It’s been hot out. Hot as balls. The heat wave seems to have broken for now, but man, it was hot. Some days it was genuinely too hot to spend much time outside for a person like me who sweats profusely at the slightest effort or lift in temperature. Other days, though, I indulged in my favourite activity: sitting in the park. Yes, I’m one of those guys. Sitting on a park bench, etc. I live near Grange Park in Toronto, which is right behind the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Ontario College of Art and Design. It’s not a massive park, but it’s not so small either. There’s an off-leash area for dogs, a playground, a water pad, a big open circle of grass in the middle, and another grassy area nearby. Along the path around that circle, there’s a big cast sculpture, Two Large Forms, created by the English artist Henry Moore. There are multiple casts of the sculpture, including in Bonn and Yorkshire, but the one at the Grange was the first, originally sitting at the side entrance of the AGO until it was moved into the park nearby.
Two Large Forms is a fantastic work of public art. It is, as the title describes, simply two large forms, bulbous, with a large hole through each, and each seeming to almost fit into each other, like continents split apart by plate tectonics. There’s something sensual about the sculpture, but also blunt and earthy, and also they kind of look like butts. Human butts, not the cigarette kind. One of the reasons I love it so much is that it conveys no meaning, only a visceral feeling, and even that changes by the day and the colour of the light and my mood. It’s also big, and sturdy, and climbable, which makes it interactive, like a part of the overall playground mentality of the park. People, especially kids and teens, will often sit within the hole in the bigger of the two forms.
I rarely do that, usually opting to sit on a bench, but I couldn’t find a bench with shade, so I decided why not, lay me down, cocooned in that great sculpture, its top blocking the sun. I got my Kobo out to read, and for an hour at least, I laid there in bliss. I love the sound of other people at the park, and the wind blowing and birds chirping. I love the feeling of activity that surrounds me, even if I’m sitting all alone. There’s community in that experience, and it makes me feel less lonely if anything. 10/10 experience, highly recommended.
This week, I review Ari Aster’s new movie Eddington for The New Republic. I liked it!
I also did an AMA post here on the newsletter, which I had quite a fun time with.
And I wrote about James Gunn’s Superman, which I also really liked!
Reading, Watching, Listening
Here are some things I’ve consumed and enjoyed over the last week.
The Store, directed by Frederick Wiseman. The TIFF Cinematheque is in the middle of a small Frederick Wiseman retrospective. For those unfamiliar, Wiseman is a true giants of American cinema. Since the late ‘60s, he has been pumping out extraordinary documentaries about institutions of all kinds. His style, basically cemented at the outside, involves no narration or talking head interviews. He simply films all around his given subject, and then cuts the footage into a fly-on-the-wall portait. Each one is mesmerizing, funny in unexpected ways, and often illumination. Some are about serious issues, like meat production and domestic violence, but others are about more mundane aspects of life in a modern world.
“The Store,” dir. Frederick Wiseman The Store is one of those. It’s a portrait of Neiman Marcus’s flagship store in Dallas, released in 1983. There’s not much to it other that watching the goings on at the store, including meetings behind-the-scenes. It puts on display the genuine pleasure of the old department store model, while also showing the ways such a store—such a brand—becomes an idol to be worshipped in the culture of American life. A scene at the end celebrating the great liberal businessman Stanley Marcus basically depicts him as the Chairman Mao of American retail. It’s an excellent film. You can watch it on Kanopy if you’ve got access through your library.
“5 Years Times”, by Noah and the Whale, is getting a lot of play right now thanks to being featured during Mr. Terrific’s big action sequence in Superman, and that’s well-deserved. It’s a great song—Song of the Summer?—and I’ve loved it a long time.
The song was featured on the band’s first album, Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down, from 2008. I no longer remember how I first heard Noah and the Whale. If I had to guess, they were a recommendation by an old high school friend, who turned me on to a lot of indie music. The band came out of the same stew that gave us Mumford and Sons and a number of other British folky acts, including Laura Marling, who was a member of the band for the recording of this debut album. I didn’t keep up with the band after their first couple of albums, for no other reason than losing track. I do have a memory, though, of seeing Noah and the Whale live at the Mod Club in Toronto in spring 2009. Still one of the better concerts I’ve been to in my life, and I still listen to that first album regularly. (I particularly like “Rocks and Daggers”.)
Pinball machines are cool machines. I’ve always been amazed by their complexity, particularly in the old days when there were no motherboards to run operations. One of my favourite YouTubers, Alec Watson of Technology Connections did a two-part, very length video all about how old pinball machines worked. It is… extremely nerdy, but if it sounds at all intersting to you, you’re about to have a great time.
“Goodbye, Mr. Germ” is an old PSA film by the great Poverty Row filmmaker Edgar G. Ulmer. I saw it at a screening hosted by The Important Cinema Club’s Will Sloan and Justin Decloux of Ulmer’s iconic noir feature Detour. They showed the short before the film, and sold it on the style and hints of German Expressionism throughout what is just educational material about tuberculosis. I’ll say, I did learn a thing or two about the disease here.
That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading, and thanks for subscribing. It really means a lot. Come back next week for more!