September 23, 2007

"All that happens is a little cut, and then everything's peaceful.  Forever"--The Golden Compass

"Is she your girlfriend?"

"She's not my girlfriend.  She's just a 'friend' of mine who happens to be a girl."

--Across the Universe

Saw Julie Taymor's Beatles musical Across the Universe at the Yorkdale.  It was rather predictable, and often downright silly--the Columbia University riot scene was particularly shameless--but overall it was good fun.  I was sitting near some teenage girls who giggled a lot.

Then I went to the first meeting of my new "Over the Hill Philosophy Meetup" for over-40s.  There was a lot of fretting about group dynamics. (I hope they learn to be more casual, because it is a promising group.)

Dinner was roast beef, to which I added several spices.

I mean to start watching the Oz DVD, but it keeps malfunctioning on the upstairs player!

September 22, 2007

"Haven't I seen you somewhere?"

"I've been somewhere!"

--Winchester 73

At the St. Paul's NDP campaign office I sorted the sign slips and volunteer slips according to their poll numbers, which I determined for each one.

Dinner was McDonald's.

Saw the DVD of Winchester 73, the first of the westerns where Anthony Mann directed Jimmy Stewart.  Cleverly plotted and well done.

September 21, 2007

Dreamed of performing with my opera chorus in my hometown of Sackville, N.B.; doing a New York Times crossword puzzle that turned out to be a rebus type where some squares had symbols like & and *.

Went to see my psychiatrist Dr. Hassan.

Dinner was pork chops and the rest of the Chinese food.

September 20, 2007

Dreamed of buying back our old house in Sackville, N.B., from its new owners and the whole family returning there.

Went shopping.

The proportional representation people needed someone to deliver some brochures to a health food place, so I did so.  Except that I brought them to the wrong place.  But that didn't matter because someone else had already delivered them!

Dinner was Chinese food.  My first fortune cookie had no message!  I ate a second one, with the message "Keep both feet on the ground when your friends flatter you."

Baked raisin bread.

September 19, 2007

"Gosh, not only are you vain and egotistical, but you have genuine crudeness"--Sweet and Lowdown

"If George Washington was alive today, he'd drop dead!"--Wait Till Your Father Gets Home

Dreamed of the Fiddler on the Roof song "Sunrise, Sunset"; receiving in the mail several shirts from Margaret, including a couple that were identical to shirts I already had.

Saw the DVD of the first episodes of Wait Till Your Father Gets Home.  It's an attempt at doing Norman Lear-style "relevant" sitcommery in the format of animation (by the notoriously cheesy Hanna-Barbera).  Pretty thin, but it does have a lot of fascinating period references.

Dinner was the rest of the lasagna.

Headache!

Saw the DVD of Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown.  Funny enough in an unpleasant sort of way, but ultimately quite sad.

September 18, 2007

Dreamed of watching an episode of Phil Donahue's talk show in which he interviewed someone who'd been permanently crippled because of someone else's mistake.

Poor Moira has a cold!

Went to the pro-proportional representation headquarters and got a lawn sign.

Dinner was lasagna.

Read an article about Snoopy in American culture in the latest issue of Vanity Fair.

Sawed a low limb off the plum tree. (I got sawdust in my hair.)

At the St. Pauls NDP campaign office, I entered sign slips in the database in the evening.

September 17, 2007

"Conservatism isn't what it used to be"--Counterpunch headline

Dreamed of riding in the top half of a double-decker bus in Toronto(?); noticing I was on the wrong route; noticing someone behind me evaluating my motions to test whether I could be a driver; taking my measurements for a uniform.

Got an Ebay package of Jungle Jim and The Phantom reprints.  I'm getting a big backlog of unread comics again.

Dinner was shepherd's pie with turkey.

At the Coro Verdi we started two new songs: "L'Emigrante" and "Stella Alpina." The basses have no solo-calibre singers this year, which leaves me as their best singer, so I should sit in their middle and take the lead.

The night before I couldn't sleep so I took a sleeping pill and ended up sleeping to noontime!

Then I lay awake till past 04:30. (I didn't dare take sleeping pills on consecutive nights.) I only slept five hours.

September 16, 2007

"I can't sit in here and watch them give him poison!"

"Come somewhere else then."

--The Golden Compass

Dreamed of being in a TV show about glamorous high-schoolers (sort of like The O.C.)

Went to the September Book Club Meetup at the Victory Cafe, where the theme was banned books.  We'd each read Fahrenheit 451, with its book-banning theme, along with one of our own choice that had been censored.  I'd read Of Mice and Men, along with someone else; Karen passed around Little Black Sambo; Howard discussed the Alan Ginsberg poem "Howl." And two others had read the suicide manual Final Exit, which was banned in France, and actually had a connection to Lenny's fate in Of Mice and Men. (I made everyone laugh by pointing out that book's use of the cliche "The skank has to die!") At the end I read out loud Ray Bradbury's four-page story "I See You Never." Next month we'll be doing some horror stories!

Afterward I went to a meeting of proportional representation-supporting volunteers at Michael Vulpe's house and let him talk me into listing the community events and such coming up in the Trinity-Spadina riding.

Donald came over for dinner, which was turkey.

Started rereading The Golden Compass from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.  I'll have just over a fortnight to finish it.

September 15, 2007

"But he's an informer!"

"No, he's an informant"

--Fahrenheit 451

Dreamed of writing a review of the Ealing Studios comedy A Run for Your Money (which I saw the previous week). Maybe I should do that on my blog.

Things were slow at the St. Pauls NDP campaign office, so I went to Indigo Books and bought a paperback set of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. (I also bought a 2008 calendar illustrated with Hiroshige's Edo scenes.) Afterward I tried to visit the HQ of the organization promoting proportional representation to get a lawn sign, but the elevator didn't work and I almost got stuck inside!

Saw Emile Ardolino's Dirty Dancing at the Bloor (for the second time).  It has great dance numbers and a very good '60s music soundtrack--even by '60s music soundtrack standards!--but the first half in particular suffers from a cheesy, predictable story.  It does improve after he and she go all the way, leading to a stunning climax (no pun intended). It's the sort of movie where the teenage heroine is known by the nickname Baby.  You don't suppose she's going to lose her "innocence," do you?

The cool fall weather has arrived.

Dinner was McDonald's.

Went to Suspect Video and rented Francois Truffaut's movie of Fahrenheit 451.  It's a visually stylish but often idiosyncratic adaptation.

September 14, 2007

"And when the war's over, some day, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we'll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again.  But that's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing"--Fahrenheit 451

At the St. Pauls NDP campaign office I typed up a list of about 200 email addresses so they can send out a mass invitation to tomorrow's campaign kickoff.  It turns out that Elections Canada won't let any of the political parties campaign for MMP proportional representation. (Brilliant logic!)

Dinner was salmon.

Finished Fahrenheit 451.  It had a stirring climax.

Baked multigrain bread overnight.

September 13, 2007

"We must all be alike.  Not everyone free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal"--Fahrenheit 451

Father and I went to Zeller's and we bought a new polo shirt to replace the one I tore cutting branches.

Went to the St. Pauls NDP campaign office and met the new guy in charge of volunteer stuff.  He was interested in knowing how the last election would have gone under Mixed-Member-Proportional Representation, so I figured that out later.  I was thinking that we should provide MMP literature, for every NDP and Green campaign office in Toronto.

Dinner was roast chicken.

Spent a long time on the Net reading about velomobiles. (That's a recumbent three-wheeled bike with a chassis.) If I became a millionaire I'd buy one of those! (Yesterday, after a mention in the "How the World Works" column in salon.com , I read all about Meiji-era Japan, the overthrow of the shoguns, the last samurai rebellion, and leaders like Ito Hirobumi on wikipedia.com .)

Put a Julian Heller sign on our front lawn.

September 12, 2007

"Those who don't build must burn.  It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents"--Fahrenheit 451

"The next day the master mind had completely solved the mystery, with the exception of finding the pearls and locating the thief"--Sherlock Jr.

Dreamed of going skating early in the morning in my hometown Sackville, N.B.

Went shopping.

Got a big load of comic-strip reprints from an Ebay seller, mostly Jungle Jim and Comics Revue.

Dinner was spaghetti.

Saw Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (for the third time), on the second half of the Our Hospitality DVD.  What a great motorcycle scene!

September 11, 2007

"The good writers touch life often.  The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her.  The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies"--Fahrenheit 451

Dreamed of playing Scrabble with tiles in different sizes; books among the tiles; watching a Steve Allen TV special featuring his regular performer Louis Nye; being distracted by a comic book I was reading at the same time, and rewinding to see the parts I'd missed.

Went to Dr. Hassan's office and booked my next appointment.  On the way back I noticed that Julian Heller's campaign office (the St. Pauls NDP candidate in Ontario's 2007 provincial election) is up and running.  Time to start my volunteer work for them.

Dinner was scallops.

Saw the DVD of Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality (for the third time). There was a thunderstorm and a brief blackout in the middle of our viewing.

Found the 9/11 poem "Wage Peace" online and emailed it to my book club.

Printed out Norman Rockwell's picture of Rosie the Riveter using the book Mein Kampf as a footstool.  I couldn't help feeling that it has an anti-intellectual overtone relevant to our upcoming Fahrenheit 451 discussion.

September 10, 2007

"Up the Arsenal!"--off-colour line in A Run for Your Money

Reporter Alec Guiness trying to find the miners in a crowd of Welsh rugby fans: "'They'll be wearing leeks.' For the first time in living memory, The Weekly Echo is guilty of understatement"--ibid.

Dreamed of playing Seahaven Towers solitaire; a crossword puzzle quote that started "I asked you, you big baby..."; coming home to a house on a hill and seeing a house on the same slope engulfed in fire.

Saw the DVD of A Run for Your Money (for the second time), an Ealing Studios comedy about two innocent Welsh miners on a day trip to big, bad London.  It reminded me how much I love that city...

Dinner was the rest of the pork.

Went to the season's first Coro Verdi rehearsal.  We did two new folk songs, "Amore Amore" and "Lontan Lontan." (The Columbus Centre rotunda now displays a bust of the Dalai Lama.) I heard that the Toronto City Opera is doing La Boheme instead of Tales of Hoffmann, so I don't think I'll participate this year.

September 9, 2007

 

Saw the double-DVD set of a 1966 Salzburg Festival production of The Marriage of Figaro, conducted by Karl Boehm.

Dinner was the rest of the fettucine.

Headache.

September 8, 2007

"You talk like a book!"--Don Giovanni

"Being faithful to one [woman] would be too cruel to the others!"--ibid.

Moira and I saw the DVD of a Vienna State Opera production of Mozart's Don Giovanni, conducted by Riccardo Muti.  She thought the direction was off, but I didn't really have any opinion.

Dinner was McDonald's.

Went to the Karaoke Meetup at the Fox & Fiddle in Leaside.  I sang Joe Jackson's "Steppin' Out," "I Want a New Drug" and the Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House." This time I ended up staying until the whole thing was over! (I had to do that once in my life.) Fortunately, William gave me a ride home.  As it is, I didn't get home till almost 03:00!

September 7, 2007

Dreamed of climbing a series of ladders to a very high position; climbing back down until I reached a point where the ladder had fallen away; climbing down further on a rope until I reached the end of it, with a lethal distance remaining; letting go; the ladder having been removed as a plot to sell tabloid magazines.

Finally got to the bank and cashed a couple of interest cheques. (I would have done it a week ago, but there was a huge queue just before the Labour Day weekend.)

Got an Ebay package of about sixty children's books.  They cost about a dollar apiece, so we may be able to resell them at a profit.  One of them was a book of ten Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, of which I figured out six!

Dinner was roast pork.

Father and I sawed off another big limb from the plum tree.

September 6, 2007

"It's fine work.  Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes then burn the ashes.  That's our official slogan"--Fahrenheit 451

Dreamed of noticing teenage gang warfare with guns; climbing down a cliff on a rope to conduct scientific research on the beach below making a decision to remember some of my dreams and write them down; making a decision to wake up.

Went shopping.

Dinner was fettucine alfredo (which I cooked).

Went to the Architecture for Humanity Meetup at Metro Hall.  When we introduced ourselves at the beginning, I said, "I'm James Matthews.  I'm a dilettante."

Started reading Fahrenheit 451.  It reads like a satire of postwar America's obsessions (e.g. speed over contemplation).

September 5, 2007

Went to the Lillian Smith library near Bathurst & College and picked up Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. (I also bought The Guardian Weekly for Moira at the magazine store near Yonge & St. Clair.)

Dinner was halibut.

Nobody showed up for my Non-Fiction Meetup to discuss Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror.  From now on I won't have this event in the same months as Karen has a series books event. (I'd only got two "maybe" RSVPs.)

Saw the DVD of Lewis Milestone's movie of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.  It was pretty faithful to the book, though of course they diluted the wife's skankiness (and gave her a name!). Lon Chaney Jr. was pretty cool, but Burgess Meredith was the sort of actor who tended to play Burgess Meredith.  Nice score by Aaron Copland.

Baked rye bread. (It's been two weeks since I baked anything.)

September 4, 2007

"Tell me, Captain McTaggart, have you lost your mind, or do you just think you've caused me to lose mine?"--The Maggie

The parents and I went out to Orchard Home Farm to pick Gravenstein apples.  We took Puitak and Gordon along, and they enjoyed it.  All but one of the Gravenstein trees had been picked through and most of the big ones were gone, but we got quite a few.  We also got some nice big Macintoshes, which were just coming ripe.

Dinner was KFC.

Moira was pleased to find a place in Toronto that sells the German magazine Der Spiegel. (I'd mentioned to her a place near Bloor and Bathurst, and they had it there.)

Saw the DVD of Alexander Mackendrick's The Maggie.  It's an Ealing Studios comedy about a brash American tycoon (British movies in the '50s often had brash American characters) who carelessly ships some valuable cargo on a notorious "puffer" (Scottish coastal tramp steamer). It had some of the same whimsical charm as the same director's Whiskey Galore.

September 3, 2007

Walked in the Labour Day parade!  I was one of the people promoting MMP there.  I started near the front, then let everyone gradually overtake me as I approached other walkers with my info. (Many of them had already been approached by the others, which is a good sign.) In the end, I managed to see the participants at the very rear, who were extremist parties.  I spent over three hours on my feet!

That afternoon Father and I cut up most of the branches we'd taken off the trees, and ended up with three big bags ready to be picked up tomorrow.  There's one big limb on the plum tree which we'll probably saw off sometime.

Dinner was pork chops.

Moira came back from Kingston.

You can find out anything on the internet!  There's this Sousa march tune I knew from childhood, except I didn't know it's title.  Using MIDIs, I found out it's "The Thunderer"!  I also found out that Sousa was Portuguese-American. (For some reason, I'd imagined him as Sicilian--must have been confusing him with Frank Capra...)

September 2, 2007

Had that dream again where the parents and I are staying in my hometown of Sackville, NB, and I suggest it's time to return to Toronto; telling them that I've reached a dead end with my Ph.D. thesis and I'll have to give it up.

Went to a Snail Pace Walking Meetup that was supposed to start near the Old Mill in Etobicoke.  But William (whom I know from the Out of the Mainstream Singles Meetup) and I couldn't find the organizer.  We walked north along the Humber River anyway.

Reread the paperback reprint Mad in Orbit (which I read as a kid). Mad magazine in its early years was full of smart satire, which gets even better with age.

Bought some Jungle Jim reprints and Comics Revue issues on Ebay. (It's been a while since I bought much.)

I also read some of another reprint The Mad Sampler.

September 1, 2007

Yesterday Father and I used the big ladder to clip off a lot of dead and ingrown branches from the trees in our yard.  Hope I didn't go too far with the plum tree!

I'm reading John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men for the Book Club Meetup.  Very Sad.

My Metropass failed to arrive again this month, so I bought one direct at the Christie station. (I'll arrange the reimbursement later.)

Went to Indigo Books and used my Irewards coupon to buy the last Harry Potter book, Frank McCourt's Teacher Man, and my latest diary.  Then I went to the World's Biggest Bookstore to buy Stephen Fry's poetry book The Ode Less Travelled. (Ouch!) and the Canadian history magazine The Beaver with its list of the worst Canadians. (I would have named Montreal-born A.M. Rosenthal, who ruined The New York Times.)

Went to an Acting Meetup at the Duke of Kent.  Seven of us came, but the organizer didn't show!