To thine own self be true

Four glorious warmish nights of outdoor classical music. Nature and music do go together nicely. We usually go one night and farm out the other 3 shows to son, daughter, and extended family. Nice balance. Everyone is entitled to this much beauty, democratically speaking. Beethoven’s “Leonore No. 3”, Rachmaninoff’s “Third Piano Concerto” and Mozart’s “Haffner Symphony” on tonight when we go by virtue of a ‘dumb luck’ exchange of shows. Dumb luck sure works well often. (This show was my first choice anyway originally.) Ditto, our subscription. All 20 years of this event with good seats near centre back. More dumb luck.

(Calgary) A lowly spider crawled into air quality monitoring equipment and produced ridiculously high readings recently. Man proposes, spider disposes. Technology vs. Nature. Nature wins. Easily.
Reminds me of the spider that had webbed my garage door detector, interfering with its normal operation.

Portion of average Canadian family income paid to municipal, provincial, and federal taxmen.

“Great thoughts come from the heart.”
–Marquis de Vauvenargues

“O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!”
–John Keats

“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
–Matthew Arnold

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
–Proverbs

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”
–Walter Pater

“Music is the universal language of mankind.”
–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”
–Walter Pater

“You can’t be any good to/for others unless you’re good to yourself.”
–Richard Davies

“In our rapidly changing society we can count on two things that will never change. What will never change is the will to change and the fear of change.”
–Harriet Goldher Lerner

“Cherish your wildness.”
–Maxine Kumin

“The readiness is all.”
–William Shakespeare

“To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.”
–Mother Teresa

“The necessity for choosing a path with the heart. I feel that one must deliberate and then act, must scan every life choice with rational thinking but then base the decision on whether one’s heart will be in it. No other person can tell you if your heart is involved, and logic cannot provide an answer.”
–Jean Shinoda Bolen

“He is strongest who is most alone.”
–Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

“Without contraries is no progression.’
-William Blake

“In delay there lies no plenty.”
-William Shakespeare

“All is flux, nothing stays still.”
-Heraclitus

“Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
-Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”

“I will drink
Life to the lees.”
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”

“If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred.”
-Walt Whitman

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
-John Keats

“Tis said that some have died for love.”
-William Wordsworth

“Reading makes a full man, conference a steady man, and writing an exact man.”
-Francis Bacon

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”
-Steele

“An unexamined life is not worth living.’
-Socrates

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
-Einstein

“When money speaks, the truth is silent.”
-Russian proverb

“Any landscape is a condition of spirit.”
-Henri-Frederic Amiel

“He that is overcautious will accomplish little.”
-Schiller

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”
-Walt Whitman

(Truffaut rehearsing kissing scene on Day for Night), still from the excellent British Film Institute

Francois Truffaut’s comic masterpiece Day for Night is mainly the story of a film shoot, but it is also an homage to film, a spoof of cliché movie-making, the problems encountered by directors when making films, the commitment of a film company to the film during an 8-week shot, the comings and goings of people during the shoot, personal lives in relation to the film’s characters’ lives, ‘film within film’, actors’ histories and relationships, time relative to film, shifts and connections between Life and Art, the beauty and mystery of women, and the process of film as compared with real life.

The famous opening scene overhead crane and tracking shot tell you this will be unlike any other film you have ever seen before. Superficially, it is just one scene extracted from a fictional film being made by Ferrand, a director (played by Truffaut himself) called Meet Pamela, of which there are only a few skeletal scenes presented, during the actual process of viewing Day for Night.

The four main actors are Alexandre, a charming old-school actor who plays the husband of Severine (Valentina Cortese), a gushy veteran French actress. Julie Baker, a beautiful American-English actress played realistically by Jacqueline Bisset, is Pamela, Alphonse’s–their son’s–played by Truffaut’s ‘look-alike’, humorous, younger ‘stand-in’, Jean-Pierre Leaud) new wife brought home to meet her husband’s parents. What follows is the cliché of the father and daughter-in-law running away together and the son’s reactions.

But Day for Night is more about what goes on behind-the-scenes of making this film within a film. And, in the process, so many likable minor characters become as interesting as the equally interesting behind-the-scenes lives of the director and principal actors. These characters include the beleaguered producer Bertrand, Joelle (the clever script girl), the cinematographer, Bernard (the beleaguered prop man), the imported English stuntman, Stacey the pregnant actress, Liliane–Alphonse’s manipulative girlfriend, the joie de vivre, soused actress Severine with her seemingly irremediable mental mistakes, Odile the good-natured hairdresser, Julie’s (the fragile main actress’s) devoted husband Dr. Nelson, and Christian, Alexandre’s (the main actor’s) surprise real-life love interest.

Truffaut also gives the viewer a glimpse into common techniques and gimmicks (such as the American day-for-night shooting filter) that create movie magic. This magic is reflected in the various delightful musical themes contributed by composer George Delerue. And this preoccupation with magic is also mirrored/linked to the “Are women magic?” question-motif pursued by the asinine Alphonse in a number of his scenes.

Indeed, there is also a special, likable, overall comic-romantic mood that accompanies the viewing of this Truffaut classic. And this mood is anchored by the third night-dream sequence in which Ferrand, as a boy, steals photo stills of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane from a movie theatre–an act which, for Truffaut, epitomizes the power, magic and influence of film-dream as he emulated it in this charming film.

It is, finally, though, an aesthetic balance that Truffaut creates in which, on one hand, film means everything to him (“Movies are always more important than Life”), while the real-life goings-on of the shoot are more interesting, dramatic, humorous, and magical, ironically, than any scene in Meet Pamela. Nowhere is this more obvious than in moments such as the absurdly hilarious “Cue the cat” sequence, or in selected actor remarks such as “It is a strange life we lead” , “No one’s personal life runs smoothly”, or “Life is more important than movies.”

We film aficionados are truly lucky that Truffaut loved movies so passionately, giving us this much inside information about his craft and art, while still recognizing that it was Life that ultimately contributes to film’s subject matter, and that Life is far more personal, deeply affecting, and significant in the long run than any film, even the great ones like Day for Night.

The first book to seriously challenge mock The Age of Reason and the inadequacies of optimist Leibniz philosophy (“the best of all possible worlds”). The narrative is a massive negative catalogue of violence, absurdity, meaningless coincidence, sexual violence, human vice. If you ponder non-stop agendas, world events overseas, world-wide injustice and unfairness, and world atrocities as well as political fat-catism today, it is hard to not agree with what Voltaire saw in his own time and those continuing truths as evident today.

All the characters in the book are asses or victims, basically preyed on and stunningly harmed except for Martin, a realist who shows up halfway through the book. Only his wise comments seem to make any sense against the mad holocaust and litany suffering presented: “Well, this is how men treat one another.” The world in his view has been created “to plague us to death.” (And yet Voltaire manages to get the reader to laugh at the naivete of Candide and the foolishness of the book’s main characters.) Martin is also the one who proposes a solution for the survivors on Candide’s estate: “Let us work without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable.” The only note of true forward movement occurs when Candide rejects his cause-effect-obsessed teacher Pangloss and concludes: “we must cultivate our garden”.
……………..
Other Voltaire quotes:
–Work banishes those three great evils–boredom, vice, and poverty.
–Men¸use thought only to justify their wrong-doings, and words only to conceal their thoughts.
–History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.
–Once the people begin to reason, all is lost.

…………………….

above picture: Dover Thrift Editions are highly recommended for their popular inexpensive editions.

“Social media, lotto tickets, and cheap Tim’s coffee are the opiates of the Canadian masses.”
–R.D.

Lean against the warm van
waiting for the others
to return from a grave.
Cotton ball clouds roll
across the blue sky above.
Afternoon tree shadows
trembling on grass.

A hundred yards away
the freeway traffic
never ceases
its preoccupied din.
Trucks with tedious loads,
wrangling families headed out,
and most cars going
nowhere in particular.

In the cemetery
a raised reservoir
with two watering cans
is there for those
who remembered
to bring real flowers.

Waiting by the van,
you glimpse a sign
beside a white sidewalk
Caution: Open Graves.