Jesus Christ Superstar review

(Members of the company in Jesus Christ Superstar. Photography by David Hou)


Jesus Christ Superstar

Lyrics by Tim Rice
Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber
Directed by Des McAnuff


Avon Theatre
until October 29





(No spoilers below but still a warning: I don't talk about the shows in any detail because I believe in virginity when approaching art. Hopefully, by telling you what I like, you can figure out how to position yourself vis-a-vis my impressions and take it from there. Sorry for the vague modifiers and feel free to read this apology as a mask for lack of erudition. Either way, I still think this is for your own good.)


As a non-fan of musical theatre, I don't possess the necessary scope of knowledge nor the experience of a seasoned musicals spectator to write a review with the necessary critical acumen. This situation does not invalidate this endeavour I think since my point with this review is to tell you should believe all those extravagantly glowing and awe-struck critical reactions to the 2011 Stratford production of Jesus Christ Superstar. Critics have been promiscuous in dispensing superlatives for this show, so much so that readers might resist believing the hype. I'm here to set you straight, you with your hard earned cynicism and doubtfulness. I hope that my input as someone who doesn't like musical theatre and who likes Andrew Lloyd Webber even less might prove a useful gauge.


I would not have gone to see Jesus Christ Superstar had I not being obligated out of friendship. I was dreading it. I think I saw a few seconds of the film version on television once. I had to switch it off so irritating I found it. As we were making our way into the Avon Theatre to see Des McAnuff's version of the show, my companion who knows my feelings about musicals and Webber whispered to me, "close your eyes and think of England". 


As an audience member who had to be won, the energy on stage was probably the first thing that pulled me in. Not one hint of a grocery or to-do list ever entered flashed passed my ADHD brain. I can be deliberately reluctant (and so can you, hipster that you are) especially when my image as an artsy chic who is sooo cutting edge aesthetically is under threat. Redde Caesari quae sunt Caesaris: when faced with a convergence of such talent in conception and execution, to refuse to surrender and open up to the experience would have proved to be a form of self-injury.


The show only got better as it went along. Everyone, every aspect of the show is outstanding — costumes, sets, lighting, choreography, music, everything. Let's just say that the show is better than the sum of its parts; if you think about it, that is quite rare in live performance.


I do hope Josh Young isn't reading the reviews. He is wondrous and shouldn't be spoiled by excess of critical adulation. The part of Judas puts him at an advantage as it is by far the meatier part of the play. It allows for a range and depth rarely seen in the far too often thinly-drawn characters typical of the genre. You expect Judas to do a good job but Young connects with the audience from beginning to end. He's as stellar as an actor can be without ripping the carpet from under the rest of the show. Brilliant actor and singer. 


Pilate is potentially complex but with so little time on stage, I doubt many actors who have played the part in the past have been able to telegraph as much as Brent Carver  does in the role. Carver renders Pilate's turmoil with immediacy and quiet directness, a subtle feat in what is a crude artistic context (the musical theatre context, that is). He conveys sense of interiority to the audience while "rock" music is blasting. I could not help but be moved by his tears streaming down his face as he condemned Jesus.


I was entertained and compelled and that would have been more than enough but the show only got better. 


Jonathan Winsby does a great job in the lead role considering he was the understudy. Winsby is replacing Paul Nolan who is experiencing health problems. I saw Jonathan give a courageous performance in what was only his third performance. Some members of the public have expressed their disappointment at not seeing Nolan on stage, or so I've read. As a musical theatre neophyte, I have no idea what it is I am missing but Jonathan Winsby was especially good in the second half where he displayed Christ-like charisma and pain and feeling. 


I don't understand the politics of how such decisions are made but I understand performed in the premiere even though his voice was strained. I wish Winsby had performed. Now the "real" critics won't review his performance and that is a great shame.


Felicitations as well to Chillina Kennedy, that public and media darling on account of successful musical performances in previous Stratford seasons. Her voice and acting as disarmingly natural, she was a wonderful surprise to me.

When I got home after the show, I downloaded the motion picture soundtrack from iTunes. Now, I would like the record to reflect that I have not suddenly turned into a musical theatre nut. I simply wanted to confirm my suspicion that this Jesus Christ Superstar is a more insightful interpretation than the movie version. It is, by leaps and bounds. Kudos to Rick Fox, musical director. 


The musical theatre genre is a mystery to me for many reasons and I was always particularly intrigued by the relationship between a musical director, choreographer and director. I'm not sure what it is that McAnuff does when he directs a musical although one can logically deduct that part of his job consists in fusing different forms of expression together. He demonstrates his mastery throughout but the King Herod's Song number is an especially noteworthy example. I genuinely bow to Bruce Dow's Herod and ALL other aspects of this number — seriously, don't read about this scene in reviews, it will spoil your fun. In the end though, it is McAnuff who deserves idolisation for making this idiosyncratic scene work in the context as a sombre second half. To stage the scene as he does is a courageous move. Striking the wrong tone might have destroyed the rest of the show. The number brought down the house.


Jesus Christ Superstar has yet to make me want to see more musicals. To me, it is a genre saps meaning from story. I like to be entertained and I like to just have a  good time but, for me, that is contingent on substance. McAnuff's Jesus Christ Superstar isn't Chekov but it is extraordinary in itself. Even though I speak from a self-declared position of ignorance, I think the critical input around this show affords me the liberty to proclaim this Jesus Christ Superstar the best that musical theatre can be.

Theatre and missionary sex

Random theatre photo: Tantalos, a theatre company in Iran rehearsing Medea

My first Shakespeare performance was in my native French at Le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in Montréal. I didn’t know a word of English until my late teens and had only experienced Shakespeare in French thus far. Le Théâtre du Nouveau Mondeis one of the best renowned and prestigious theatre in Québec. I saw Le songe d’une nuit d’été directed by Robert Lepage. The production was erotically charged, if not explicit, erotic enough that I was glad I sat next to classmates and not my parents. We’d gone as a group of classmates to get a school group fare but Midsummer was not assigned that year so we hadn’t read it. When we talked to our teacher about it the next day, he said that a highly sexualised interpretation of Midsummer was right there in the text and that Lepage didn’t take much liberties at all.

Lepage’s production was a feast of colours and movement. It was frenetic and self-assured, the actors were bouncing off poles and scaffolds in a manner I would describe as well-adjusted and joyous crystal meth addicts. I remember Puck (played by a woman) often screaming her lines out to great effect. The overall effect was rather like having been brutalised emotionally and yet my memory isn’t doing this production justice after all these years because it was punctuated with beautiful moments of quietness and tenderness. Again, Lepage gave us a completely justifiable interpretation of the text with its Dionysian tendencies. I’d never seen anything like this in my life and I wanted it again and more every day. We went for coffee after the show and alternated between talking over each other and long silences whilst we were replaying bits in our heads and tried to make sense of what we’d seen.

I’m telling you this because of online discussions I’ve participated in over the weekend after the announcement that Des McAnuff will be leaving his post as artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival at the end of the 2013 season and the announcement of the 2012 season line up. There was some disgruntlement over a so-called “Shakespeare” festival would only be offering three Shakespeare plays next year and the production of crowd pleasers like You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown. If some Canadians cheer a right-wing fembots on cable TV for spewing vitriol over the public financing of a contemporary dancer, (Google Margie Gillis and Sun TV News) others wonder whether tax payers should foot the bill for Canadian productions of Broadway blockbusters. My take on it is that if Charlie Brown pays for Sophocles (also part of the 2012 season), I’ll take it.

McAnuff seems to have been a popular AD and many are sad to see him go. I’m not in the know enough to participate in discussions judging his AD-ship but every Stratford production I’ve seen under McAnuff’s tenure has been of high quality. In one discussion, we did muse about who would make a good replacement and I argued for an iconoclast.

In reading what follows, please don’t think I have a bad opinion of Ontario theatre versus Québec theatre. I lived in London for several years and saw the likes of Jacobi, Stevenson, Fiennes, Ejiofor and Russell Beale in pedestrian productions that had the imagination and experimental qualities of missionary sex. I have seen wonderfully inventive theatre in Toronto but, and there is a but, I have seen it mostly in tiny theatres, productions the mass public doesn’t easily have access to. I can assert this because even me, as someone who occasionally works in theatre, often almost miss such amazing productions, so ephemeral and small scale they are. 

What I am comparing are the big, prestigious non-for-profit Québec versus Ontario theatres who at least dabble in repertoire and new productions and get millions of dollars in funding year after year. My knowledge is not comprehensive but from my point of view one province is far more willing to challenge its audience than the other. Is this a cultural thing? Are Ontario audiences far more conservative? I truly could not tell you but when I saw the Lepage (sorry, him again) production ofProject Andersen at CanStage last year, the theatre was so packed, one could hardly breathe. One thing we’re aware of as audience members even if we’re not paying attention to others is the level of attention being directed to the show in front of us. Not one cough, I tell you. I’ve never seen such a captive audience since I moved to Ontario almost ten years ago. Too bad the word “rapture” has taken such unfortunate connotations these days as it would have proved a fitting term.

Talking to other commenters online, the issue of audience development came up as it always does. In terms of content, do we reach for the audience with crowd-pleasing productions or do we ask the audience to rise the material? I refuse this idea that the internet and Xbox have drawn bums off theatre seats. People between the ages of twenty and fifty (an age group woefully underrepresented in theatre audiences) do drop one to two hundred dollars on a meal at a trendy restaurant rather than go to the theatre. That’s, I do know.

Thinking more generally about why many people don’t go to the theatre it struck me that maybe some people stay home because they are more challenged there. Television has come a long way and the risks and experiments taken by shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood, Rome, Breaking Bad, and so on make many contemporary theatre productions seem positively provincial. I’m not taking about mature language, violence and sex but about complex, substantive, layered content which forces me to think and sparks many long conversations in aforementioned eateries discussing David Chase, David Milch, David Simon and Matthew Weiner (respectively creators of The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire and Mad Men). Look for Bill Moyers’ interview of David Simon or the five hour interview of Matthew Weiner by the American Television Archive on youtube. These are thinking men with a highly developed sense of aesthetics. My point is this though: if television takes more risk than theatre then there is something very wrong and perhaps we cannot chastise an audience for not turning up.

Theatre has advantages over other media: intimacy and immediacy. When done well, it’s an art form that distinguishes itself from the pack in its visceral impact. I don’t expect every single play I see to achieve this but I certainly think it should try. Or not. Maybe I just need to learn my place, maybe I belong in tiny theatres at the end of dark alleys. I don’t mind going there but it’s a tad strange that someone like me who lives a very middle-class lifestyle and who is getting rather long in the tooth feels the need to turn to countercultural outlets of theatre. That’s not the case with other art forms. HBO and Ian McEwan are mainstream, they are not the “dark alleys” of their medium. I can’t imagine I’m the only one who feels this way, it is possible that theatre are not filled, or not filled with people who are going to be alive in twenty years from now because theatre does not go far enough. We may need to rethink this idea that one can never underestimate the taste of the population.

I have recently moved from Toronto to Stratford and I’m having a great time going to the festival this year. No production has turned me inside out yet, but every show I’ve seen has been good. Repertory demands great acting talent and, to be honest, that level of quality is rarely found in my “alleys”. An actor needs time, support, and mentors to achieve great performances. This takes money and Stratford is obviously a great place for actors to hone their skills. I am truly grateful I will get to see every Stratford show this year. There is nothing like the best lines ever penned down in humankind being spoken by the best actors in the world. When I first saw Simon Russell Beale playing Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi, I felt completely overtaken by him. Let’s be blunt about it, missionary sex with a great partner can be hugely satisfying.

Despite all this, I must admit, I’m still puzzled over why the big Ontario productions I’ve seen in the last ten years stand so far away from the precipice. I’m not talking about stunts like actors urinating on stage, shock for shock value. I’m not a prude and I understand how certain extremes have a dialectical purpose in art but I’m far more conservative than that. We all have our thresholds and as an artist I do force myself to see what I know will make me feel uncomfortable at times but I’m not sure this is a demand on the audience that can/should be applied widely. So, I’m a bit conservative but “Truth is beauty, beauty, truth…” is my motto and this means that when I see a Shakespeare play on stage I want to see something I’ve never seen before. The text affords theatremakers unlimited possibilities. On the other hand, I do know a few SSF people personally and I get the feeling they do feel the festival has its edgy tendencies. It’s all subjective. 

The matter of the audience, in my humble opinion, is a broader social question; it’s the commitment to educate children to be subversive aesthetically because that is the only way to nourish and advance culture. I’ll extend Woody Allen’s comparison of selachimorphas and love and state that culture is like a shark. If it stops moving, it dies. If there is one thing we can all agree on I think it’s the notion that we, our contemporaries, do all kinds of things not to be numbed. Video games, extreme sports, and all kinds of behaviours online and off. I want to add theatre to be on this list, a theatre that not only excites but takes us to the precipice because the precipice is where art happens. It’s where a life is examined and therefore understood and truly lived. It is where we feel in a world that numbs us.

Great Mad Men interview

I haven't watched all five hours of this Archive on American Television interview from Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner but it is proving to be riveting stuff so far. From his family background, to his education, to the show itself, this series of interview deserves to be archived and will be valuable to television historians, makers and fans for generations to come.

Weiner is an interesting one: I remember an online interview in which he alluded to all mothers being like Betty and reading commenting, "like, well, uh, no..." It was clear that Betty was based on his mother. His mother, he explains, was a lawyer who couldn't find work because she had children and no firm would hire her. This turned her into a very unhappy and frustrated woman. As far as Don goes, he is also apparently based on Weiner's father, a prominent doctor with better lineage than his fictional counterpart.

Matthew Weiner was a writer for The Sopranos along with showrunner David Chase, the heart and soul of The Sopranos who based Tony's mother, Livia was also based on Chase's mother. Ouch. Apparently we should thank evil mothers for contributing in giving us the best television of all time. You can find a couple of hour long interviews with David Chase on Charlie Rose's website, but for Mad Men people, I recommend you put time aside to sit back and watch these fascinating Weiner interviews below:

Part one:


Part two:


Part three:


Part four:


Part five:


Part six:


Part seven:

Snow in Toronto - Anatomy of a Tragedy

Today it snowed.

In Toronto.

There are about three inches right now and the white stuff is still falling and searing through our skin like the ashes of a nuclear winter.




Here's a gut wrenching testimony:

TIFF at the Bell Lightbox - The Essential 100 Films

How many of these films have you seen? "This list represents the merging of one 100 film list as determined by an expert panel of TIFF curators with one 100 film list as determined by TIFF stakeholders." We are so lucky to have that place

Roger Ebert admits he's only seen 92. I'm afraid I've only seen 48. How many have you seen?

Ok, just on a personal note, isn't it The Bicycle Thief and WTF is bloody Amélie doing on the list?

Here's the list


1 THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (Carl Theodor Dreyer)
2 CITIZEN KANE (Orson Welles)
3 L'AVVENTURA (Michaelangelo Antonioni)
4 THE GODFATHER (Francis Ford Coppola)
5 PICKPOCKET (Robert Bresson)
6 SEVEN SAMURAI (Akira Kurosawa)
7 PATHER PANCHALI (Satyajit Ray)
8 CASABLANCA (Michael Curtiz)
9 MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (Dziga Vertov)
10 BICYCLE THIEVES (Vittorio De Sica)
11 ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
12 8 ½ (Federico Fellini)
13 BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (Sergei Eisenstein)
14 RASHOMON (Akira Kurosawa)
15 TOKYO STORY (Yasujiro Ozu)
16 THE 400 BLOWS (François Truffaut)
17 UGETSU (Kenji Mizoguchi)
18 BREATHLESS (Jean-Luc Godard)
19 L'ATALANTE (Jean Vigo)
20 CINEMA PARADISO (Giuseppe Tornatore)
21 LA GRANDE ILLUSION (Jean Renoir)
22 LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (David Lean)
23 PERSONA (Ingmar Bergman)
24 GONE WITH THE WIND (Victor Fleming)
25 SUNRISE (F.W. Murnau)
26 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (Stanley Kubrick)
27 VOYAGE IN ITALY (Roberto Rossellini)
28 AMÉLIE (Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
29 CITY LIGHTS (Charlie Chaplin)
30 STAR WARS (George Lucas)
31 SHERLOCK JR. (Buster Keaton)
32 RULES OF THE GAME (Jean Renoir)
33 THE LEOPARD (Luchino Visconti)
34 LA DOLCE VITA (Federico Fellini)
35 L’ARRIVÉE D’UN TRAIN À LA CIOTAT (Frères LumiereLouis Lumière and Auguste Lumière)
36 THE WIZARD OF OZ (Victor Fleming)
37 LA JETÉE (Chris Marker)
38 VERTIGO (Alfred Hitchcock)
39 NIGHT AND FOG (Alain Resnais)
40 PULP FICTION (Quentin Tarantino)
41 THE SEARCHERS (John Ford)
42 SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (Danny Boyle)
43 THE CONFORMIST (Bernardo Bertolucci)
44 CITY OF GOD (Fernando Meirelles)
45 TAXI DRIVER (Martin Scorsese)
46 APOCALYPSE NOW (Francis Ford Coppola)
47 SALÓ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
48 THE SEVENTH SEAL (Ingmar Bergma)
49 LE VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE (Georges Méliès)
50 METROPOLIS (Fritz Lang)
51 THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (Gillo Pontecorvo)
52 IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Wong Kar Wai)
53 VIRIDIANA (Luis Buñuel)
54 LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (Roberto Benigni)
55 THE SORROW AND THE PITY (Marcel Ophüls)
56 PAN'S LABYRINTH (Guillermo del Toro)
57 THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE… (Max Ophüls)
58 BLADE RUNNER (Ridley Scott)
59 THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES (Abbas Kiarostami)
60 LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS (Marcel Carné)
61 BRINGING UP BABY (Howard Hawks)
62 SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (Stanley Donen)
63 JOHNNY GUITAR (Nicholas Ray)
64 A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (Stanley Kubrick)
65 MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea)
66 M (Fritz Lang)
67 SCORPIO RISING (Kenneth Anger)
68 PSYCHO (Alfred Hitchcock)
69 DUST IN THE WIND (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)
70 SCHINDLER’S LIST (Steven Spielberg)
71 NASHVILLE (Robert Altman)
72 CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (Ang Lee)
73 WAVELENGTH (Michael Snow)
74 JULES ET JIM (François Truffaut)
75 CHRONIQUE D’UN ÉTÉ (Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch)
76 THE LIVES OF OTHERS (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)
77 GREED (Erich von Stroheim)
78 SOME LIKE IT HOT (Billy Wilder)
79 JAWS (Steven Spielberg)
80 ANNIE HALL (Woody Allen)
81 THE BIRTH OF A NATION (D.W. Griffith)
82 CHUNGKING EXPRESS (Wong Kar Wai)
83 LA NOIRE DE… (Ousmane Sembene)
84 RAGING BULL (Martin Scorsese)
85 THE MALTESE FALCON (John Huston)
86 CHINATOWN (Roman Polanski)
87 ANDREI RUBLEV (Andrei Tarkovsky)
88 WINGS OF DESIRE (Wim Wenders)
89 VIDEODROME (David Cronenberg)
90 WRITTEN ON THE WIND (Douglas Sirk)
91 THE THIRD MAN (Carol Reed)
92 BLUE VELVET (David Lynch)
93 THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (Sergio Leone)
94 BREAKING THE WAVES (Lars von Trier)
95 A NOS AMOURS (Maurice Pialat)
96 CLEO DE 5 A 7 (Agnès Varda)
97 ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (Pedro Almodóvar)
98 EARTH (Aleksandr Dovzhenko)
99 OLDBOY (Park Chan-wook)
100 PLAYTIME (Jacques Tati)

Xmas music and film - Day Three

No Room in the Inn

Today's discovery thanks to Sam. A beautiful gospel Christmas song.

Pippi Goes on Board

What's Christmas without Pippi? I grew watching Pippi in French and much prefer the dubbing in la langue de Molière but Pippi's spirit transcends all language barriers.

Xmas music and film - Day Two

Are you ready for Badder Santa?

It's easier for me to give my mother a list of books and DVDs to buy so I don't get ten boxes of chocolates or a gift card to a store I would never be caught dead being seen in. So, I few years ago, mom and her friends went Christmas shopping and when they saw that mom's daughter wanted Badder Santa, they ALL thought, what a great idea, let's ALL buy Badder Santa. When I learned of this, caught between delight at the DVD I had just unwrapped and the sense that I might have coronary any second now, I just put the DVD aside and tried not to think about it too much.

If you're not in the know, know this: Badder Santa is very, very rude. In every conceivable way. That being said, if you can bear rudeness, this will surely become one of your favourite Christmas movies. The comedic genius in this film stems not from its depravity but from the intelligence in its treatment of it. Any concession to propriety here would diminish the film. 

The film is dedicated to John Ritter who passed shortly after the making of this film. It is the best performance of his life. Within a couple of years, the comic world would also lose Bernie Mac who renders a pitch perfect performance in "Badder Santa". "Pitch perfect" is a term that is overused these days in describing performance, but it is the proper phrase here, Mac makes you believe in every breath he takes on camera and every pore of his being is in character. This is quite a feat when one consider that his character has little naturalism to it, but is a rather mannered, fanciful conception.

If you see Badder Santa and laugh, I will have earned my stars for Christmas.

"Happy Kwanza!"

Do I really need to say WARNING: explicit content. Don't get Bad Santa which was censored by our charming friends over at the MPAA, get Badder Santa.

Badder Santa

Terry Zwigoff

Ok, this may be not the greatest song but I loved it as a kid

Barefoot Santa Claus

Sonny James

Xmas music and film - Day One

Wild Billy Childish & The Musicians Of The British Empire

A Poundland Christmas

Without Billy Childish, it wouldn't be a punk rock Christmas

Metropolitan

Whit Stillman

One of the best Christmas movies of all time.

Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair Munk Debates, part two

Continuing the Munk Debate clips. Parts six to nine.

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

Part Nine

Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair Munk Debates, part one

Journalist and atheist Christopher Hitchens debates UK ex-PM Tony Blair a recent Catholic convert on  the motion that religion is a force for good. This Munk Debate took place at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto last Friday.

The debate was made public by the organisers in nine parts which I am embedding below starting with parts two to five. The debate begins somewhere in the middle of the second clip. Parts six to nine will appear in a later post.





Part Three




Part Four



Part Five

Listgirl

My mother never allowed Xmas decorations in the house until 8 December which marks the Catholic holiday of the Immaculate Conception... hmmm, so the baby was born on the 25th and the immaculate conception was... Never mind. This is Religion and it doesn't invite Logic to its parties.

Traditions need not have meaning and I find the date useful because from Immaculate Conception to the Epiphany — Magi and the cake with the hidden bean, I dig — from 8 December to 6 January, is 30 days. One month of greed and excess.

To me, it's an important month. Christmas is comprised of the things I love most in life all put together.

People 

Holidays are peopled. Family people, friend people, work people. A few of them are bound to get drunk and tell me they really, really love me. People just don't seem to tell me they love me nearly as much when they are sober.

Food

I pack it in. I live in Canada. C-A-N-A-D-A. The land of animals with blubber. Why? Because fat protects you from the cold. It is my duty to eat so I when I get the flu or a cold it doesn't turn into pneumonia and I don't waste away and die. Wasting away would be most unkind to the taxpayer who pay for my UNIVERSAL healthcare (raspberry to Americans) or to the aforementioned people who love me and who are going to be grief stricken and in turn be less immune to disease and disaster. 

Food excess is easier than booze in the sense that the buffer zone between excess and the need for a vomitorium allows for a Gargantuesque margin of error. The only reason I’m not worried about booze now is because I’m older and mature and I’ve learned. The hard way.

Booze

Bad people prefer water. Look at Noah's Flood. Yes, I'm an atheist, but this a religious month, so Bible lessons count. 

Let it flow. The mulled wine. The eggnog (ew) without the egg (yum). The sparkling wine. The cocktails. 'Tis the season for my famous French onion soup drenched in beef broth and white wine. Rum balls. Brandy sauce on everything.

Snow

Yes, I won the lottery of the womb. Not only do I live in the land that invented universal healthcare but our Christmases are white. Don’t talk to me about Scandinavia, Canada is better for me. I’m not interested in being tall and blonde and perfect about everything all the time and be light years ahead of the rest of humanity socially and in every other conceivable way. Just last week, I read that women in Sweden are the happiest because there is no sexism to speak of there. Fuck Sweden and their perfect world. My Christmas includes homeless people down the street and that makes me sad (I’m sure they are sadder) but I wouldn’t want to live in Perfect Scandinavian Land because I am far, far, far from being perfect and would stick out like a sore thumb. Hmm. Where was I?

Everything’s Lit Up

I have no time for environmentalists from the 8th to the 6th. Ok, that’s not true. I have LED Christmas lights and I continue recycling but I switch the lights on at sundown (around 4 pm) and leave them on until I go to bed. I also purchase a real Christmas tree every year because they smell so good and artificial trees are just as bad for the environment it turns out. I live north and in the darkest nights I need lights and the evergreen to remind me that, one day, Spring will come and the earth will be reborn. At least, that my story.

Books

People buy me books at Christmas. Thank you Jesus!

Concerts/Shows/ Carols

Relatives take you to see The Nutcracker ten years in row until you have a Nutckracker melt down and you tell the mothership that Aunt Marianne can go fuck herself, I am (I mean you are) NOT going to see the Nutcracker EVER AGAIN, that freak who covered you in your cousin's mink coat and took you to the opera from the time you were seven — ok, that was kinda cool and kinda scary, but mostly cool. 

Thing is, it was time. “You” needed to detach from both the nest and the extended nest and go to nightclubs and maybe screw around which, oddly enough, isn't as soul crushing an experience to go through between the Immaculate Conception and the Epiphany. A bit like screwing around on holiday, it's like it doesn't really count. 

And then you grow up and don't froth at the mouth as much when a friend drags you to church. And those carols are really, really lovely. And then you drag a friend, or, heck, a family member, a cousin, to see Twelth Night. And you go to hear The Messiah. You go out to see concerts and shows more because your mind gently blocks out that heart attack you're going to have come the Visa and Mastercard bills late January and right now the plastic cards inside your wallet are magic. Christmas magic.

Lists

I love making lists. All these things I'm going to do, I am such a busy little bee. An industrious ant who needs a planning committee to get everything in my social butterfly life done.  

Lists. Christmas is so satisfying that way. List of people who get Christmas cards. Actually three Xmas card lists (bliss!), the list that'll require Canadian stamps, the US list and the international stamps list. List of recipes to make for parties. List of food and booze to buy for parties. List of gifts to buy. Christmas list for the mothership and those who have learned long ago not to "surprise" me with a book I likely have already. List of movies to watch.

And we come, finally (sorry, was I rambling?) to the point of this blog. 

Every year, I list 30 movies for the 8th to the 6th. I never get to watch them all but it something to strive for. The list has a three year rotation after two years... and this blog is too long already and the list so complex and in need of fine tuning so I'll explain soon and we can have fun make lists together!

Smoochies

From the New Yorker, airport security-related cartoons

By Frank Cotham, February 24, 1997

And many more great cartoons here.

Handel Messiah flash mob

Thank you to FB friend Stacey for posting this flash mob vid. Shot in Ontario this year at a Welland shopping centre.

Hmm... this is a tough one

Who to hate most, Henry Rollins or hipsters?

Acting masterclass

I'm afraid I find myself compelled to share this vid every year. Theatre and female friendship. This French and Saunders skit hits all the right notes without making you feel ill-ease on a Ricky-Gervais-humour scale. Comedy at its best.