Christmas Morning
Wednesday, August 31, 2005 | 0 Comments
Ah, the last Wednesday in August. It doesn't quite match the morning I woke up to find a Millennium Falcon under the tree, but the sight of a FedEx truck in late August is just about as good as it gets. The plan is to spend the next few hours pouring through the catalog, obsessing over the schedule, and checking titles off of my spreadsheet -- yes, I created a spreadsheet -- all in hopes of creating the most efficient and dud-free lineup of films possible. I then overnight my ticket requests back to Toronto and hope for the best.
If all goes according to plan, over the span of ten days I'll get to see new films by Alexander Sokurov, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Laurent Cantet, Atom Egoyan, Michael Haneke, Michael Winterbottom, Francois Ozon, Thomas Vinterberg, Jean Paul Civeyrac, Stephen Frears, Danis Tanovic, David Cronenberg, the Quay brothers, Bennett Miller, Patrice Chereau, Eugene Jarecki, Nobuhiro Suwa, Cristi Puiu, and about twenty others.
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas . . .
1977: A Good Year for Denim and Butterfly Collars
Sunday, August 28, 2005 | 0 Comments
On the left: Suzy from 21 Up; On the right: Aunt Beru from Star Wars
Week in Review
Sunday, August 28, 2005 | 0 Comments
- Films Watched: The Battle of Algiers dir. by Gillo Pontecorvo; Down by Law dir. by Jim Jarmusch; Saraband dir. by Ingmar Bergman; 35 Up dir. by Michael Apted
- Books Finished: Libra by Don DeLillo; The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation by Hayden White; The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
- CDs Purchased:
Howlby Black Rebel Motorcycle Club; Pixel Revolt by John Vanderslice; Donnie Darko (soundtrack) by Michael Andrews
Remember that episode of The Office when David Brent interrupts a training seminar to sing his ode to the free love freeway? The comedy in that scene is about a mile-and-a-half thick. There's the typical embarrassment of Brent's colleagues, there's Tim's disbelieving stares into the camera and Gareth's interruptions ("She's dead"), but what I most love about the joke is that Brent, a middle-aged paper salesman from Slough, has written -- and is earnestly performing -- a song about driving a Cadillac through the American southwest, bedding lovely "senoritas" along the way. It's good comedy because it's . . . what's the word? . . . ironic.
Oh, dear lord, how I wish I could chalk up Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's new album Howl to an extended exercise in irony. Generally speaking, I avoid power-trio rock-and-roll, but BRMC's last record Take Them On, On Your Own was one of my favorites of 2004. It's heavy when it needs to be but also features some surprisingly melodic songwriting and great guitar noise. Howl, apparently, is their attempt at "roots" music. Acoustic guitars? Check. Harmonicas? Check. T-Bone Burnett credit? Check. Song titles that make confused, sepia-toned allusions to southern spirituality and Depression-era heartache? Check. Apparently these California boys turned off their Jesus and Mary Chain records just long enough to watch O Brother Where Art Thou seven or eight times, and now they've lost their way in the funhouse of Americana simulacrum. Fortunately, The Disc Exchange has a ten-day return policy, so I'll be getting that New Pornographers album instead.
The week wasn't a total bust for new music, though. After spending most of the last month listening obsessively to John Vanderslice's "Exodus Damage," I picked up the new album, Pixel Revolt, and it's a beaut'. Vanderslice is a story-teller. Okay, so that's not terribly unusual. But he's a story-teller who works in genres. For example, "Continuation," the new Song of the Moment, is a police procedural. Seriously, it's sung by a detective who's working a case. And it has a cello solo. And it rocks. You're probably going to laugh at some point during the first twenty-two seconds of the song. Then Vanderslice will start singing, and by the time he hits the chorus, you'll be tapping your foot and smiling.
Still high from the Miranda July film, I also picked up a used copy of the Donnie Darko soundtrack this week. (Both films were scored by Michael Andrews.) Except for its inclusion of three, barely-distinguishable versions of "Mad World," I like it a lot. Maybe instead of a Fender Rhodes, I should be on the lookout for a Mellotron.
Another week, another book of critical theory, another postmodern doorstop. In The Content of the Form, Hayden White asks, "Could we ever narrativize without moralizing?" For White, the interpretation of history, like the acts of fiction-making and criticism, is a moral and political act. Reading White alongside Don DeLillo's Libra made for an interesting study of theory and praxis. DeLillo's "Author's Note," included on the last rather than first page, reads:
This is a work of imagination. While drawing from the historical record, I've made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination.
Any novel about a major unresolved event would aspire to fill some of the blank spaces in the known record. To do this, I've altered and embellished reality, extended real people into imagined space and time, invented incidents, dialogues, and characters.
Libra, in effect, is about the writing of history, the transformation of "real" events into a narrative. It's a job, DeLillo implies, shared by novelists, historians, CIA analysts, politicians, and anyone else -- Lee Harvey Oswald, for example -- who writes themselves into human history. That's an admittedly pedantic description of a novel that was honest-to-god fun to read. I was blissfully ignorant of the JFK assassination before picking up the book, so I was swept quickly into the various intrigues and conspiracies. I have no idea at this point how much of the novel is "real," which, I guess, is precisely the point.
If I watched fewer films this week, it's because much of my spare time was spent parsing through the list of 256 features and 79 shorts that will be playing at TIFF this year. Again, I'm holding off on commenting on the 7 Up films until I finish them all, and I have a longer response to Saraband in the works, which leaves only The Battle of Algiers and Down by Law. I missed Algiers during its theatrical re-release a year or two ago, and I'm sort of glad that, instead, I was able to see it now, at some remove from Bush's march to war and the prison abuse scandals. That Pontecorvo's film was made forty years ago, and that America now finds itself in a situation so similar to colonial France's (the same arrogance, the same disregard for history, the same dehumanizing mistakes), is just maddening. It's almost too much to watch -- and I mean that as the most sincere compliment. Again, Doug has two really fine essays on the film and the DVD release.
Down by Law is also a great film, and for completely different reasons. What happens in Jarmusch's film is irrelevant -- three guys are arrested and make a jailbreak, if you're curious -- all that matters is that it happens to three guys who are endlessly watchable. John Lurie doesn't so much act as simply embody cool. In fact, I like him best when he's standing still or functioning as the straight man. Tom Waits is Tom Waits is Tom Waits. And Roberto Benigni, despite what you might think of him after Life is Beautiful and the Oscars, has some kind of superhuman comic timing and this crazy gift for swinging effortlessly between mania and pathos.
When I first mentioned Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree, Bulb wrote in a comment, "I left [a copy] in my guest bathroom and it never fails to elicit favorable comments." I don't mind admitting that I read most of Spree two or three pages at a time. It's great in small doses. Hornby tells us what he read, why he read it, and whether it was worth the effort, and he does so in a typically charming and insightful manner. I can't write fiction. It's a complete mystery to me. Which is why I so enjoy reading writers write about writing. Best of all, Spree has given me an unexpected and much-needed push toward the book shelf (and the blog).
TIFF 2005
Tuesday, August 23, 2005 | 0 Comments
The full list. My "must-see" list has grown to, like, thirty already, but I'd still love to hear some suggestions.
Week in Review
Sunday, August 21, 2005 | 0 Comments
- Films Watched: Nosferatu dir. by F.W. Murnau; 28 Up dir. by Michael Apted; Vers Nancy dir. by Claire Denis; Me and You and Everyone We Know dir. by Miranda July; Los Angeles Plays Itself dir. by Thom Andersen
- Books Finished: The Public Burning by Robert Coover; Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction by Amy Elias
- CDs Purchased: Until the End of the World (soundtrack) by various artists; Me and You and Everyone We Know (soundtrack) mostly by Michael Andrews
With apologies to Nick Hornby. While reading The Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of his "Stuff I've Been Reading" columns from The Believer, two things occurred to me. First, Hornby's columns are essentially blog posts by another name: they're written in the first-person, they're chronological (especially once collected in book form), and they're unified by a single topic. Second, like Hornby, I could chart the course of my life by pacing slowly through a library full of books, CDs, and DVDs.
Because Long Pauses is essentially a notebook, a diary, and an archive, all in one, I've decided to give this "Week in Review" idea a shot. Granted, seven days from now this will all likely have taken on the smell of a deadline, but, in the words of Stuart Smalley, "That's. Okay." For now, it seems a fine way to spend a Sunday morning. If I stick to it, the Song of the Moment feature will probably be absorbed into the weekly review, Borg-like.
As I mentioned a few days ago, Miranda July's first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, left quite an impact on me, though I sense the effect waning somewhat. I worry that, when all is said and done, the film's message is only slightly more nuanced than "carpe diem," though, really, as far as messages go, that's a pretty good one, especially when handled with a certain grace. July has a deep, deep fondness for her characters and a child-like wonder about the world in which they live. As a storyteller and filmmaker, she's ambitious in the best sense of the word, and her ability to capture something of the beauty and fear (often simultaneously) that characterize love and life in the modern world is something special. Maybe the best compliment I can give the film is to say it doesn't feel like it was made in America. "When I call a Name" is the opening track from Michael Andrews's fine soundtrack, which reminds me a bit of those Brian Eno Music for Films albums.
Nosferatu is the latest entry in my Great Films series. I watched it last Sunday after a long weekend that involved two trips to the emergency room, an overnight stay in the hospital (for Joanna), and very little sleep. Which is to say that Nosferatu is an almost perfect film to watch in a waking dream state. Murnau's brand of expressionism is so organically "uncanny," and Max Schreck's performance is so utterly alien. It's my new favorite Dracula, bar none.
Like any great essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself is almost too rich to be eaten in one bite. I want to watch it again before commenting at length, but three quick points for now: 1) It made me want to watch Blade Runner again. 2) It made me want to track down the films of Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Billie Woodberry, Julie Dash, and other independent black filmmakers of the 1970s. 3) I love the idea of looking for documentary moments in narrative films, an idea that was raised in Ross McElwee's Bright Leaves, as well. (Doug has a really great essay on Los Angeles Plays Itself, by the way.) I'll return to the 7 Up films and the Denis short in later weeks.
Seeing only two titles on the "books finished" list undersells the size of my accomplishment, I think, considering that the novel weighs in at 534 pages and the other is a book of critical theory. The next chapter of my dissertation, ostensibly a tight reading of The Public Burning and E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, is actually about the rise of the academic Left in the 1970s and 1980s and the political problems of postmodernism. Elias's book posits that "history is something we know we can't learn, something we can only desire," which she wraps into discussions of "the Sublime," the traditional historical novel (think Walter Scott), and post-1960s American fiction, in particular those novels she calls "metahistorical romances."
Did I mention that Elias is on my dissertation committee? Or that her book was blurbed favorably by Linda Hutcheon? Or that in her preface she thanks Hayden White for his encouragement, advice, personal generosity, and kindness? (I know those two names mean, like, nothing to most people, but if you're working in history and postmodern literature, they mean a lot.) The Public Burning comes up quite a bit in Elias's book as an example of an avant-garde metahistorical romance, which is quite a nice way of describing it, I think. Its voice alternates between first- and third-person (the former from the p.o.v. of Vice President Richard Nixon), and Coover also cuts into "Intermezzos," which take on various forms: a poem pasted together from snippets of text from President Eisenhower's public statements, a dramatic dialogue between Ike and Ethel Rosenberg, and a mini-opera sung by the Rosenbergs and James Bennett, then-Federal Director of the Bureau of Prisons.
The novel reaches its climax in the middle of Times Square, where all of American history has come undone. Betty Crocker, Uncle Sam, and the nation's Poet Laureate (Time magazine) are all there to witness the Rosenberg execution, as are the Republican Elephant, the Democratic Donkey, Cecil B. DeMille (who's producing the spectacle), Walt Disney (who's selling souvenirs), and fighting bands of patriots and redcoats. Elias (via Soja, Jameson, Frank, and Foucault) would describe the scene as an example of spatialized metahistory: "What one gets is a view from above, a critical view akin to the perspective of aerial photography, flattening out time, space, and history in order to map them." The question for my chapter is this: "What does this mean for a 'real' politics of the Left?" I'm intrigued by the line that ends Elias's second chapter:
The humanities [English and philosophy departments, for example] not only take seriously the challenge to history in fantasies and novels; they have forcefully asserted that history is fantasy and fiction allied with power, and have thrown down a gauntlet to the social sciences to prove otherwise.
That "prove otherwise" puts an interesting spin on the debate, I think.
That covers everything from this week except for the Until the End of the World soundtrack I picked up used for $7, proving once again that spontaneous buys are seldom good buys. I think I'll enjoy these songs more when they show up randomly in iTunes. They don't make for a very cohesive or compelling album.
A Girl and a Gun
Saturday, August 20, 2005 | 0 Comments
It is, I concede, time to pull myself out of my post-election funk and face up to the fact that I harbor the richest contempt for something like sixty million of my fellow citizens. (How's that for healing?)
That is how George Fasel began his first post at A Girl and a Gun. He became one of my Daily Reads a month or two later. Like I wrote in the comments there, as saddened as I am to hear of George's passing, I'm also feeling strangely inspired and encouraged by his example. He and I exchanged a few notes over the past few months, and I always enjoyed his curiosity, humor, and generosity of spirit. I had no idea he'd been a writer, historian, professor, film critic, and PR executive. I didn't know he was 67 years old (in my imagination, every Blogger is my age, give or take), and I certainly didn't know he was fighting cancer. What a loss.
Everything is Copasetic, Now
Thursday, August 18, 2005 | 0 Comments
At Girish's request, I've pasted together a mix of music that features the Fender Rhodes. If you want a copy, send me your snail mail address. (For the record, I'm going by ear here, so it's possible that what I'm hearing on a few of these tracks is actually a Wurlitzer. Liner notes are surprisingly useless in this regard.)
- "She's Gone" by Hall and Oates
- "Celebration Suite, Pt. 2" by Return to Forever
- "Niki Hoeky" by Aretha Franklin
- "Two Trains" by Little Feat
- "No Quarter" by Led Zeppelin
- "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy" by Elton John
- "Nanook Rubs It" by Frank Zappa
- "Living for the City" by Stevie Wonder
- "Humdrum" by Peter Gabriel
- "Fainting in Coils" by Bruford
- "Babylon Sisters" by Steely Dan
- "Midnight Rider" by Gregg Allman
- "Breakdown" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
- "Do You Feel Like We Do" by Peter Frampton
- "Tombigbee" by Tori Amos
- "Nowhere Again" by The Secret Machines
It's a fairly eclectic mix, I think. I did my best to pull from several genres:
Pop: "She's Gone" and "Breakdown" have been played to death over the years, but they're still perfect pop songs. ("Sarah Smiles" is even better, but, alas, no Rhodes.) "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy," as I've said before, is a not-too-guilty favorite.
Classic Rock: It's hard to be a piano player when you really want to be a rock star. John Paul Jones's electric piano on "No Quarter" is almost as cool as Jimmy Page's Gibson. I put "Do You Feel Like We Do" at the end of the CD so you can skip it more easily, but I really do love Bob Mayo's solo (around the 4 minute mark).
Southern Rock: This version of "Midnight Rider" is from one of Gregg Allman's solo albums, with Chuck Leavell's keyboard covering the Dickie Betts parts. "Two Trains" is among Lowell George's best songs. And Billy Payne's playing is typically tasteful. (I went back and forth on which Little Feat song to include. For an added bonus, here's the runner-up, "Juliette.")
Progressive/Fusion: I limited myself to two tracks in this genre, knowing that few people share my love of 70s fusion and progressive rock. Bill Bruford (of Yes and King Crimson fame) had a great band in the late-70s that featured Jeff Berlin, Allan Holdsworth, and Dave Stewart. Stewart's playing on "Fainting in Coils" is inspiring. Return to Forever was a fusion supergroup, with Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, Al DiMeola, and Lenny White joining up for the album No Mystery. That's where I grabbed "Celebration Suite, Pt. 2."
Soul: I was tempted to include Aretha's cover of "Eleanor Rigby" from Live at the Fillmore West, but went with "Niki Hoeky" instead, if for no other reason than to hear her sing the line that gives this post its title. The Rhodes makes Aretha's rhythm section. Stevie Wonder tended to use the Rhodes for his sweeter, more melodic pop songs; his funkier tunes, like "Higher Ground" and "Superstition," were all about the Clavinet. "Living for the City" meets those two styles somewhere in the middle.
Hard to Classify: No one shows off the melodic possibilities of the Rhodes like Donald Fagen. "Babylon Sisters" is one of about twenty Steely Dan songs that could have made the mix. "Humdrum," from Peter Gabriel's first solo album, is just a beautiful, beautiful song. And Zappa . . . well, "Nanook Rubs It" is great fun, and you get George Duke on keyboards, to boot.
Epilogue: I had planned to choose only songs that were recorded from, say, 1968 to 1978 but decided to throw in two songs by current acts that are using vintage keyboards. Tori Amos brought along a couple on her last tour (see the Welcome to Sunny Florida concert DVD) and used what appears to be an 88-key Rhodes on "Tombigbee." I don't own The Secret Machines album, but I stopped in my tracks every time I caught the video for "Nowhere Again" on MTV. Brandon Curtis's Rhodes is filtered, fuzzed, and distorted beyond recognition, and god bless him for it.
Maybe It's Just Me . . .
Tuesday, August 16, 2005 | 0 Comments
Or maybe many, many people find themselves suddenly and unexpectedly harboring a painful crush on Miranda July. I'm not sure what to say about Me and You and Everyone We Know right now except, well, it's certainly the best American film I've seen this year, and I can't imagine another one topping it. Also, Michael Andrew's score is exactly the kind of film music I'd be making if I had his studio full of vintage synthesizers. Oh, and his talent. I'd also need his talent.
Pile
Tuesday, August 16, 2005 | 0 Comments
I'm not a slob. Really. Which is why I grabbed my camera this morning. I wish I could say that I had doctored this photo or had carefully arranged my bedside table for dramatic effect, but this is what I woke up to. Sad but true.
A brief catalog of items:
- Alarm clock, lamp, mostly-empty bottle of water, several mechanical pencils (I like mechanical pencils), a bag of Sun Chips, and one dime. Oh, and a remote control. My only justification for having a bag of chips in the bedroom is this: Joanna has been recovering from a bit of a health scare this week, so we've spent a lot of time in bed, watching the first season of The Muppet Show on DVD. And sometimes a guy just needs some chips.
- The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby -- A free gift with my birthday-present subscription to The Believer. Things I've learned from the first two essays: Hornby named his son Lowell in honor of Lowell George, so apparently I'm not alone in thinking Little Feat is the great, unsung American rock band; Hay-on-Wye, "a weird town on the border of England and Wales that consists almost entirely of secondhand bookshops," should be on our list of destinations when Jo and I go to England next summer; and, like Hornby, I am also horrible at remembering details (and even whole plots) from the books I've read -- "I can't tell you how depressing this is."
- Claire Denis by Judith Mayne, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye by Andrew Robinson, and a Summer 2005 Film Program from the National Gallery of Art -- A week or so ago, during a trip to Maryland, I caught a screening of Pather Panchali at the NGA. Nearly everyone in the standing-room-only crowd seemed to enjoy themselves as much as I did -- everyone, that is, except for the man directly to my right, who apparently thought a dark, air conditioned room would be a fine place for a nap. Anyway, I picked up both books at the giftshop in the underground walkway between the east and west wings of the Gallery.
- The Public Burning by Robert Coover and Loon Lake by E.L. Doctorow -- I finished rereading The Public Burning yesterday. It and Doctorow's The Book of Daniel are the focus of my next chapter, so these are both work-related, I guess. Coover's novel is a monster -- easily my favorite of the postmodern "doorstop" novels (as my friend Ethan once described Infinite Jest). I started Loon Lake a few weeks ago, got about thirty pages in, and lost interest.
- Libra and The Body Artist (book on tape) by Don DeLillo -- DeLillo has written several of my favorite novels (Underworld, White Noise, Americana, The Body Artist), which is why it's so odd when one leaves me cold. I'm a third of the way through Libra, a (meta)fictional account of the Kennedy assassination, and it's just not doing anything for me. I had the same lukewarm response to Mao II and Cosmopolis.
- Arthur Miller: A Critical Study by Christopher Bigsby -- I've said enough already about this one.
- And on the bottom shelf: Catalogs from TIFF 2004 and SFIFF 2005, America: The Book, and an old issue of Home Theater magazine.
Anyone else got a pile?
Song of the Moment
Wednesday, August 10, 2005 | 0 Comments
Sub-title: In Praise of the Fender Rhodes
In 1972, Eumir Deodato's funked and fused arrangement of Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" reached number 2 on the American charts and earned him a Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance. (It also, I assume, earned him a commitment to playing the song as an encore every. single. night. of. his. life.)
I only know of Deodato because of Being There (1979). Hal Ashby drops his needle on "Zarathustra" during the long sequence near the beginning of the film when Chance leaves his now-dead employer's estate and wanders, umbrella and suitcase in hand, through the streets of Washington, D.C. Ashby has impeccable taste in music -- most famously the Cat Stevens songs throughout Harold and Maude and Tim Buckley's "Once I Was" at the end of Coming Home -- but the Deodato cue might be my favorite. It's a perfect pairing with Jerzy Kosinski's story, all allegory and irony and self-reflexive allusion. Plus -- I'll admit it -- I really like the song.
Girish and I have already decided that, if we need a break from movies next month, we're going to explore the music shops around downtown Toronto. (Suggestions?) I'm unofficially in the market for a vintage Fender Rhodes. I'm flexible regarding the model, though an early 73-key Mark I would be my first choice. All that matters to me, really, is that it has the sound and feel of the electric pianos played on so many great recordings of the early-1970s.
I've been tempted to buy a new keyboard -- something with weighted keys and a large stash of pre-loaded sounds. It would be more flexible, certainly, and could lay the groundwork for some home recording. I've gone so far as to spend hours and hours at the local Guitar Center, auditioning, researching, asking questions. But when I'm there, I almost always sit down, click through to the Fender Rhodes sounds, and annoy the hell out of Joanna by playing Steely Dan songs. ("The Dan" is a running joke in our house. We once heard "FM" during four consecutive trips to the grocery store. The look on Joanna's face when she mocks Donald Fagen's lisp -- "No thtatic at all" -- is one of the many reasons I love her.)
So I think I might just get an old Rhodes, which, really, is the greatest instrument ever, after all. Without the Rhodes there'd be no epic intro to Pink Floyd's "Sheep," the opening chords of "Deacon Blue" would be utterly forgettable (rather than transcendent -- which they ARE), Jeff Beck's "Cause We've Ended as Lovers" would be just one more guitar player showing off his volume pedal, and Peter Frampton would never have uttered the words, "Bob Mayo on keyboards! Bob Mayo!" And I haven't even mentioned Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Billy Payne, Stevie Wonder, Joe Zawinul, or, like, every keyboard player who recorded with Jerry Wexler at Atlantic in the late-'60s and early-70s. (I've been playing the hell out of Aretha Franklin's Lady Soul this week.)
So there you go. Granted, Deodato's "Zarathustra" has the faint smell of cheese, but try to enjoy it with as little irony as possible.
Dreaming of Movies
Monday, August 01, 2005 | 0 Comments
I had my first TIFF-related dream last night. It was kind of like that dream where you show up for a final exam after skipping class all semester, except that, instead of sliding into a strange classroom, I was wandering around Toronto with no tickets because I'd forgotten to submit my out-of-town form. I woke up feeling anxious.
Some of that anxiety may stem from a rookie mistake I made last year. I had passes for three films on the evening I arrived but had failed to realize that my actual tickets were housed in an office somewhere on the ground floor of a building near Yonge and College rather than at the box office, where I arrived thirty minutes before the first film began -- plenty of time, I assumed, to get in line, rest, grab a good seat, whatever. Instead, I went running (literally) out of the theater, cursing the volunteer who had politely -- and I say "politely" only in retrospect -- who had politely handed me a map and pointed me north. By the time I found the ticket office, I was sweating and the tops of my feet were bleeding. (Note: Don't ever run in Birkenstocks.) I ran back to the Paramount in time to catch the last 45 minutes of Nobody Knows.
My TIFF dream was also related, I think, to Michael Apted's 7 Up films, the first two of which I watched for the first time last night. We went to bed some time after midnight, and I spent the next two hours in that strange waking dream state. I don't remember any specific details of the dreams, but they were full of those kids -- Tony the Jockey, John the Reactionary, and Neil the Sad-Eyed Chess Player, in particular. Joanna and I were so moved by the films that we cheated. I looked up a few reviews of the later films to get snapshot updates of their lives. Part of me regrets doing so now, but I suspect that watching the other four films will actually be a better experience without the "suspense."
Darren Hughes is a web designer and freelance writer in Knoxville, Tennessee.