Writing and Watching and Writing
A few words about being too busy
If you’re a regular reader of the newsletter, you’ll know that Friday is generally reserved for my weekly “Reading, Watching, Listening” column, in which I muse about things at random and then recommend some items I’ve been consuming. This week, I’m not doing that. Slammed with work (a good thing!), I wasn’t able to keep up my usual rhythm. I’d intended to have a regular post or two up in the last few days, but they never materialized. I was simply busy. So this won’t be a typical paid Friday column.
I’ve been working on a few assignments of various sizes at the same time, which I’ll be excited to share once they’re published. One in particular represents a big step forward for me in the kinds of stories I report and write. Amid those, I still managed to take in some culture. More culture than usual, in some ways. More varied, at least.
There were movies, certainly. I took in a 35mm screening of Crooklyn, a Spike Lee joint I’d remembered fondly from the one time I watched it, back in high school. Seeing it again, on the big screen, on film, all those popping colours and that beautiful soundtrack, it was a revelation. Another masterpiece from a filmmaker I’m seriously starting to feel is underrated in terms of pure, virtuosic craft. Lee is a man with cinema practically pouring out of him, and when he’s at his best (which is more often than many realize), it’s a reminder that he is, in fact, one of the best to ever do it. Later the same night, I went and saw The Naked Gun, which was hilarious, as I’d hoped. I cried laughing.
Last night, after I could no longer stare at the article I was working on, I decided to leave the last, fiddly bits till morning so I could check out a late show of Zach Creggar’s new movie Weapons at the nearby LieMAX. I came away with complicated feelings. On the one hand, the film is an expertly made horror thrill ride that had me on edge, jumping out of my seat, and laughing uproariously at all the right moments. It has some startling, entrancing imagery that I can already tell will stick with me for a long, long time. The crowd was into it, too, and I imagine this will become one of the genre’s contemporary standard-bearers. Still, something about the very entertaining final act of the movie nonetheless left me feeling deflated. Though I appreciated Creggar’s stylistic craft more than my friend Adam Nayman, his pan of the film at The Ringer nails the source of my dissatisfaction extremely well, so I recommend reading that if you’ve seen the film, or if you don’t care to have plot details revealed.
It wasn’t only movies, though. Last Friday, while I was writing last week’s column, I got a sudden hankering to see a concert. So I looked up concerts happening that day in Toronto. There wasn’t much interesting, except for one thing. TV on the Radio, one of the bands of my youth, was playing a show at History. Better still, ticketholders seemed to be in offloading mode, so I snagged an $80 ticket for just $40. I later learned that as the day wore on, $20 tickets popped it, but that’s no big deal. It was an awesome show. I’d never seen the band live before, and was told they put on a good show, but I was unprepared for just how hard their sound went in a live setting. Helped, too, that several friends of mine also happened to be attending, so all in all it was an excellent experience.
The next day, I went to a comedy show. Josh Gondelman, from the socials, was playing Comedy Bar Danforth, so I hopped on a city e-bike and rode all the way down to the East End, that far off land. The set was great, as were the emcee and opener. I laughed and laughed, and then hopped on another e-bike and rode back into the core to catch Wierd Alice’s screening of the early ‘70s gay erotic film Bijou, by the artist Wakefield Poole. To be clear: this was gay porn, straight up. But arty! And I’m not just saying that. It is genuinely strange, expressive, oddly moving at times, and often outright surreal. One section of the film, just before the giant-dicked protagonist starts railing a bunch of guys in a fantastic orgy, feels like the live-action gay porn version of Fantasia. You don’t see this kind of thing screened theatrically very often, so it was a remarkable thing to witness that way, at the Paradise on Bloor.
All in all, a great and busy week. Stay tuned for more regular programming!