September 23, 2004

Dreamed of seeing a one-man ballet of the Hiawatha legend, being televised on PBS; getting scared witless by the music; rusing out of the auditorium (inside a special education school) and not knowing where to go next; standing on a shore and trying to identify the different birds in the water; wanting to draw a sketch but being unable to find blank paper.

Started watching Gary Oldman's Nil by Mouth on DVD, but I couldn't sit through it.  Too grim.

Instead, I saw the DVD of the MST3K version of The Catalina Caper, a 1960s scuba beach party heist "comedy."

Dinner was lasagna.

At the Geneva Centre group we were playing Cranium and Trivial Pursuit.

September 22, 2004

Dreamed of acting in a drama where Donald, John and I were fishermen who were going to go out to sea, get caught in a storm and die; the first part where I didn't want to go out and they had to convince me.

Went shopping.

Finished the ice in the freezer machine for the summer.

The latest Harper's magazine has "Whitewash as Public Service," an article denouncing the 9/11 Commission's report as passive. (There's an obvious parallel with the Iran-Contra "investigation.")

Printed out my diary entries for May.

Dinner was pork chops.

Went out to the Spiderman Meetup but the other guy didn't seem to be there.  I just wanted to invite him to join the Comic Books Meetup anyway.

September 21, 2004

Went out and got my ticket to the Rat Pack musical changed from the 16th to the 17th.  I told them the new seat didn't have to be as good as the old one, and then I got one that was better! (A moral lesson here?)

John, Kathrine, and Donald came over for dinner.  They brought Indian takeout food.

Went to a Cooking and Recipes Meetup.  Nobody else came.

Went to the Fossil & Haggis for a Karaoke Meetup.  Nobody else once again.  The place was more listless than I expected.  I stayed less than an hour, but managed to sing four songs: "The Wild Rover," "Eat It," "When I'm Sixty-Four," and "Sweet Caroline."

September 20, 2004

Dreamed of tying a new computer game and not finishing it; trying to remember the exact words of the schoolboy song that goes "Tararaboom-diyay, we have no school today, our teacher passed away, we threw her in the bay, she scared the fish away..."

Saw the DVD of the MST3K version of The Creeping Terror.

Dinner was the rest of the Thai food.

Went to an Asperger's Meetup at the Frog and Firkin.  There were three people there.

Because of the Meetup, I was late for choir practice.  We sang a new song, "The Little Road to Bethlehem."

September 19, 2004

Elizabeth I: "The strong have to be seen as strong.  That is their weakness"--Gunpowder, Treason and Plot

Baked multigrain bread.

Saw the DVD of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of the early 1960s B-movie The Skydivers.  MST3K is a series where a janitor and his robots in outer space watch cheesy movies and interject with many snarky comments. (I remember seeing this movie's trailer when I was little!)

Today was Kathrine's birthday and she, John and Rae brought over a Thai dinner, including a cake John baked.

Saw the first part of Gunpowder, Treason and Plot, a lamely-titled British drama about Mary, Queen of Scots and her son James I.  It was a little much.

Of the 20 or so Menomonee Falls Gazette issues I bid for on Ebay, I won only two. (Prices are getting crazy!) But I won another one for a lot of two dozen, for less than I expected.

September 18, 2004

Dreamed of being on a ship that turned into a bus; Moira and I coming to live in London; being at a non-existent precipice on the banks of the Thames River.

Saw Buster Keaton's silent classic The General at the Elgin, for at least the fourth time.  A perfect slapstick adventure. (If his stunts look dangerous, that's because some of them were.)

Dinner was spaghetti.

Saw the 1971 Newfoundland film The Rowdyman at the Cumberland. (I saw it thirty years ago on TV.) Some real poignancy in its story of a happy-go-lucky carouser.  Its star, Gordon Pinsent, appeared at the screening!

Finished reading The Trade. (I read over sixty pages today!) It's a terrific historical novel.

Glad the film festival's finally over.

September 17, 2004

Dreamed of rising to the top of a non-existent steep hill near our Sackville house; Donald getting a medal for fighting against terrorism in Northern Ireland(?).

Saw Going Upriver at the Varsity.  It's a documentary about John Kerry in Vietnam, and protesting the war afterward.  Rather hagiographic but informative.  Kerry comes across as shrewd.

Dinner was roast beef.

Went to an Anime Meetup at UTARPA, the University of Toronto anime club.  I saw a young superheroine's adventure Kiddy Grade and a classroom comedy Azumanga Daiyou, but could only stay for the first part.

Saw Z Channel at the ROM Cinema.  It's a documentary about Z Channel, a Los Angeles movie-based pay TV channel that attracted a fervent following in the 1980s by showing neglected movies, until its chief programmer killed his wife and himself.  Quite remarkable, and full of enjoyable movie clips.

Bushed!

September 16, 2004

Long day!  First I met Dr. Hassan in the morning.  He was so pleased about my involvement with meetup.com and the Toronto schools continuing education program that he asked me for their URLs so he could recommend them to other patients.

Saw David Cronenberg's 1979 horror movie The Brood at the Cumberland, presented by Don McKellar  Very strange, but it had some real style despite its low budget.

Bought a ticket to see The General Saturday afternoon.

Saw the amazing anime Steamboy at the Isabel Bader Theatre.  It's about a boy engineer in Victorian England whose father and grandfather are feuding over the development of a super-dynamo to power new weapons. (Very timely!)

Dinner was KFC.  It was ten hours before I got home!

September 15, 2004

Bernd Eichinger on Hitler: "He was a human being, he was not an elephant."

Saw The Downfall at the Ryerson cinema.  It's a long, devastating drama about Berlin in the last days of World War II. (There was an appearance by producer-writer Bernd Eichinger.) It started about noon, so I missed lunch.

I left with a big headache. (It didn't help that it was a noisy movie, with lots of bombing and artillery sound effects.) When I came home, I took another hot bath.

Dinner was back bacon.

Saw Antoine Fuqua's Lightning in a Bottle, also at the Ryerson.  That one's an entertaining documentary about a Radio City blue concert, with veterans like B.B. King.

Afterward I went to a Poetry Meetup.  Like the night before, I was late getting there but it didn't matter because I couldn't find anyone else.

September 14, 2004

Dreamed of being in a museum and hearing former New York mayor Ed Koch charge a vendor with stationing his cart too close to a certain point; moving away because I didn't like Koch's voice [never did!]; seeing Kris Kristofferson's cat being used in a movie stunt on a roof, and noticing that the cat resembled its master (I'd just seen KK in the Heaven's Gate screening); watching from a rooftop a killer bunny being attacked with the Holy Hand Grenade (a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail).

Went to the Ontario Aspergers Society's annual meeting.  At the end, I put in a plug for my Aspergers Meetup.

The meeting went on so long that I was late for my Comic Books Meetup.  There didn't seem to be anyone else anyway.

Didn't eat till after 20:00. (Dinner was Harvey's.)

September 13, 2004

Dreamed of having my mouth full of snow; being about to race in an Olympic-type 40-metre sprint, then realizing I wasn't serious enough for it; "waking up" and finding a hot water bottle in my bed.

Went shopping.

Dinner was shepherd's pie.  A new season for the Giuseppe Verdi Chorus.  At our first rehearsal we did "The Little Drummer Boy"; Mozart's "Laudate Dominum"; "Do You Hear What I Hear?"; and the spiritual "Rockin' Jerusalem." (We're already preparing for the Christmas concert.)

September 12, 2004

"You've been gone a long time, Lord Stafford.  Things have changed greatly"--brilliant dialogue in Cromwell

Did the August book accounts.  About $150 profit.

After a long discussion with Father, I opened an Ebay store.

Dinner was McDonald's.

Saw the DVD of the 1970 historical epic Cromwell.  Richard Harris was in pretty hammy form.

September 11, 2004

Dreamed of being in a car and trying to tell the one in charge of the radio that I was annoyed by songs like Phil Collins' "Another Day in Paradise."

Saw the documentary Tell Them Who You Are at the Elgin.  It's an entertaining portrait of the Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler, made by his photojournalist son Mark.  He's a real character.  The audience was in stitches during the scene where the father wanted to talk about the antiwar rally he attended that day, but the son wanted to film him on the balcony in the light of the setting sun, the father wanted to stay inside, and they ended up bickering.

Then I saw Final Cut, a terrific documentary about the making of the movie Heaven's Gate. (It appeared back in 1980, when a movie's failure could actually matter.) Now that I think about it, Heaven's Gate would have made a good silent movie.

Dinner was salmon.

Baked rye bread overnight.

September 10, 2004

"I'm a victim of my class, James"--Heaven's Gate

Dreamed of a mouse nibbling my hand; visiting Windsor near London; joining up with a tour group attending a wedding, in which the couple were bathed in the sea like a baptism; reading about Napoleon III in a magazine; the movie Erin Brockovich (which I haven't seen) with Aaron Eckhart playing the financier Julia Roberts was suing. (He actually played her boyfriend.)

Moira and I saw Michael Cimino's notorious western Heaven's Gate at the Cumberland. (I'd seen the shorter version in a cinema and the longer version on video, but this was the first time I saw the long version on the big screen.) It's a shameless but oddly glorious mess.  Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond answered questions afterward. [I remember seeing the promising trailer above back in 1980.]

The movie left me with a big headache. (It didn't help that we sat near the front because the rows further back have visibility problems in that cinema.) So I had a really hot bath in the evening.

Dinner was roast beef.

September 9, 2004

Dreamed of someone handing me a big parcel of letters from my London friend Philip Chang. [He was a Korean-Australian law student I knew during my stay at Goodenough College in 1995.]

Sold some of my comics for $20.  I also changed my La Traviata ticket so it wouldn't be on the same night as the play The Rat Pack.

Today was the parents' golden wedding anniversary.  For dinner we went to the Mandarin Restaurant.

The Geneva Centre group met at the nearby Bull & Firkin pub.

September 8, 2004

Dreamed of a Bill Murray movie that started in a railway town in the American West and ended in Seattle; recalling my anger from doing the correspondence courses at 15; Donald introducing us to a game with unorthodox cards, shuffling the deck but forgetting that these cards weren't symmetrical.

Went shopping.

Saw the DVD of the animated feature The Aristocats.  I'd heard it was second-rate Disney, and it was:  a thin story, top-heavy with cuteness and full of elements that were better done in earlier Disney movies.

Dinner was roast chicken.

Went through the videocassettes to figure out which ones had been seen.

Printed out my March diary entries.  I also started typing the April entries

September 7, 2004

Dreamed of reading a new Menomonee Falls Gazette issue.  Then I woke up and 16 MFG issues had arrived!

Went to get my film festival tickets and it turned out I'd got all ten of my first choices!  Moira got all but a few she wasn't so interested in anyway. (I'd feared worse because we were far back in the random selection order.)

Puitak and I saw Zhang Yimou's Hero, with Jet Li, at the Paramount.  Colourful, arty and enjoyable.

Afterward we had dinner at the Eaton Centre food court.  I ate satay beef with noodles.

September 6, 2004

CBC Radio had a show playing the most essential songs of the 20th century.  Alanis Morrisette's "You Oughta Know" was a strange choice. (That isn't singing, that's screeching!)

Sinus trouble.

Read the Classics Illustrated comic of H.G. Wells' First Men in the Moon.

Saw the Elizabeth R episode about the conspiracy that led to Mary, Queen of Scots being beheaded. [Curiously, they depicted Thomas Babington as a dilettante who was ready to rat out the other conspirators but foolishly haggled over the reward!]

Dinner was chicken curry.

September 5, 2004

Dreamed of visiting the American side of Niagara Falls (which we didn't do the other day).

Started typing the April entries of my diary.

Read the Classics Illustrated comic about Tom Sawyer, and the Classics Illustrated Junior comic about Cinderella.

John and the girls brought over dinner, which was a vegetable stew.

September 4, 2004

Dreamed of waiting in a motel for Father to come back and pick me up; singing "Back in the U.S.S.R." and "The Big Rock Candy Mountain"; having fun with other writers thinking up lame TV show concepts like pairing two "sidekick" characters with each other for activities like crime-solving and developing visual promo ads; reflecting that Andrew McCarthy had his best role in Pretty in Pink. (I should see it again.)

Baked whole wheat bread.

Dinner was McDonald's.

We went to Revue Video and rented some videos (including a couple of Michael Redgrave films for Moira).

Saw the Elizabeth R episode where she was courted by the French prince (nicely played by Michael Williams).

Robert Fulford in The National Post said that the results of Reagan's anti-communism were "mostly good." That apologia makes  me so angry that I stayed awake well past midnight planning the letter I'm going to send them. [It reminded me of the Chinese Communist Party declaring Mao Zedong's policies "two-thirds good": both were rationalizing destructive wickedness.]

September 3, 2004

Dreamed of the board game Monopoly, with jewels and watches in addition to houses and hotels; walking downtown in Sackville to meet Moira; meeting my karaoke buddy Jim in Sackville(?).

We went on an excursion to Niagara-on-the-Lake.  Lots of B&Bs and boutiques.

We went to a noontime one-act play by Terence Rattigan.  Harlequinade was about a famous theatrical couple rehearsing Romeo and Juliet (for which they were clearly too old) and chaos developing everywhere.  It was quite funny, somewhat like Michael Frayn's Noises Off.

Afterward we visited the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.  It's full of billboards and restaurants called Biffy's or My Cousin Vinny's.  Moira kept saying, "Are you sure we aren't on the American side?"

Back home, dinner was takeout Chinese food.

September 2, 2004

Dreamed of returning to our Sackville home in March after visiting Toronto; being in the Disney animated version of Peter Pan and admiring the purplish-blue clouds in the night sky; the pilot of the 1970s sitcom Good Times (which I've never seen); the actual episode of The Waltons where John-Boy was going to be in a horse race and (in a cheesy scene) Pa took issue with his "attitude."

Read the Classics Illustrated comic of Robert Louis Stevenson's War of the Roses swashbuckler The Black Arrow.  Pretty complicated.

Got some reprints of the stone age comic strip Alley Oop.  I remember reading those adventures thirty years ago.

Dinner was spaghetti (which I cooked).

Saw the last three episodes of the first season of Oz.  It's very complex.

Trimmed back the bushes growing between the fence slats on the north side of our property.

September 1, 2004

Dreamed of a soldier aiming at enemy lights and hitting a civilian house; entering a church; living on the moon with about ten people.

Went shopping.

Started Fred Stenson's The Trade.  It opens really vividly.

Dinner was pork chops.

Read the Classics Illustrated comic book of Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha.

August 31, 2004

Dreamed of hearing a succession of musical themes and writing down the ones I recognized; writing the Around the World in 80 Days theme [by Victor Young] though I'm not sure that's what I heard; a pianist performing onstage with a woman in his lap.

Went downtown and got the film festival order form.

Finished Centenary at Jalna.  The saga wore kinda thin toward the end.

Dinner was lasagna.

Planned what movies I'll try for at the festival.  Predictably, they're mostly documentaries and older movies.

August 30, 2004

Dreamed of a version of the Dickens musical Oliver! with an appearance by General Grant and motor-cars(?); the song "Baby Keep Smiling." [They played it at the dance studio a lot.]

Got a Classics Illustrated comic of the Mutiny on the Bounty sequel Pitcairn's Island.

Dinner was steak.

The book club had its first meeting, at Indigo books.  We finally decided on Trade, a novel about Hudson's Bay Company traders in the early 19th century.

Headache.

Moira came home from Kingston in the evening.

August 29, 2004

"There's something in the air, and it ain't love"--Oz

Dreamed of looking at the TV listings in Britain on Monday night and seeing that they were showing A Hard Day's Night at the same time as a movie review show; renting a locker at a railway station to put my backpack in before travelling to London.

Read the Classics Illustrated Junior comic book of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Swineherd" (here called "The Penny Prince"). They gave this version a happy ending!

We finally got the Chums annual onto the market. [But it didn't sell.]

Saw the DVD of the first episode of the prison drama Oz.  It's pretty disturbing, all right.  Dostoevsky (I think) said you can learn a lot about a society from its prisons.

Won only four of the bids for the latest round of Menomonee Falls Gazette auctions.

Read the Classics Illustrated comic of Francis Parkman's frontier report The Oregon Trail, and the one about Daniel Boone.

Dinner was pizza.

August 28, 2004

Dreamed of Miss Piggy on The Muppet Show.

Read a six-month Terry and the Pirates adventure (from late 1936 and early 1937) which climaxed in Pat Ryan being the marriage prize in a warlord's lottery, which the Dragon Lady fixed to win herself.  But then Pat brought in a decrepit doctor who turned out to be a former lover of the Dragon Lady whom she had ruined, and now got even by shooting her. (Of course, she'll survive for future adventures.) An extremely lucky hunch on Pat's part!

Dinner was KFC.

Saw Alfonso Cuaron's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at the Royal.  It's the best in the series so far, surpassing the two Chris Columbus directed in briskness, style and emotional resonance.  That whomping willow was scary!

August 27, 2004

Dreamed of removing some excess furniture from my room to a basement room; waking up in the morning and finding my watch had lost its face(?).

Tried to post a Chums annual for sale on Ebay, bu I couldn't upload the image scans for some reason. [Chums was a British boy's magazine like Boy's Own Paper.]

Did some pruning on the trees.

Dinner was ham.

The DVD player still has sound trouble.  Father decided to buy a new one, and we got it at Futureshop. (The other player is in the repair shop.)

August 26, 2004

Dreamed of a large mural that was a memorial to World War II fighter pilots; wearing panty hose(?); adventures with a time machine; collecting quotes from a movie.

Father managed to get the DVD out of the other player, and it seems to be working again. (We still haven't heard from the company about exchanging it.)

The company finally called back and arranged to repair the DVD player.

Saw the Elizabeth R episode where she flirted with marriage. (I remember the part where Robert Dudley waited endlessly at the church for her to arrive.)

Dinner was fish.

Went bowling with the Geneva Centre group.  I enjoyed the first part, until they turned up the musica and put on disco lights.  In ended up leaving early. (Wayne scored two strikes!)

August 25, 2004

A parent to teenagers going off on a date: "Be good.  And if you can't be good, be careful"--All or Nothing (but she got pregnant anyway)

Baked white bread overnight.

Dreamed of having a cameo in a series of four unpleasant Wagnerian operas as a bedridden invalid; being unable to turn off a stereo radio in my room; reading British comic annuals; returning from the operas on the London subway, still unable to sit up; the 1970s sitcom One Day at a Time.

Got a Sunday comics section from 1966.

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

Registered for continuing education courses in drama, creative writing and dancing.

Saw the video of Mike Leigh's All or Nothing. (I'm not quite sure what the title means.) It's a Leigh-style "slice of life" drama about people living on a London housing estate.  Interesting but kinda bleak.  Mother said Timothy Spall looks like he's seen a ghost!

August 24, 2004

"Renny would not have understood or would have chosen not to understand.  A new and desperately urgent life was thrusting up, out of the colonial past, but he ignored it, not so much in antagonism as in absorption by his own manner of life.  He simply could not imagine a change in Jalna itself"--Centenary at Jalna

Dreamed of walking home in Sackville and seeing a TV ad somehow projected in the sky; borrowing several Dr. Seuss books from the library; visiting an open house with a large group from my dance studio; seeing an episode from a comic strip in the boy's swashbuckler genre of Treasure Island; the composer Henry Mancini giving me an autographed record album.

Saw the video of Powell & Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, a World War II movie about a GI, a Tommy and a Land Girl who come together in a village near Canterbury and solve the mystery of a night stalker who throws glue into women's hair.  There's a sort of parallel evoked with Chaucer's pilgrims.  An intriguing curio, though a bit long.

Dinner was steak.

Went to a Writers Meetup at the Fox and Fiddle.  There were three people there.

August 23, 2004

Dreamed of taking a swimming course; the Elvis song "Memories" fused with Glen Campbell's "True Grit" theme song.

In the reprint I've been reading, Terry and the Pirates improved remarkably in the first year.

Went shopping.  We also rented some videos at Revue.

Dinner was chicken (which I fried).

Saw the video of the first episode of the BBC series Elizabeth R. (It shows how Elizabeth I survived her political difficulties in the years before becoming Queen.) It's a terrific show, with Glenda Jackson at her considerable best in the title role.  I recall this as the best of all the episodes. [Later I decided I preferred the fifth episode, about defeating the Spanish Armada.]

Read the Classics Illustrated special issue "The Atomic Age."

August 22, 2004

"You're a fool, but you're my fool!"--The Battle of the Sexes

"Ye'll never live t'regret it"--Terry and the Pirates

Dreamed of seeing a movie at the Bloor Cinema; being afraid to watch a scene with people being attacked by dogs; being unable to put my shoes back on and gather all my stuff after the movie was over.

Started reading the Terry and the Pirates reprints.  The first episodes were kinda lame.

Moira went to Kingston for a week or so.

Saw the DVD of D.W. Griffiths' The Battle of the Sexes.  It's a silent melodrama with comic touches, about a rich married man who abandons his family for a gold digger.  Minor. (They broke Chekhov's rule by showing a gun and not having it go off.)

Dinner was McDonald's.

There was a last-minute bidding war, but I got twelve of the eighteen Menomonee Falls Gazette issues I was trying for.

Read the Teddy Roosevelt and Snow White comics I recently bought.

August 21, 2004

Dreamed of going on a Ferris Wheel.

Baked multigrain bread.

Sinus trouble.

Went to a Movie Meetup.  There were half a dozen people there. We saw Open Water at the Market Square.  It's a stunning independent production about a couple on a scuba dive whose boat leaves them behind!

Dinner was churrasco chicken.

August 20, 2004

"If they hadn't put up that building, you could see the Hudson from here"--Hallelujah I'm a Bum!

Dreamed of getting a job as caretaker in a school.

Dinner was spaghetti (which I cooked).

Saw the DVD of Lewis Milestone's Hallelujah I'm a Bum! (The other DVD player was working again.  Its sound problem is intermittent.) It's a 1933 musical, from the time before they introduced the Production Code, so there's quite a bit of off-colour humour.  Al Jolson plays the "King of Central Park" (as in a hobo). There's a Depression-era populist theme.  Silent comedian Harry Langdon plays a revolutionary!

Visited the old dance studio.  My teacher Cynthia now has a tan.

Vanity Fair has a good David Halberstam article about the shadow the Vietnam War casts over American politics today.

August 19, 2004

Dreamed of being in the movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and doing a dance number with Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell.

Got a reprint of the last episodes of Terry and the Pirates.

Dinner was salmon.

We were going to watch the DVD of Francois Truffaut's Day for Night, but there was no sound on our DVD player, so we switched to the other machine.  We watched about half an hour, then I stopped the machine to go to the lavatory.  When we started it again, the disc had gone back to the beginning, so I fast-forwarded it to the scene where we'd stopped, but then it wouldn't go to Play or Stop or Power Off or anything, and all I could do was unplug it.  Then, when I plugged it back in none of the buttons would respond!  It's inconvenient to have both machines malfunction at the same time.

Finally finished reading my Menomonee Falls Gazette collection.