Monday, February 29, 2016

A concert

When I was thirteen, I went to a Bachmann-Turner Overdrive concert at the C.N.E.  This was the time of their mega-album Not Fragile.  Real truck music!  At one point people in the audience started lighting matches and they had to ask them to put them out. (I noticed there was a fire truck stationed nearby.)

But I don't go to rock concerts in general.  I did attend a Sheena Easton concert at Massey Hall when I was twenty.  She told the audience of seeing a Coronation Street episode on Canadian TV that was so old one of its characters was long dead. (I heard that she invested in California real estate and got really rich.)

When I lived in London, I saw a couple of classical music concerts when my sister Moira visited me. (One of them featured Canadian pianist Louis Lortie.) I also saw a Proms concert at the Albert Hall--not the last night--where they did Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra and a Shostakovich viola concerto.  And I saw the classic silent movie Sunrise at the Royal Festival Hall with a Colin Davis score played by a live orchestra!  That's the only thing that beats a live piano accompaniment.

I've seen a couple of concerts at Roy Thomson Hall.  At one they did Carl Orff's neoclassical Carmina Burana.  And at another they showed classic Warner Brothers cartoons with a live orchestra playing the musical scores!

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Sewing

I've never learned to sew. (Knitting might be fun.) I do know a Chinese seamstress who used to take English lessons from my sister Moira.  Her husband doesn't speak Chinese and her English still isn't very good, but they seem to get along.

I don't know a lot of tailors.  I remember Motl the mousy tailor in the musical Fiddler on the Roof.  I once saw the movie with an outdoor audience in the park next to Roy Thompson Hall.  When Motl was getting up the nerve to tell Tevye that he loved his daughter, someone in the audience yelled, "You can do it, Motl!" A year ago, when people were wondering whether Bernie Sanders would run for president, I kept posting online, "You can do it, Bernie!" I'm glad he listened to me.

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Snakes

In the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man, there's a scene where Nick Nolte put a snake in his son's crib, so he wouldn't be afraid of snakes when he was older. (The boy's mother had a fit.) I can imagine Steve Irwin doing that with his kids.

Sometimes I wish someone had put a snake in my crib.  It isn't that I'm particularly afraid of snakes.  It's that my parents had a tendency to keep me away from anything scary.  In hindsight, I with they'd encouraged me to deal with my fears more.  Oh well, you can choose your friends but you can't choose your parents.

In India some villages keep a pet cobra!  He may bite people occasionally, but mostly he just eats rats and keeps that population down.  I read that when a snake charmer draws out the snake, it isn't the music but the way he wiggles his instrument!

Some years back I saw the movie The Snake Pit, with Olivia De Havilland as an inmate in a mental institution.  Movies about mental illness inevitably simplify things for dramatic purpose.  What I remember was a shrink saying that one sign that Olivia was being cured was that she was becoming possessive with her property.

In the movie You Can't Cheat an Honest Man there's a scene where W.C. Fields attended a high-class soiree and kept talking about snakes ("That reminds me of an experience I had with a rattlesnake..."), causing the delicate hostess to scream and faint!

Monday, February 15, 2016

Civil wars

I've always been interested in the American Civil War.  When I was little, we had a book in the How and Why series devoted to the Civil War.  At an early age I decided that the Confederacy was evil because they wanted to preserve slavery.  When I got older I decided that was too simplistic a view, but in recent years I've been returning to my original stance.

There have been a lot of good movies involving the Civil War. (Two of the more recent ones are Glory and Ride With the Devil.) But good movies about the American Revolutionary War have been fewer.  I really loved Ken Burns' PBS Civil War documentary, which I've seen many times without it getting stale.  The early photographs of the time are really illuminating, partly because people hadn't learned to "pose" for the camera.  And the contemporary music works well. (Burns also made a wonderful PBS special of people singing Civil War songs.)

In the United States they have a lot of Civil War re-enactments. (The Southern re-enactors outnumber the Northern ones two to one, while the actual war was the other way around!) People re-enact a lot of different periods.  I wonder if they do it here in Toronto?  I might be interested in getting into it.

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Ugliness

So you think the octopus is ugly.
Well, here's something for you:
It just so happens that the octopus
May think you're ugly too!
--Oscar the Grouch

I told my psychiatrist once that I fantasized about having a blind girlfriend.  He suggested that meant that I see myself as ugly.  I hadn't thought of it that way!  Maybe it's more that someone who can't see me can't judge me.

I'm interested in the grotesque style.  That means ugly in a grandiose sort of way.  My singing teacher Giuseppe told me once that he loves Popeye cartoon but hates The Simpsons, which he considers "grotesque." I said, "Well, Popeye's a bit grotesque too," and he said, "That's different.  Popeye is a caricature!" I suppose it depends on your point of view.  Like when I was little, we had a Homemaker's Encyclopedia with the volume "Beauty and Personal Charm." The cover of that volume showed a ca. 1950 model in a fancy Christian Dior-type dress.  At my early age, she struck me as grotesque!

In the movie Chinatown, there's a line about how ugly buildings get respectable with time.  When they first built the Eiffel Tower some Parisians considered it an eyesore, yet now it's the city's emblem.  Like Prince Charles, I guess I have old-fashioned architectural tastes.  The Robarts Library looks pretty ugly to me. (It reminds me of the sort of place that could be the setting for those British puppet shows like Thunderbirds or Captain Scarlet.) But maybe it'll stand the test of time.  I've read that it's an example of the "brutalist" school of architecture.

Monday, February 8, 2016

School field trips

When I grew up in Sackville, N.B., one of the places they took us to for field trips was the Enterprise Foundry, where they built stoves and stuff.  My sister Moira's class was on such a trip and when they encouraged the kids to ask questions she asked, "How much money do you make?"

Moira's embarrassed that she ever asked such a stupid question, but it was better than the question I asked when my class visited!  At home we had a Westinghouse stove, so I asked, "Do you make Westinghouse stoves?" The guy indignantly answered that they only made Enterprise stoves, adding, "Some of the people here have never seen a Westinghouse stove!" Another kid asked, "What's the most serious type of accident?" I was really jealous of him.

On one occasion my class took a bus to Springhill, N.S., to visit the Miner's Museum there.  They had a small safe pit that you could walk into and dig a little coal, to imagine what mining is like.  Our guide was one of the survivors of the 1950s disasters.  To show what it was like he turned out the lights for a moment. He asked if this was OK with us, and the most vocal kids said yes.  But I wasn't ready for it and freaked out.  On the way back one kid made fun of me for this.

I could never work in a mine.

Monday, February 1, 2016

Insomnia

I used to have a big problem with insomnia. (It hasn't been so bad lately.) I'm a rather light sleeper and sensitive to outside noises.  On New Year's Eve I'm in bed before midnight, but the noise of fireworks always wakes me up.  I used to be sensitive to light too, but living in the city with all the street lights has changed me.  Yet the others in my family are pretty heavy sleepers.

Whenever I fly on a plane, especially an overnight flight, I try to get some sleep.  But it's easier said than done.  There's just enough background noise to distract me, and it's hard for someone like me to loosen up in flight.

On the other hand, you can get sleepy at the wrong time.  The last time I was in London, I saw Roger Rees' one-man show about acting Shakespeare.  I'm afraid I nodded off during the show, and I sure hope Rees didn't notice! (I wasn't so far from the front row, so he could have.)

That reminds me that the other day, in one of my Facebook groups, someone challenged us to complete the sentence, "The sex was great until..." I posted, "...until she yawned."