February 18, 2005

Got a Los Angeles Times Sunday comics section, and Larry McMurtry's book of Texas essays In a Lonely Grave (the latter from amazon.com ).

Saw the DVD of Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, with Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson, the man at the center of the rave music scene in 1980s Manchester.  It's a droll period piece.

Dinner was chicken Kiev.

Just one person came to my Activists Meetup.

Pui, Gordon, Moira and I are going to visit Washington, D.C., next month.  I bought the airplane tickets online.

Saw Once Upon a Time in China IV at the Royal.  This one didn't have Jet Li, but it was still fun, especially the Red Lantern Society of ass-kicking women.

February 17, 2005

Dreamed of painting a mural with black ink, of a round, extraterrestrial spaceship (sort of like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind) on a wall formed by the deep ditch on the north side of our Sackville garden.

Saw the DVD of The Broadway Melody, one of the first MGM musicals (from 1929). The story was really lame.  An in-joke:  the rich cad was named Jacques Warriner, not unlike Jack Warner of MGM rival Warner Brothers.

Got some more Modesty Blaise comics, some British comics like Hotspur, and a 1956 New York News Sunday comics section.

Dinner was spaghetti.

Saw Rivers and Tides at the Paradise.  It's a handsome documentary about an artist who builds landscape structures, often ephemeral ones.

Baked rye bread overnight.

February 16, 2005

Dreamed of visiting a museum and looking for my sweater near the coat racks just before closing time; actors performing the story of King Arthur in the street; five children performing a ballet; walking from Cape Breton home to Sackville with Donald and John; trying to steal a rowboat moored near a large library; a building always covered by fog.

Dinner was salmon.

Got some issues of Menomonee Falls Guardian, a couple of Modesty Blaise reprints, some Favorite Funnies reprint issues, and another Mad magazine paperback.

At the drama class we had an exercise of using an imaginary object, so I pretended to use a pogo stick!

Got sick in the middle of the night.  Maybe the salmon disagreed with me.

February 15, 2005

Arab: "I am Figgo!" Steve Canyon: "Just take a hot bath--it might go away!"

Dreamed of meeting Donald Trump.

Went shopping.

Started reading a Steve Canyon reprint from 1948.  Steve and his Gabby Hayes-like sidekick Happy Easter are in some Arab country where people say things like "Thou art..." They get busted out of jail by a girl called Convoy who wants to marry Steve, then get taken prisoner in a submarine commanded by a Russian woman called Akoola (Russian for shark).

Dinner was roast chicken.

Saw an episode of the TV documentary series Sin Cities focusing on Shanghai.

Headache!

February 14, 2005

Dreamed of taking a taxi with some siblings from London southeast to a rural district called Milkesop; comparing the area to Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood.

Got some Mad magazine paperbacks.

Dropped off the last of the opera leaflets.  I've distributed them to a good twenty libraries!

Read another reprint of the comic strip adventures of World War II navy pilot Buz Sawyer.  Priceless lines like "To think that such food was about to be wasted on a bandy-legged Jap," and "Yip-pee!  Hit the dirt, you monkeys!" and the exchange "Yankee dog, you die!" "That's what you think, little brown brother."

Dinner was sausages and mash.

Skipped choir practice for once and went to the Geneva Centre Valentine's Day party instead.  They had a lot of cookies and pizza, but I wasn't hungry.

Typed out my diary's July entries.

February 13, 2005

"You're gorgeous!" "Don't take that as a compliment--from her, it's more of an attack"--Spanglish

Dreamed of waking up in our Sackville house; trying to masturbate; finding that I was already about to use up the blank pages of my diary.

The parents and I saw James L. Brooks' Spanglish at the Paradise.  It's a lightweight middlebrow comedy about a Mexican maid and her daughter in a Los Angeles household, with an unusually restrained Adam Sandler. (The ending was rather PC.)

Dinner was turkey on toast.

On Six Feet Under the funeral home got sued, Keith's father demanded custody of his niece, Nate revealed to Brenda that he'd got Lisa pregnant, and Ruth paid Nikolai's loan-shark debt.  Quite a lot happening.

February 12, 2005

Dreamed of Noddy and Peanuts books.

Dinner was fettucine alfredo (which I cooked).

Greg was the only one who came to my games night. (Eric couldn't come till 21:00, so he decided to wait for the next meeting.) Greg ended up telling me all about his gold investments!

Saw the DVD of On Valentine's Day (for the second time), another film of a Horton Foote play with characters based on his parents.  I remembered the wife singing the old song "Juanita."

February 11, 2005

"A coupla coppers torpedoed us!  They bumped Turk!  I conked one and took leg-bail!  Pearly crashed too, Satin!"--Kerry Drake

Dreamed of looking at a new $100 bill and seeing that the reverse side told the story of how the Thanksgiving holiday came about; trying to remember what I'd dreamed. (Did I really dream about supermodel Gisele Bundchen?  I remember remembering it in the dream, but after I woke up I forgot.)

Dropped yet more opera leaflets.

Got Richard Hofstadter's book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (which I bought at amazon.com). I also got some more Sunday comics.

I was late again for dinner, which was more turkey pie.

Finished the Wiseguy DVDs.  A brilliant show.

Visited my old dance studio.  Most of them were out of town for some tournament.

February 10, 2005

A CIA fixer on his third-world client: "The nice thing about him is, he things his ideas are his own"--Wiseguy

Headache!

Dinner was McDonald's. (I was going to cook dinner, but my headache was too great.)

In the evening there was a blackout in my neighbourhood.  Since there was nothing else to do, I went out for a walk and looked at the stars. (Car headlights look twice as bright in pitch-black darkness.) I noticed that the blackout was over a small area, bounded by St. Clair, Wychwood, Davenport and Oakwood.

I went to bed but didn't get to sleep until I noticed that the electricity was back.

Started typing up my diary entries from last July.

February 9, 2005

"Hire yourself a hearse, wise guy!  They'll never fry me and I'm sure coming back to pay you off the night I crash out"--Fingers sends Kerry Drake a message

Dreamed that I'd submitted an essay and Moira had read the teacher's comments before me, and said that the comments weren't so much about me as about the sum-total of knowledge I'd acquired up to that time.

Started reading a reprint of the detective strip Kerry Drake from its beginning in 1943.  Fingers is a great villain! (I liked the moment when he's so hungry that he scarfs animal feed.)

Dropped off some more opera leaflets.

Dinner was turkey pie.

At the drama class we were doing sketches where we whispered so the audience would hear us.  I was in a group performing Nine Ten, which I'd done in the previous term.

Got a batch of weekend comics from The Toronto Star Weekly (which I remember from my childhood) and The Monitor (from Montreal).

February 8, 2005

Kevin Spacey's repeated line: "Only the toes knows"--the TV series Wiseguy

Went shopping.

Moira came back from Kingston.

Dinner was turkey.

Brought the Apples to Apples game to the Common Room.  They had a good time with it.  We also played a game called Bop It, where you had this gadget that gave one of four orders--bop it, twist it, pull it and pass it--which you had to do quickly enough to maintain an accelerating rhythm.

February 7, 2005

Comic strip hero Brick Bradford: "I must hold out!  I must!  I must!  I can't give in--though these dear friends, in agony--must not persuade me to--or should they?"

Dreamed of comic strip hero Norman Drabble joining a group on a business trip to London, then doing something so goofy that it got into the newspaper The Independent, bringing the group unwanted attention.

Got several Sunday comics, including Dick Tracy, Li'l Abner, Steve Canyon, The Heart of Juliet Jones, Flash Gordon and a complete section from 1963.

Distributed some more opera leaflets.  It took a long time, though I only go to four more libraries.  So I was late for dinner, which was pork chops.

At the choir I heard that Catherine had severe pneumonia.

February 6, 2005

Melissa (Brenda's hooker friend), watching an orgy: "Sex is so stupid!"--Six Feet Under

Dreamed of visiting a war museum with an exhibit on POWs; being tempted to ask whether the war movie cliche of the Japanese sticking bamboo shoots under prisoners' fingernails ever really happened (from what I've heard, I wouldn't doubt it); finding a furry winter cap on the floor next to coat racks (like my real one, but brown instead of black) and wondering who it belonged to.

We did the January accounts for our used book business.  We were slightly in the red.

Father gave me a $1000 cheque and I bid for quite a few Ebay comic strips.

John brought over dinner, which was vegan lasagna.  I couldn't eat much of it, and afterward I sneaked out to McDonald's. (Hope he didn't notice!)

Baked white bread.

On Six Feet Under Brenda attended an orgy; Keith's sister killed someone in a hit & run.

February 5, 2005

Wife and husband: "I'm a rotten bitch, through and through!" "Nevertheless..."--Being Julia

Superman to two criminals: "May I borrow your feet, please?"

Dreamed of staying in a motel; visiting Parliament Hill, and approaching the area that only MPs are allowed to enter.

Started reading some Superman stories in Menomonee Falls Gazette, reprinted from the 1940s comic strip.  Rather predictable.

The parents and I went to see Istvan Szabo's Being Julia at Canada Square.  I enjoyed it somewhat more than I expected.  Annette Bening had the perfect role as a theatre diva who doesn't know when to stop being theatrical.  W. Somerset Maugham, who wrote the book, was middlebrow enough, but he did know how to tell a story.

Afterward we ate at the nearby Mandarin buffet restaurant to celebrate my 43rd birthday.  I was careful and managed to avoid overeating!  My fortune cookie said, "Good fortune and a better position."

February 4, 2005

Woke up early and thought about all my anti-antis. (I'm anti-antidrugs, anti-antiradical, anti-antianger, anti-antihiphop, anti-antidivorce...)

Put a new strap on my watch.

Saw the DVD of Disney's Arthurian animated feature The Sword in the Stone (for the second time). It's second-rate Disney, but I have a special fondness for it from seeing it back at the age of 12. (I definitely identified with Wart back then.) I remembered the scene where Merlin set up a magical assembly line to wash all the dishes in the kitchen, giving Wart's betters a fright.  This time I noticed that the villainess Madame Mim was basically a copy of Witch Hazel in a certain Warner Brothers cartoon with Bugs Bunny. [WB cartoons started out imitating Disney, but the worm turned!]

Dinner was the rest of the lasagna.

Nobody came to the Karaoke Meetup! (I was expecting six people.) [Those cold winter evenings will wreck turnout...]

The cottage cheese in the lasagna gave me the runs, because it has lactose. (At least that's my theory of the cause) [For a while, I had to drink lactose-free milk.]

February 3, 2005

Dreamed of digging underground tunnels from our Sackville house to neighbouring houses; floating about ten feet off the ground and having a hard time getting down; the Star Trek crew doing a musical number sort of like in the episode where Kirk and Spock were turned into brainwashed zombie gladiators and made to fight each other.

I also dreamed about the last couple of pages of a comic book with a Lord of the Rings-type good vs. evil story; seeing the denoument after good had won when they all approached a New Year's Eve "moment of destiny" at midnight and successive panels showed closeups of all the different characters--including sad, defeated villains--as the moment approached.

Started distributing the opera leaflets to local libraries.

Dinner was lasagna.

The Geneva Centre group had a karaoke evening at the XO place near Bloor & Christie.  Eleven people came!  It was a bit of a zoo, of course.  Both of the songs Hartley chose turned out to have no musical accompaniment!  After I sang "Let's Dance," someone said it was like David Bowie was in the room.

February 2, 2005

Dreamed of the Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; taking the bus from Sackville to Moncton (something I almost never did); meeting someone who agreed with me that Ronald Reagan was despicable.

Got a special reprint of dozens of Sunday funnies from between 1896 and 1950.

Went shopping.

Dinner was shepherd's pie.

At the drama class, I finally got to do the scene from Moony's Kid Don't Cry, an early one-act play by Tennessee Williams. (Well, the first part anyway.) We had the exercise of pretending we were in some kind of weather.  I pretended to be in a dust storm and none of the others could figure it out.  That's their problem.

Saw the first of another series of Wiseguy episodes on DVD.  This time Ken Wahl is infiltrating a company of international racketeers led by Kevin Spacey.

February 1, 2005

Dreamed of going into a department store with a black girl and getting into a fight with her.

Baked whole wheat bread.

Got a huge book I'd bought on Ebay:  The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.  Looks fun.

Some people making a documentary series about card games for Men TV came to interview me about canasta because that's one of several card-game Meetup groups I'm organizing.  I don't know how to play it, but I gather I was better than nothing. (They couldn't find anyone else in Toronto involved in the game.)

We ate out at the Swiss Chalet.

Went down to the Bickford Centre and saw the last part of The Barber of Seville being rehearsed.  Barbara Thompson was glas to see me.  I bought a ticket to both of Giuseppe's operas and picked up a bunch of leaflets promoting them for later distribution. (Barbara said, unironically, "You're so good!") I recognized several faces from last year but had trouble remembering names.

January 31, 2005

Dreamed that Pete Fletcher (Mary Perkins' photojournalist husband in the comic strip On Stage) was actually called Mike Knipfer but changed his name to advance his career.

Puitak and Gordon came over.  Pui brought a huge lunch she'd cooked for us.  I told her that if we were ever having ten people for dinner, it would be nice to have her cooking for us then.

Dinner was chicken (which I fried).

Started reading a Brick Bradford reprint.  It's an eleven-month story from the 1930s in which Brick and a scientist go inside an atom!

The choir started doing Gounod's "O Divine Redeemer" and Tchaikovsky's "The Crown of Roses."

January 30, 2005

Dreamed of Mother and I spending so long mowing in the back yard of our Sackville house that I missed Monday night choir practice; entering the future; seeing a Sackville neighbour set off fireworks; seeing the Tantramar marshes near Sackville in 360-degree arcs from a high revolving tower; seeing a car bomb explode from that tower and hearing a lot of screaming; the song "When I Was a Lad" from Gilbert & Sullivan's operetta H.M.S. Pinafore.

Saw the Canadian Opera Company production of Wagner's Siegfried at the Hummingbird Centre.  It went on for four hours (excluding the two intermissions), and when the final curtain came down I felt the same as when I've done my last sit-up.

Afterward I ate at McDonald's.

On Six Feet Under Nate found out that his trip to Seattle had left Lisa pregnant; Keith's sister entered drug rehab but got her daughter to take her urine tests for her.

January 29, 2005

Dreamed of President Bush appoint Spencer Herrmann, a youngish judge in a wheelchair, as successor to Chief Justice William Rehnquist; a kite with a broken string flying away in the sky; gathering apples to feed to an animal in a small zoo near the quarry near our Sackville house; seeing an SCTV episode I hadn't seen before.

Baked raisin bread.

Saw the DVD of "The Secret Adversary," an episode of the Agatha Christie series Tommy and Tuppence:  Partners in Crime.  It was so complicated that I was tempted to see it a second time!  It's a bout a secret treaty that an agent passed to a woman on the Lusitania, which the Bolsheviks want to expose to cause anarchy in Britain.

Dinner was roast beef.

Started reading the Tarzan comic strip from the late 1940s in Menomonee Falls Gazette.  These are great stories, going on for as much as seven months!

January 28, 2005

Dreamed of arriving at a prep school in Maine, and feeling I was in the wrong place; wearing the wrong clothes, including pants that had been taken up much too high; a man doing a funny commercial for Japanese markets promoting travel in the West, which had acquired a cult following; the actor in it recalling, "I kept thinking, 'Be serious!  Be serious!'"

Dinner was salmon.

Father and John finished the pipe work.

Saw Oliver Stone's swords and sandals epic Alexander at the Bloor.  They were right, it's a cheesy mess, the kind of movie where Darius rhymes with "try us" and harem dancers have shaved armpits.  Oddly, many of the actors delivered their lines in an Irish brogue, though Angelina Jolie preferred a Sophia Loren impersonation.  They moved the whole early sequence where his father got killed and he took over to the middle of the India campaign! (That's how inept it was.) The 1950s version with Richard Burton is also a turkey--if you get a chance to see it, don't.  Frankly, Stone peaked early with Salvador and Platoon.

January 27, 2005

"You practically do not use semicolons at all.  This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life"--a George Bernard Shaw letter critiquing Lawrence of Arabia's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom manuscript, quoted in Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Dreamed of Mother visiting me in London. (She didn't.)

Father and John seem to have fixed the leak in the bathtub pipes.  They were still working on it late, so I went out and ate KFC by myself to be sure I'd be on time for my 18:30 movie.

Finally got my OHIP health card renewed.  I only had to wait about half an hour. (I brought a couple of bank and credit card statements to provide proof of residence.)

Saw Sergio Leone's gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America for the second time, though it was the first time I saw the director's cut.  I didn't hate the shorter version as much as some people did twenty years ago, but the near-four hour version is a revelation.  Though a lot of it doesn't make sense--the story takes a bizarre turn in the last half hour--its adagio pacing and elegiac tone are brilliantly evocative.  A flawed masterpiece, with another wonderful musical score by Ennio Morricone.

January 26, 2005

Dreamed of the song that goes "All things shall perish under the sky....  Music alone shall live, never to die"; being in a chorus rehearsing the Gilbert & Sullivan opera The Mikado.

Went shopping.

Saw the DVD of Courtship, first of a trilogy based on Horton Foote plays, about a young couple in Texas around the time of World War I. (The other two are On Valentine's Day and 1919.) Sweetly low-key.

Dinner was pork chops.

At the drama class we did improv scenes set in a store.  In one I came in and said to the saleslady, "I want some condoms, sweetie!" Then I asked, "Are you doing anything tonight?"  Last week Roxanne had given us the exercise of wearing something we don't usually wear, so I've been wearing my green cardigan. (I feel like Richie Cunningham!)

January 25, 2005

Dreamed of a TV version of the comic strip On Stage with some of the Sopranos actors in the cast; telling Mother that I wasn't looking forward to the next season of The Sopranos because I'd (actually) heard that the most sympathetic character (Adrianna) gets killed.

Dann found me a proofreading job to apply for!  Dr. Hassan was pleased.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves has lots of history, which is how I like it.

Dinner was McDonald's.

Went to the first meeting of the Common Room.  There were half a dozen others.  Mission:  Possible leader Gail led us in some improv games.  Later we played charades.  Dan and Debbie were also there. [I heard the word "TMI" for the first time.]

Started reading some Ben Casey stories in Menomonee Falls Gazette, based on the medical TV show from the 1960s. It's drawn by Neal Adams, who went on to become a famous comic book artist.  It has a rather humourless hero, but that goes back to the TV show.

January 24, 2005

"I'm saying that people like us [actors] can't be what we really are....  We have to be more thatn we are, or we aren't anything!"--On Stage

Dreamed of a South Park-type comedy with a group of boys making one of them the fall guy for their prank; the fall guy fleeing and sneaking through a hill to another community on the other side; starting university in Halifax and being late registering.

Went to get my health card renewed, but somewhere along the way I lost the document I was supposed to bring.

Dinner was the rest of the churrasco chicken.

Unusually, there were no new pieces at the choir.