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The Mosquitos
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Theatre
- Hits: 114
At the Capitol in Nelson, a surreal play about how the Pandemic fractured everybody into their own conspiracy-laden world, complete with transformations into the most elaborate papier-mache masks...
Which was of interest to me because I have an abundance of overdue papier-mache projects that are overdue.
I brought a neighbour, the other one, who proved the perfect date/wingman. She paid attention, found it all hilarious, clapped, in short she wasn't someone who gets out a lot and showed great appreciation at my taking her. In contrast with the first neighbour, who at the sketch-comedy revue complained about how unfunny it was. I concurred, but that wasn't my fault and she didn't pay for the ticket, no returns for her!
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian (or, the evening redness in the west)
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 255
In a way, like "Fanny Hill" in which the author finds a thousand ways to describe the most basic act of love.
Only, with Cormac McCarthy, the act is not love but Violence, on a Biblical, Apocalyptic scale, Ostensibly about a kid from Tennessee who joins the "Glanton Gang" and does the grand tour of the Old West, hunting down Apaches, Indians, Niggers, who-have-you, it's an over the top ode to violence, rape, murder, torture, sadism, the cruelty of man, an obscene diatribe on mankind's theology, of blackened ears and scalps worn as trophies around the neck, of mans relations to animals and men and the universe in general.
It's bleak, but written with a rhythm and prose that carries you along like soldiers themselves, silhouetted on the blood-red horizon at the ends of the world, being carried forward always to a bloodier future where neither and never law nor order applies...
Brilliant, after it's fashion, and I will have to track down some of his other novels. It's always a pleasure to discover a new (to me) author, and he's a few I can follow up with. The themes, vile, visceral, but the prose becomes poetry and bears you along...
Oso Buco
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 301
Trying out new recipes to impress the children with.
For example, my classic clam chowder, now even better that I've discovered a better bacon - costs more, get less, but what a difference it makes...the daughter will love this!!!!!
Only she isn't around this week. But I need to try out a few new recipes, and I've noticed the Shank Steak at Kootenay Co-op at reasonable (>$10) prices, and I set my heart on making an Oso Buco.
It works out, after a fashion, the sauce - beef stock, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, onion, garlic, basil, rosemary, thyme - is delicious. Five Star. I'm pleased. The steak, however, turns out a little tough and stringy, not the fall-off-of-the-bone-melt-in-your-mouth kinda steak that I hoped for. I need to figure this out so next week I'll try again.
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Other news, J***** - the other server, the only other server, is sick. She apparently hit a deer with her car and took the week off to recover. This would be a bad thing, only she does this every week. The week before she had a sad horse and couldn't come in to work. The week before that her dog got lost and then showed up a day later sick and she had to take off a day off. The week before that she had to take her mother to the hospital...
She schedules herself for 5 shifts and is lucky to work 3 and while I like her well enough, like working with her, it's starting to become like I'm liking an imaginary character in a book that doesn't exist, that I've never met, like loving Jesus for all the imagined benefits an imaginary saviour confers, or loving a Santa Clause that has never once brought you a single gift...
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At work, they're starting to get the hints. J***** doesn't want to work, certainly not as much as she's been working. I'm on her page, only I need a vehicle. And I'd go about it a bit differently. These last minute emergencies, as predictable as the sun rising, well, they're getting a little bit much.
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We tried out a new server, 2 shifts, lunches, never met her, she's already gone. Yesterday, my double, I trained two. Both younger, pleasant, not incompetent. I'm hopeful.
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Monday, 36 degrees. Too fucking hot. To do anything, and there's much to be done. Sit in the flat and melt into my chair. I've been feeding the crows, putting out peanuts where I smoke, the crows show up in my absence and recover them. There's one, that when he/she (??) spots me flies down and will hop up to recover, a little bolder than the rest.
Monday morning I'm greeted with the full mob, I've only brought 4 peanuts and there are 8 crows greeting me when I get up. I've officially been made provider...you can google 8 crows to get their AI nonsense on the topic. "Counting Crows" I don't recall got up to 8...
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Walking down to get some liquor because what else can you do in 36 degree heat, I've eaten, as much as I can, passing the antique shop where they've put my antique WWI gun sight in the window for a mere $200. I paid over $600 over 30 years ago in London. I should buy it... The law of greater fools, and I've spent my life proving it...
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And, yesterday, JR's Mother In Law shows up from Cranbrook, nice enough, but I'm no longer master of my own apartment, she's the guest and I'm officially on the living room floor yet again. Hopefully only for a couple of days, she's here to visit her mother, in the hospital, and I'm hoping this doesn't go on forever but god-damn today's a day off and I can't even hang about the flat, doesn't matter, I need to go and buy some more peanuts anyways...
The Rehearsal (Season's 1 & 2) - Nathan Fielder
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 208
This was brilliant.
And - allow me to clarify - while absolutely brilliant it was not an easy watch, and I was frequently tempted to abandon it. Billed as a comedy, and for sure, it has it's moments, it's more a meta-upon-meta scaffolding which builds a Tower of Babel upon notions of Identity, the choices we make, the people we meet and how we all - one way or another - intrude our reality upon other peoples lives.
There's a lot more than that I'm sure.
Spoilers ahead, so if you're not sure you're going to watch it don't follow the page break:
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