which I've never watched) coming together for a party, which soon got out of hand.

Sang with the chorus at the wedding after all.  Father drove me up to the place, a United church in Markham.  We sang Gounod's "Ave Maria," Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus," Vivaldi's "Gloria" and Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus." It only took about half an hour, which seems pretty short for such a life-altering event. [I noticed the organist playing the Roy Rogers song "Let There Be Peace on Earth," which we had on a record when I was little.]

Moira returned from Kingston.

Dinner was pork chops.

Saw a months-old tape of a PBS documentary about Charles Dickens, based on Peter Ackroyd's biography.  Some famous British actors had cameos.

The first chapter of the third volume of A Cartoon History of the Universe was about the Arab Empire.

April 30, 2004

Dreamed of a group of people in an enclosed, isolated outpost who find out they're all about to die; going to a screening of short films of advertising directed at at children from the 1950s and early '60s, and seeing one with a helicopter shot of my hometown Sackville, N.B., as it was then; meeting a Chinese woman on the way home, then meeting Moira; a Zorro remake set in the present day, relying on broad comedy.

We drove down to Sunnyside Park.  There was some drizzle.

Managed to practice my choral singing.  I should be up to singing at the wedding.

Dinner was McDonald's.

Saw Victor Sjostrom's Fire on Board.  It was an entertaining yarn about a ship captain who has his wife and daughter aboard on a voyage, along with his wife's old flame and a secret cargo of contraband gunpowder. (An explosive situation, no?)

Stopped by Captain Video at their new quarters and bought a few more videos, include Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. (They'll call me when they find it.)

April 29, 2004

Dreamed of an off-color comedy movie from the early 1960s, with three women undressing in a swimming pool; sweeping up the pine needles on a back porch; feeling extremely angry at someone early in the morning; noticing that it was late May and time to start mowing the lawn around the Sackville house; the non-existent moment in my adolescence when I lost my virginity. [I'm still a virgin.]

The really warm weather has arrived!  I'll have to start the garden soon.

Went to a comics bookstore called The Beguiling and found the third volume of A Cartoon History of the Universe! (This one's about the Middle Ages.)

Dinner was the rest of the lasagna.

Saw Victor Sjostrom's A Dangerous Pledge, about a miserly pawnbroker and the maid who worms her way into his heart, resulting in a love triangle.

April 28, 2004

Dreamed of the barbershop quartet song "Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie" (which we had on a record when I was young); meeting a small group of people in a video store to play the videos and DVDs we owned for each other; walking along Park Street in Sackville and finding on someone's lawn a children's book about energy from the early 1960s with a foreword written by my father.

Went to the Geneva Centre to find out what time they were starting the movie and it turned out they'd shown it the previous Wednesday! (Anyway, even if I'd known it would have conflicted with my SCRIPT meeting.)

Went shopping.

Dinner was lasagna. 

April 27, 2004

Dreamed of deciding to go to Giuseppe's Saturday wedding but finding that Father wasn't available to drive me; a rich Russian being seduced by Tess of the D'Urbervilles and later testifying against her; doing a math problem involving factorials; using a pencil whose lead fell out; driving with some friends to a fancy London atrium full of multiplex cinema crowds; meeting Starsky and Hutch actor David Soul. (I'd seen Soul's singing album among the records at the church sale.)

Read the Classics Illustrated comic The Adventures of Marco Polo.

Dinner was fettucine in pesto sauce (which I cooked).

Went to the subway station for another hour and collected 20 more SCRIPT signatures. (This time there were half a dozen of us.)

Saw the first part of a TVOntario documentary series about the Tuscan origins of the Renaissance.  This episode was about St. Francis of Assisi and the naturalistic influence he had on artists like Giotto.

Baked multigrain bread overnight.

April 26, 2004

Dreamed of leaning out a window so far that I couldn't climb back in, at such a height that I couldn't jump, so I shifted my weight to tip the building over; reading that Ralph Nader had done the same thing in a mobile home (he'd been urinating out a window); being in a new house on the site of our old Sackville house, wondering when the new owners would return, and hoping to return home soon because I was concerned about school work; telling Moira, "Home is where you have internet access"; unpacking some convenient reference materials and casually singing "Ticket to Ride"; the latest Star Wars movie being a family-conflict drama with no special effects; going beneath Sackville to find an underground highway complex.

Dinner was halibut.

Read the Classics Illustrated comic book of Kipling's Captains Courageous, one of the ones I'd read as a child but failed to save. (I bought a new copy a few days ago.) One of their best, if you ask me. [I used to think the title was "Captain's Courageous," and just noticed my mistake now!]

At choir rehearsal we sang Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus." We're going to sing at the wedding of Giuseppe's niece Saturday afternoon, but I told him I couldn't make it. (I'm still not over my cold.) But I would like to come, and I hope I'm feeling better by then.

April 25, 2004

Dreamed of acting on the stage; Gina McKee (Irene in The Forsyte Saga) being nice to me the same way her character was to mine in our play; being chummy with actor John Cusack; realizing that I was scheduled to fly home the next week and that I'd have to change my plans; taking a swimming lesson in a crowded pool where the teachers were planning a big heist at the same time.

Saw Victor Sjostrom's movie of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter with the great Lillian Gish.

Hung around the St. Clair West subway station for about 90 minutes collecting signatures for the SCRIPT petition.  I got over 30!

John and Rae came over for dinner, which was pizza.

Saw a PBS documentary on Gore Vidal. (We taped it many months ago.)

The last of the chilly weather. (Hopefully!)

April 24, 2004

"After that the magic was gone." "And a jolly good thing, too, if you ask me"--Bitter Moon

Dreamed of reading a Classics Illustrated comic book about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid(?); taking a Los Angeles bus to a historic fort; a non-existent football cheer from an MGM musical.

Went to the book sale again and bought some more albums.

Saw Victor Sjostrom's The Girl From the Marsh Croft. (The streetcar kept me waiting over 20 minutes, so I got in a minute late, which always bugs me.) It was a pretty good melodrama about a "proper" young man and a girl disgraced by a paternity case.

John came over for dinner, which was spaghetti and soy meatballs.

Saw Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon, about a square British couple on a ship who meet a very kinky Franco-American couple.  A long, uneven black comedy, sometimes perversely funny, sometimes heavy-handed, sometimes just silly (like the final sequence where the two wives get it on).

April 23, 2004

Narration: "The last drop of suffering--her own child does not recognize her!"--Ingeborg Holm

Dreamed of being at a tribute to Marty Feldman (the 1970s comedian with the big eyes) and wondering what the time and place were (a nearby map showed southwest England and suggested Devonshire along the English Channel coast).

Went out to the bookstore This Ain't the Rosedale Library and bought a ticket to the Anton Kuerti concert raising money for Mordechai Vanunu. (I'm still angray about what happened to him and how little Western governments did about it.) Then I bought a new Quill and Quire issue at Indigo Books.

Dinner was shepherd's pie.

Saw two of Victor Sjostrom's early silents, both pretty shameless melodrama.  The Broken Spring Rose was about a girl who ends up a Fallen Woman; Ingeborg Holm was about a mother who ends up in the poorhouse, has to foster out her children, and goes insane.

Went to the used book sale at Fairlawn United Church.  I ended up buying 30 records (at $1 apiece!) and a few opera videos.

April 22, 2004

Dreamed of being left alone at our cottage near Sackville overnight, and planning to drive to Moncton airport the next day and fly home; remembering that I don't know how to drive; looking at a group of books I'd written; getting up and finding the time was past 19:00.

Went over to Dr. Hassan's and got my Celexa prescription renewed.  I also got some comic books at the nearby store, and a ticket for the opera Aida next month.

Dinner was fettucine in pesto sauce (which I cooked).

We saw an episode of The South Bank Show with Melvyn Bragg interviewing Stephen Spender.  If you ask me, the people Spender knew (Auden, Isherwood etc.) were more interesting than he was.

April 21, 2004

Dreamed of being so excited that I said to Father, "I don't really get excited, but now I am!"; the comic book Asterix; the Physics & Engineering Building on the Mount Allison campus where Father had his office; accompanying Father on a visit to a Sybilline prophet in the forest and getting stung by two wasps; imagining a romantic comedy about guy with a French girlfriend who says things like "True French people hate Paris." (Why can't I think of things like that when I'm awake?)

Vacuumed my room and the attic. (It gave me a headache.)

Got a new pair of pants at Zeller's.

Dinner was roast beef.

Went to a public meeting hosted by SCRIPT, an organization that supports giving the St. Clair streetcar a dedicated lane. (I missed parts of it because of diarrhea.) I volunteered to do some stuff like entering data for them.

April 20, 2004

Dreamed of going to a singer's conference and meeting someone who wouldn't leave me alone; driving from Halifax to Sackville in the early hours of Sunday morning the movie version of Starsky and Hutch.

Got up after noon.

Dinner was pork chops.

I was going to see Polanski's Chinatown at the Cinematheque, but didn't feel like it.

Instead we went through our 30 videocassettes to decide which ones had stuff worth saving.

Baked rye bread overnight.

April 19, 2004

Dreamed of being on a ship; trying to finish getting my luggage together in a Toronto airport before going home.

Went shopping.  We picked up some post-Easter reduced chocolate.

The warm weather has finally arrived!  We're opening windows now.

End-of-cold headache.

Dinner was roast chicken.

At the choir rehearsal we sang new stuff like the Humming Chorus, the Hallelujah Chorus and the Serenade from Don Pasquale.

April 18, 2004

Didn't get out of bed till after 13:00!

Dreamed of The Dresser (a British movie about a Shakespearian actor with Albert Finny and Tom Courtenay).

Saw Edward Zwick's The Last Samurai at the Revue.  Romantic new-age twaddle.  Ken Watanabe blew Tom Cruise away.

Went straight from the movie to the Queen of Sheba.  We ate Ethiopian food with Donald, John and crews. [Unfortunately, the food was ordered before I arrived so I got the same vegetarian order as the others.]

Headache.

Copied my November diary entries into Appleworks and managed to print them out!

April 17, 2004

Dreamed of North Korea; a computer game where you ascend to the top of a spire, go down a chimney until you've braked your descent, then rise again but not so quickly that you'll keep going beyond the roof.

Saw Peter Weir's Master and Commander at the Bloor with Moira.  It's a terrific movie, exciting and intelligent and believable.  Lots of "How did they film that?" shots.

Dinner was Burger King.

I also saw Olivier Assaya's Demonlover at the Cinematheque.  Couldn't sit through it. (Vaguely sleazy.)

Just after I left the Cinematheque, I almost got mugged by three guys, but someone confronted them and they messed him up instead.  I ran to the nearby police station and they got arrested.  After waiting a couple of hours, I made a statement and identified one of them. (The victim didn't stick around for this.) Seems they'd just mugged someone else in a park.  I may be testifying months from now. [I didn't.]

April 16, 2004

Dreamed of living in our cottage near Sackville; visiting the Sackville post office with our postal box; telling the family about the Sopranos episode where Tony tried to force his son into military school.

Got another nine tapes from Captain Video.  The woman who works there says I have a good eye for choosing the best movies!

Dinner was McDonald's.

Saw Howard Hawks' Sergeant York, for at least the fourth time. (It was one of the videos I bought.) Entertaining cornpone, though I found the moral hard to take:  it's wrong to kill people who cheat you out of your bottom land, and wrong to kill government agents who are hunting you, but right to kill Germans. (He killed twenty Germans, but their machine guns were killing thousands, see?) This movie was made in 1941, when the U.S.A. was about to make its belated entry into World War II, and people were already looking for moral justifications.  Hawks, one of the great directors, was working with a perfectly cast Gary Cooper.

April 15, 2004

Took it easy because of my cold.

Baked whole wheat bread.

Dinner was fish in batter.

Saw Victor Sjostrom's silent The Phantom Carriage, a starkly moral story about a man undone by Demon Drink.

Stayed for Roman Polanski's The Tenant (which I saw for the second time), about a man who moves into a very strange Paris apartment and ends up going crazy.  Funny but very creepy. (Remind me not to move to Paris!)