I've accumulated a list of things I wanted to review, especially as we have some kind of review-quest happening, but I can't find the motivation. Busy with work, busy with my almost-no-budget film. Our actor in a wheelchair appears in one scene; the business that offered their premises was not wheelchair accessible. We got someone to make a ramp for them, so now they are. This makes us happy.
So yeah...
Movies:
The Artist: Hollywood writes another love letter to itself. It's well acted and entertaining, and it took coglioni to make a black-and-white and essentially silent movie in 2012 and expect success. I don't know about that Best Picture Oscar, but I don't take the Oscars seriously.
100 Rifles: This one was a big deal when I was a kid, because we heard it had a nude Rachel Welch and stuff. Much later, I learned it held a position as one of the first first Hollywood Westerns to take a pro-Native angle and one of the first mainstream films to feature interracial sex. I finally saw it, and may review it for one reason: it has the most conflicted racial subtexts imaginable.
Books:
Room by Emma Donoghue (minor spoilers): The book deserves a review, and I may write it one day. The first half may be slow, but it fleshes out the characters and their world, and has a creeping, pervasive suspense mainstream thriller and horror writers should envy. The second half plays like a real-world Stranger in a Strange Land.
The author lives nearby. We've never met.
Summer of Night by Dan Simmons: A younger Simmons serves up his own (King-approved) version of Stephen King's It, with implausibly competent heroic kids in the early 1960s, an eldritch Lovecrafted horror in a small town, an out-of-place creepy underage sex scene, and a tortuous historical backstory. It starts out promising to be an improved version of that mix; it really doesn't play out that way.
Magazine:
On Spec: My sale last year netted me some money and a subscription, so I've been reading it regularly, instead of sporadically. I'm an issue behind. The stories have been well-crafted, and reflect the diversity in SF and fantasy of which the mundane audience remains largely unaware.
TV:
The Walking Dead: I've been reviewing the eps elsewhere. I might do an overview of seasons one and two, if no one beats me to it.
The second half of Season Two is better than the first half, but not as good as Season One.
Theatre:
Beard by Jason Rip: This is Rip's revival, slightly revised, of his play about Roy McDonald. We thoroughly enjoyed it. As a bonus, Roy was in the house that night, and they brought him up on stage to perform the ending alongside the actor playing him. Dueling McDonalds. I forgot to ask him when the long braided tail of his beard broke off; that important information should appear in my write-up.
Tempting Providence by Robert Chafe: For Canada Day, maybe? It's the play about Myra Bennett (née Grimsley) aka "Nurse," the British nurse who settled in rural Newfoundland in 1921 and became a local legend, bringing medical care off the beaten track, delivering babies, sewing a foot back on, and (as a bonus) living to 100. It's brilliantly-staged and well-acted, a little slow of pace in places, often witty, but I'd probably just do a write-up about her.
We ran into an old friend afterwards, who was in town for that night only.
Comics:
The current run on Action: they've rebooted Superman again, but they're handling his early years and career in a somewhat novel fashion. I don't like the new outfit much, though they've left the door open to bring the old one back into continuity-- a word which has little meaning in any case, in American comics.
JLA: New Frontier: Almost inspirational, a postcard to the postwar dreams of the world that birthed me, as much as a superhero story.
Me:
Uh, I'm okay.
Twenty years ago, I finished work in August and had new prospects in September. I had recently met a young woman and we'd started dating. I'd planned a trip, first to my home town, and then across Canada to the east coast.
I stayed with Kevin in Montreal (we lost contact, years ago), a couple I knew from university in Quebec City (very sporadic contact anymore), an ex and her husband in Halifax (I think we talked about five years ago), and Heather in Ottawa (I occasionally hear about her life from mutual friends), on the way back. I slept in an off-season dorm in Fredericton, a B&B near Ottawa (en route), and cheap motel near the Quebec-Ontario border.
I bought my new girlfriend a silk scarf that complemented her eyes. By request, I gathered sea shells from the Atlantic for her mother. I kept one myself from the Bay of Fundy, marked like hieroglyphics. As someone else wrote at this site, I could whisper to myself "You are as free now as you ever have been or ever will be." I was well into my twenties, but in some respects, my adult life began in earnest that year.
The job stuck. I broke up with that beautiful young woman a year later and spent too much time wishing I could have made it work. I met my wife awhile later at one of those jonbar points that mark life. We traveled in different circles then, and our personal and family histories couldn't be more different. Change anything about that afternoon, and we likely wouldn't even know each other in 2012.
We live in a white house in a very friendly neighbourhood, close to downtown. A street cat moved in a few years ago. The kid across the street and his buddies named her Slim, and that stuck.
I had a dream, a few nights ago.
No, not the one where I cross impossible and unnecessary bridges, presumably designed by M.C. Escher, to visit a town on Lake Huron, only to discover myself trailing a bad stereotype of a Cold War Russian Villain in some version of the forthcoming Avengers movie. Not the one where a basketball player wants to pretend he's interviewing me in front of a room full of teenagers trying to write while Internet Memes blare on an outsized screen.
In this one, I'm either leaving or returning from that road trip, twenty years in the past. A tired trucker veers off-course and I see a flock of pterosaurs and darkness and light. Voices whisper in a white house.
I wake up in a hospital room. The woman I dated then, and her mom and dad are in the room. I've been in a coma for a day or so. My parents arrive soon after, having driven their way all day. But I also see my future wife, whom I did not know then, and my friend Singularity Girl, who would have been a child in another country. It's as though I'm watching the quantum probabilities collapse into the life I've led.
I'm making a nearly-no-budget film, trying to sell a novel, and resigning from the editorial staff of a site that I don't visit as often as I once did, but which remains a pretty nifty online magazine.
But time moves along, the probabilities collapse, and we're never what we once were.
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