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I'd been having a bit of back and forth with Scott, as I wanted to bundle the Byas and Clark sets to save (slightly) on postage up to Canada. It's been a while since I ordered with Mosaic (probably the Savory Collection was the last one). Anyway, I pulled the trigger this morning. 😊 If I get dinged with a huge customs charge 🤕, this might be the last time. We'll see... 🤞

Agreed. It is a stupid trend that I don't feel like supporting or even giving in to...

Glad to hear you got it back at least once more and backed up your files. I had a few scares with my work laptop. It finally gave up the ghost, but I had backed up the download folder (which doesn't get backed up on company servers) the day before, whereas the main documents folder is backed up each evening into the cloud. I'm generally ok with backing up files on my home computer. I try to make sure everything is on two different external hard drives, but I am not perfect about it. I also don't store the 2nd hard drive in a different location, which I should definitely start doing.

Don Byron is up in Toronto this week at The Rex, sitting in with a group fronted by Michael Occhipinti on guitar. I'm not really sure what to expect. I saw Byron years and years ago at the Village Vanguard with his own group, but I'm not expecting it to be at all the same. Anyway, I am definitely going on Thurs., and if I am really into it, I may come back on Sat.

Halfway through Mary McCarthy's The Group. Will be Pym's Excellent Women after that.

Just back from Exotica at TIFF Lightbox. This was a special screening because Atom Egoyan was in attendance and told some quite interesting stories about shooting this film and some of his other work. Very glad I made it. I gather there is a new edition of this out from Criterion. https://www.criterion.com/films/29270-exotica

I came fairly close to putting in an order on Amazon (where it is back-ordered) but I just have so many classical box sets that I can't sell back to any music stores in Toronto that it just isn't worth it. It looks like a solid majority of the recordings are on streaming sites, so I think I'll just satisfy the itch that way.

I liked The Holdovers quite a bit, though it did kind of seem like an alt. universe version of The Breakfast Club where the Judd Nelson character bonds with the teacher. 😋

I really thought I was going tonight, but some things came up. Hopefully on Wed.

Toronto's ARC Ensemble specializes in composers who went into exile (mostly due to WWII) and are largely or indeed completely unknown. They very recently started performing live again. https://culture.pl/en/event/torontos-arc-ensemble-revives-music-in-exile In addition to the concerts, they have put out quite a few CDs in this series: https://www.rcmusic.com/performance/arc-ensemble/arc-ensemble-recordings (The Weinberg, while interesting, isn't technically part of the Music in Exile series...) I was able to catch them recently playing a concert dedicated to Frederick Block, who fled Germany but never recovered psychologically from being in exile. There is a hour-long radio program discussing Block here: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/arc-ensemble-perform-exiled-composer-music-1.7060775 I believe the entire concert is supposed to be broadcast at some point without the surrounding commentary, as interesting as it is. And they will be releasing a Block CD. I can't make ARC Ensemble's next concert due to conflicts, but I'll see what they get up to in the future.

For The Holdovers? I did notice that Fallen Leaves uses a couple of very short clips from Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die.

Just saw Aki Kaurismäki's Fallen Leaves. On the whole I liked it, aside from the playing of alcoholism for laughs in a certain sense, plus the main character just deciding to stop drinking overnight and succeeding. I suppose this may happen in a very, very few cases, but this part of the plot didn't ring true for other reasons. I am likely to try to catch The Holdovers tomorrow. This is basically gone from the main theatres but is kicking around a few second-run theatres in Toronto.

Had to stay up past my bedtime, but I finished Percival Everett's Erasure just before we went to see American Fiction, which is based upon it.

Agreed. I was only a marginal basketball fan back then, and now I have zero interest in the games. Almost no defense played and chucking up 3s all the time. No thanks.

Visages baroques by Raphaël Feuillâtre

Just wrapping up Conrad's Under Western Eyes. I'm finding the ending very disappointing for various reasons. I also don't like how the sections flip between third-person omniscient narrator and then a first person narrator observing the action. I don't think this works at all. It looks like the next book up after that is William Maxwell's The Chateau.

I just heard about American Fiction. It sounds pretty intriguing (about a Black English professor who decides to increase his book sales by writing a novel as if he were a homeboy). It should open in Toronto next Thurs., and I'll see about checking it out soon after that.

Just back from The Boy and The Heron. Parts were really interesting. Someone in the audience at the end was loudly declaring that the internal logic and storytelling made no sense and she was deeply disappointed. I wasn't that dismayed, but it's not his best by far. My favorite is Howl's Moving Castle, though even that has a couple of weird gaps, papered over by "dream logic." I will say that I thought the book, How Do You Live?, would be far more prominent, based on some early discussions about the movie, but it is really not much more than a footnote.

Just back from seeing Terence Blanchard's E-Collective with Turtle Island Quartet. I know Blanchard is an artist in residence with the DSO, and I caught one or two of his shows with them as livestreams. Those concerts were pretty short, so I wasn't entirely sure what we would get tonight, but it was a full concert (two hours!). I'd describe it as sounding a lot like a live version of Panthalassa with string accompaniment. They performed many of the tracks off their recent BN album Absence. The Turtle Island Quartet had one tune all to themselves -- The Second Wave -- while the band rested. Overall, a very interesting concert.

Keep putting out music until he goes broke?

Tokyo Godfathers - what a wild ride!

The latest film from Studio Ghibli, The Boy and the Heron, comes out later this week. I'll probably try to catch it on Sunday, but if not, then the following week.

I heard this groaner the other day: Why are fire engines red? Because they are always rushin'.

My son wasn't too bad a sleeper when a baby, but he had the night terrors for probably close to six months, maybe even closer to a year when he was 3 or 4. I usually had to lie on the floor near his bed -- for hours -- in order to get him calm enough to get back to sleep. I don't miss those days...

I saw the Cowboy Junkies last night at the Danforth Music Hall. Last night of the tour, but they'll be back in the road in Feb. This was a rescheduled show, as 3 of the band members came down with COVID in Oct. Glad that they seemed back in good form. Not a huge, huge fan, but they are more or less a local group, and I thought I should check them out. I actually saw them in 1989 or 1990 when they were just coming up the charts and they just tore it up back then. They generally are a bit more raucous live than on their albums... I think I saw Scofield is coming back to Toronto soon, but I was pretty underwhelmed the last time I saw him, so I will likely pass. Pat LaBarbera has been coming through The Rex fairly regularly lately. Neil Swainson is supposed to be in the group in mid-Dec., and I'll make an effort to get out to see them at least once.