The garbage pickup has moved back to Thursday mornings. This feels far more natural and way it s'posed to be than Tuesdays. Of course, natural is two pickups a week, but that we haven't had in decades.
There's been much shifting about of boxes next door, as s-i-l's work office moves into bro's home office, bro's home office moves down to basement, and what was in the basement since 1989 gets left for the garbage or the scavengers, whichever comes first. Thus I discover that the early issues of Horizon magazine, from the late '50s, did *not* go to the Art Gallery's library. They've been next door all along, and that vanished snapshot of a vanished time is now mine. Alas it's a faintly mouldy mine-- not enough to make me sneeze, but with a distinctive smell and a tendency for pages to want to stick together.
It remains a fascinating snapshot of the pre-British Invasion/ Vietnam War world that I saw and read as a child: the Beat poets and modern American architecture (all of it hideous to my eye) and execrations of the growing emptiness of growing suburbia; profiles of up-and-coming entertainers like the young Stephen Sondheim, the young Marlon Brando, the young Mike Nichols and Elaine May; homages to the grand old men Andrew Wyeth and Robert Frost, encomia of the new Italian directors Fellini and Antonioni, pictures by (the young) Ronald Searle; and articles on odd corners of history and art, popular stuff but still informative. It just looks--- different, 50 years later with an adult understanding of what's being said. I think Horizon shaped my idea of what kind of world adults ought to live in, a world of style and ideas; I believed that New York or Paris in the 50s was some kind of heaven. But it wasn't that way at all, even from the viewpoint of the time.
Speaking of different on re-view: Sunday I finally saw Sen to Chihiro in Japanese on a big screen. It was good, of course; but my memory says the Bloor's screen was bigger and the whole thing more engrossing, the colours richer and more mysterious, when seen that first time, even from the balcony. Like the first time, I was seized mid-film with a need to pee, but this time I held out, slightly to the detriment of my concentration. Also was troubled by an attack of those chest knocks that are either anxiety or fluid in the lungs, and I never know which. But a nuisance, whichever. Because though I woke Sunday morning feeling better than in weeks, with energy to spare, by the time I finished with the film and got me home I was yawning at 11 and slept ten and a half hours, and was a draggled wreck the next day.
Thus I am not going to Omohide poro-poro this evening (starts at 8:45), having been up early for a sick child this morning and landed with an 8:15 shift for tomorrow. I'm yawning at 7:30 and anticipate a very early night. (Out the window a grey November sky is backing the blooming plum blossoms and the buildings are all shades of tan in the filtered western light. That was what the 50s looked like to me.)
