Hello. I’m a yak
Like most of us, the denizens of the High Park zoo seemed impatient for the arrival of spring last weekend.
Winter up on high
The unwelcome howl
Of February’s wind
Amplified by the city’s
Towering skyline
The skin reels
Tugs the blankets tight
The chill wind is outside
Its harsh sound penetrates within
The brain moderates
And forces the body
Out of its nocturnal cocoon
To be exposed
The whipped wind plays tricks
On our fearful senses
It’s cold on the ground
But sounds colder it’s the sky
John Barry footnote
When John Barry died last week, most media reports called him a “Bond composer”, or claimed that he was best known for the work he did on numerous James Bond films. I suppose this is fair – he wrote music for 12 Bond films, after all, although the authorship of the actual “Bond theme” remains murky.
I had always assumed that he was best known for writing the music for “Out of Africa” – the orchestral score has remained a radio staple, while memories of the movie seem to be fading away. He was also well known for the “Born Free” and “Dances with Wolves” scores, with the Bond stuff more of a career footnote than anything else (for the record, I think “You Only Live Twice” has the best score of all the Bond films).
But a better example of a career footnote would be his score for “The Black Hole” – what I would argue is the greatest music score ever written for a terrible movie. I’m not sure what the competition is – but it is a really great score, worthy of a far better movie. In the age of YouTube, it has become ubiquitous around the web, with commenters inevitably asking “Where does that come from?”
And course, he wrote a bunch of other stuff as well – “Midnight Cowboy”, “Body Heat”, “Zulu”, etc. But in all the various obits I read, there was no mention at all of “The Black Hole” – fortunately, YouTubers didn’t forget it:
Ducks on the Don
Let’s get on with spring already
The period between the winter meetings and the Hall of Fame announcement is my least favourite part of the baseball calendar. The excitement of the winter meetings gradually fades, and then devolves into parody (Kevin Gregg will decide this week which team he will sign with – can you stand the suspense?); and then comes the Hall of Fame debate, a nasty, unpleasant affair in which argument devolves into rants and personal attacks.
Best thing to do is try to ignore it; this time of year offers plenty of other distractions anyways. If you’re a baseball fan and can’t help yourself, all you can hope for is a warm fuzzy at the end of the process. Last year, myself and I think a lot of other fans were left cold when only one player was inducted and two just missed; this year, those two players (Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven) were inducted, while another highly-deserving player (Barry Larkin) took a big jump, and seems like an excellent bet to be inducted next year.
(The warm & fuzzy feeling was completed when another personal favourite, Tim Raines, got a nice boost as well. Long, long way to go, but heading in the right direction)
So I will stick to the positive for one day: in my 35 years as a sports fan living in Toronto, Roberto Alomar is the single most important athlete this city has had, the best player on a team that won back-to-back championships, a feat that looks even more stunning in retrospect. Right now, almost everything about the local pro sports scene is bad; the hockey team is gawdawful bad, the basketball team is horrible, the football and soccer teams are also bad… the Blue Jays are the only team generating any buzz at all right now, and although I like their future I don’t think they will compete for a playoff spot in 2011.
So we’ll just have to enjoy the moment (and it’s a nice touch that the architect of those teams, Pat Gillick, is being inducted as well). And as for Bert Blyleven, here’s a video of him getting his head shaved:
Forbidden Planet
It’s been a few years since I last watched Forbidden Planet, but I’m feeling the urge to check it out again because the two stars, the impossibly young-and-beautiful Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis, have died within days of each other.
This is my second-favourite sci-fi film of the 1950′s, after the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers; based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, it basically serves as the template for every episode of Star Trek ever made (it also was the debut of Robby the Robot, who was recycled many times over, most notably in Lost in Space).
I can’t remember all the similarities – the horny young dashing captain, phasers, away-teams, red-shirts, etc. – I’ll have to watch it again. But they’re just trivia and minutiae; at its heart are the impossibly young-and-beautiful lovers, and old Walter Pidgeon, both mad-and-bad but sympathetic nonetheless.
On and around the waterfront
It’s now the end of September in Toronto, and I’ve been a stranger to the waterfront this year. Partly because I’m not very adventurous, partly because it’s been stinking hot, and partly because the waterfront has always been a good place to make a stranger of.
Put it was a pleasant Sunday, stuff is being built or has been built, and I’ve seen little of it, so I made a trip to the foot of Spadina to see the Wavedeck that had been built there (I traveled light, carrying only my Droid phone, so the pictures are what they are).
A familiar view from the foot of lower Spadina Avenue.
A not-so-familiar view: The Spadina Wavedeck.
The Wavedecks at Rees and (especially) Simcoe are more eye-catching, the photos not so much (I still have a bad habit of coverage the shutter on my Droid with my finger, and I missed a kid doing some tricks with his bike. Anyways, this video has some impressive before-and-after views)
Willow trees at HTO Park.
Birds.
Unfortunately, once you hit Ferry Docks, it’s back onto the sidewalk, and such beautiful landmarks as Captain John’s. Beyond that the lake shore is extraordinarily forbidding to pedestrians. But there’s stuff being built, including the newly-opened Sherbourne Common, a park/storm water treatment facility.
At the moment, the fountains at Sherbourne Common are making little puddles on the ground. But you really can walk right up to lake shore.
The other part of Sherbourne Common, still a work in progress.
The City, and people who use the waterfront, still have some details to work out.
The Port Lands are still not a place I care to visit often; they’re pretty bleak, unless you’re in to Go-Karts or year-round driving ranges. But there is an actual beach at the end of the road.
A view from the Ship Channel Bridge. Or Cherry Street Bridge, I can't remember which one.
Cherry Beach on a warm Sunday afternoon in September... and a whole lot of nobody there.
Walking from Spadina to Cherry Beach also reminded me that I’m terribly out of shape and my feet hurt, so that was that. Looking at a map, it’s amazing how little of the waterfront I’ve seen; Toronto is a big city, and when you stick to your own little neighbourhood it’s easy to forget how much more there is out there.
(case in point: like many commenters – and non-drivers – on this post, I’ve NEVER seen the Cube House, and didn’t even know it was there. Though at one point yesterday I was just a couple of blocks from it.)
Moon + Jupiter + Toronto sky
Living in downtown Toronto, I can’t see much of the night sky… but Wednesday night, this pair managed to overpower the light pollution.
Recently read – The Savage Detectives
The Savage Detectives is a book written by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, published in 1998, written in Spanish and translated into English by Natasha Wimmer.
Bolaño, as you may, has rocketed into stardom in the past few years with the publication of two major novels and some short story collections. He’s also very dead, having passed away from liver disease in 2003. He’s also something of a mystery, having spent 30 years as a nomadic minor poet – finding success writing prose late in life, then dying just before he was discovered by the English-speaking world.
His death has perhaps helped his ascent to literary fame… but in any case, I’m happy to say I loved reading The Savage Detectives, and that it appears that Bolaño’s soaring reputation is justified. The book is partly autobiographical (one of the lead character’s name is “Arturo Belano”) but the story of the two nomadic young poets is not told by themselves, but by dozens of different characters whom they encounter over the years.
The range of different voices and personalities is quite astonishing, and as the book moves along it continues to introduce new and engaging characters. Many of them are quite eccentric or even deranged, and while it’s normally true that eccentric people aren’t nearly as interesting as they think they are, there’s enough of a solid grounding on the earth and in human nature to keep up interest.
My favourite voices are Joaquín Font, the father/architect/patron of young poets who starts out somewhat disturbed and ends up in an insane asylum, though it’s never clear how crazy he actually is; Amadeo Salvatierra, an aging poet who seems thrilled that two boys would seek him out to ask questions about his past, enough so that he breaks out a bottle of irreplaceable liquor; Heimito Künst, one of the more far-out voices in the book, but also strangely believable and thus scary; and of course Auxilio Lacouture, the poetess who spends two weeks alone in a university bathroom after the school is raided by the army.
Passages
“And I can’t say that Álamo was much of a critic either, even though he talked a lot about criticism. Really I think he just talked for the sake of talking. He knew what periphrasis was. Not very well, but he knew. But he didn’t know what pentapody was (a line of five feet in classical meter, as everybody knows), and he didn’t know what a nicharchean was either (a line something like the phalaecean), or what a tetrastich was (a four-line stanza). How do I know he didn’t know? Because on the first day of the workshop, I made the mistake of asking. I have no idea what I was thinking. The only Mexican poet who knows things like that by heart is Octavio Paz (our great enemy), the others are clueless, or at least that was what Ulises Lima told me minutes after I joined the visceral realists and they embraced me as one of their own.”
“By the feel of her breath I realized that I was only fractions of an inch from María’s face. Her fingers ran over my face, from my chin to my eyes, closing my eyes as if inviting me to sleep; her hand, a bony hand, unzipped my pants and felt for my cock. Why I don’ t know, maybe because I was so nervous, but I said I wasn’t sleepy. I know, said María, me neither. Then everything turned into a succession of concrete acts and proper nouns and verbs, or pages from an anatomy manual scattered like flower petals, chaotically linked.”
“And then I hit 1968. Or 1968 hit me. Now I can say that I felt it coming, that I smelled it in bars, in February or March of ’68 but before ’68 really became ’68. Oh, it makes me laugh to remember it. It makes me want to cry! Am I crying? I saw everything and at the same time I saw nothing. I was at the faculty when the army violated the university’s autonomy and came on campus to arrest or kill everybody. No. There weren’t many deaths at the university. That was Tlatelolco. May the name be forever etched on our memory!”
“But mostly I looked out the window. The gray sky. And sometimes I looked toward Israel. One night, as I was drawing in my notebook, my good friend Ulises asked me: what were you doing in Israel, Heimito? I told him. Searching, searching. The word searching alongside the house and the elephant that I had drawn. And what were you doing, my good friend Ulises? Nothing, he said.”
“A few days later, my daughter came to see me. Did you hear about the earthquake? she asked. Of course I did, I said. Have many people died? No, not many, said my daughter, but enough. Have many of our friends died? None, as far as I know, said my daughter. The few friends we have left don’t need the help of any Mexican earthquake to die, I said. Sometimes I think you aren’t crazy, said my daughter. I’m not crazy, I said, just confused. But you’ve been confused for a long time, said my daughter. Time is an illusion, I said, and I thought about people I hadn’t seen for a long time and even people I’d never seen. I’d get you out of here if I could, said my daughter. There’s no rush, I said, and I thought about the earthquakes of Mexico marching towards us out of the past, trudging on beggars’ feet, straight toward eternity or Mexican nothingness. If it were up to me, I’d get you out of here today, said my daughter. Don’t worry, I said, you must have problems enough of your own. My daughter just looked at me and didn’t say anything.”
“In a dream, said the boy, I couldn’t have been more than seven, and I had a fever. Cesárea Tinajero’s poem? Had he seen it when he was seven years old? And did he understand it? Did he know what it meant? Because it had to mean something, didn’t it? And the boys looked at me and said no, Amadeo, a poem doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything, except that it’s a poem, although this one, Cesárea’s, might not even be that. So I said let me see it and I reached out my hand like someone begging and they put the only issue of Caborca left in the world into my cramped fingers. And I saw the poem that I’d seen so many times:”
“The same way you see the night sky, I saw the 0, the 1, and the 2, but the sequence was different, the figures came faster, and when I passed the Liceo, a number appeared that I had never seen before: 3. I stopped agonizing over it and went to bed. That night, as I was undressing the dark room, listening to the snoring of the two bastards I had for roommates, it occurred to me that I was going crazy, which struck me as so funny that I had to sit down on the bed and cover my mouth to keep from laughing out loud.”
“One night, while we were making love, I told him. I told him that I thought I was going crazy, that I kept having the same symptoms. I talked for a long time. His response surprised me (it was the last time he surprised me). He said that if I was going crazy then he would go crazy too, that he didn’t mind going crazy with me. Do you like to tempt fate? I said. It’s not fate I’m tempting, he said. I searched for his eyes in the dark and asked whether he was serious. Of course I’m serious, he said, and he pressed his body close to mine. That night I slept peacefully. The next morning I knew I had to leave him, the sooner the better, and at noon I called my mother from Telefónica. In those days, Arturo and his friends didn’t pay for the international calls they made. I never knew how they did it. All I knew was that they had more than one method and they had to be swindling Telefónica out of thousands of millions of pesetas. They would find some telephone and hook up a few wires and that was it, they had a connection. The Argentinians were the best at it, hands down, and then the Chileans.”
“I think we make a wonderful couple: people look at us and nod their heads. We embody optimism and the future in a certain way, a way that’s pragmatic and thoughtful too. Some nights, though, when I’m in my office putting the final touches on my column or revising a few pages of my novel, I hear footsteps in the street, and I think, I could almost swear, that it’s the mailwoman out delivering mail at the wrong time of day. I go out onto the balcony and I don’t see anyone there or maybe I see some drunk on his way home, vanishing around a corner. Nothing’s wrong. There’s no one there. But when I go back to my desk, I hear the steps again, and then I know that the mailwoman is working, that even though I can’t see her she’s making her rounds and she couldn’t have picked a worse time. And then I stop working on my column or my chapter and I try to write a poem or spend the rest of the evening writing in my diary, but I can’t. The sound of her sensible shoes keeps echoing in my head.”
Sampling some (Saul) Bass
While browsing on iTunes, I noticed that they had added the soundtrack for Vertigo for $3.99. That was irresistible; I’ve always remembered Bernard Herrmann’s score as one of the greats in movie history, and, sure enough, the 16 tracks sound great by themselves as well.
I then started thinking that it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the movie. I still haven’t watched it recently, but I searched for and found the opening sequence on YouTube. The sequence is designed by Saul Bass:
Saul Bass has a unique place in movie history. He was a graphic designer who designed title cards for movies. Not only was he the most famous person in his field, I would say that he’s the only famous title card designer in movie history.
Bass is best known for his work he did with Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo was followed by North By Northwest and Psycho) and for Otto Preminger. For the latter, here is Anatomy Of A Murder, 1959:
Famous may not be the right word; he’s not James Dean-famous, but his worked has endured to an incredible extent. There are roughly a BILLION tributes/parodies on YouTube. Here is one of the best known:
I was little surprised by how much of his work was on YouTube, but I shouldn’t be; his title card sequences were 2-3 minutes long, are their own self-contained pieces of art, and are perfect for sites like YouTube. Here is the sequence for Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, 1960:
The internet has, of course, become a perfect medium for movie trailers. Saul Bass’ title card sequences are similar, except that they’re way better. Will title cards make a comeback? If I were trying to use social media to promote my film, I’d much rather use one of Saul Bass’ works than a movie trailer, which all seem the same and rarely generate much buzz.
Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear, 1991:
