The Antisocial Socialist

Provisionally excited to hear about Ncuti Gatwa cast as the 14th Doctor. I have learned from experience not to get too excited over Doctor Who changes as it's always a crapshoot buuuuut combined with a showrunner who, for all his myriad flaws, can actually 1) tell a story and 2) has a basic handle as to who the Doctor is as a character, I am actually looking forward to watching it again. Gatwa was great in Sex Education (which I didn't finish watching for reasons and has the right kind of weird manic energy. His casting will also make the choads very mad, which I like as well.

I bet you would like to see how the tinykittens next door are doing.



( MOAR tinykittens )

Okay, I basically have the best birthday plans ever. (Note: My birthday is in May.)

Saturday, May 16th: Laibach are playing! I have never seen Laibach, and they are going to be down the street from me. I am contemplating going dressed as a communist kitten; at any rate, friends are encouraging me to do so. And possibly attend in a COMMUNIST KITTEN BLOC.

Sunday, May 17th: Driving down in a carload of wonderful people to see the live Welcome to Night Vale show in Buffalo, NY. I got hugely into it this year as a result of the podcasts being roughly the length of my walk to work—and also because it's amazeballs and people have been telling me to listen to it for years—and was kicking myself for missing the Toronto show when they toured in August, only a month or so before I finally got around to listening to it. But Buffalo is close. Ish. And it's a long weekend, so I don't need to be at work the next morning. Hence I get to see this thing, in what looks like a pretty theatre in a city where I'm told there is an excellent vegetarian restaurant.

Posting here because I think I have already irritated most of FB with my floating-cat-herding and communist-cat-herding organizing of contingents. But if you would care to join either the floating cats or the communist cats, tickets to both are apparently general admission (so I didn't have to do any herding after all—sorry, FB) and the more the merrier.

Basically, I am a very happy Miss Tabby right now, despite having the third most exciting thing that happened today being the biannual Sacrifice of the Trees, a.k.a., photocopying course outlines that no one will read.

3.7 kilos, up from last week's 3.6.

( Cut for gigantic cat pic )

Just finished watching the series finale of Breaking Bad, which means that I can go back on the internet. (I was mostly avoiding all sites because it's the one show where I care about spoilers.)

Gahhh, I loved it. Flawless finale to one of, if not, the most flawless television show ever made. The last season was so incredibly tense that I'm actually glad it's over; I keep joking that it was bad for my blood pressure, but really, I don't like to be that invested in fiction.

If anyone else wants to decompress, let's do so in the comments.

Eee! Last night, I finally made one of the Salon Noir events, which is an evening of cabaret and gothy awesomeness. It was apparently the right one to start off with because it featured the Sex Gang Children playing their first Toronto gig in 30 years. (As precocious a darkling as I was, I was not quite cool enough to hit up their show when I was 4.)

So the deal with Salon Noir is that it's held at a lovely venue, there's a strict dress code (hilariously reminiscent of the dress code at the Sanctuary Vampire Sex Bar, where I misspent much of my adolescence sneaking in underage), and everything and everyone is dazzlingly pretty. So, tamales and red wine and goth music and hangouts with friends old and new. I hadn't heard of the opening act, Scarlet Fever, but they were quite good. Amusingly, their singer looks exactly like Viserys Targaryen on Game of Thrones, but is a much nicer person. They were followed by DJ Uriel, spinning all of the songs that I like, two burlesque acts, including the drop-dead gorgeous Coco Framboise, and a sideshow act. Sex Gang Children were actually more awesome than I might have imagined—incredible stage presence and energy, and their new album is quite impressive.

I regret that I don't have photos to post, but I got the most awesome compliment on my outfit ever from a drunk girl who mistook me for one of the burlesque dancers. Heh.

And speaking of Sanctuary, I ran into Lance, the former proprietor of said establishment, who back in the day was kind enough to turn a blind eye to my underage ass sneaking into his club every weekend. He's a mortician now. I was vastly amused.

So yeah, that was a blast. And thanks to the_axel for finally dragging me out to one of these events, given that for a year and a half I keep saying Maybe to them on FB and then not managing to get tickets.

I would be remiss in not mentioning that I went to the completely mindblowing Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds show, courtesy of the awesomecakes the_axel and the_siobhan, last Saturday. Because, amazingness. Probably in the top three concerts I've ever seen. (Albeit amazingness tempered with the unfortunate realization that I will probably never get to see Blixa Bargeld in the line-up*, but that in itself is tempered by the exciting notion that his absence in the band means more Einsturzende Neubauten. Hopefully?)

The coolest bit for me as a Nice White Lady was that Grade 5 and 6 students from a St. Jamestown public school sang back-up, adding a really gorgeous and haunting dimension to what's already gorgeous and haunting music. (Yes, they were off-stage during "Stagger Lee." As an educator, I can assure you that the kids have now Googled the lyrics to that by now and are singing it in class.)

Speaking of which (NSFW):



* Everything is better with Blixa Bargeld. The Bad Seeds, hardware store commercials, romantic evenings with your significant other. Seriously, though, his presence is utterly mandatory for "Weeping Song."

While Treme is now only the second-best thing on TV (thanks to Breaking Bad being so good, not because its quality has gone down), you really should be watching it if you're not already. Here's the third season trailer:



Just finished watching the third season and it has given me all the feels and now I'm going to blather on about it in an effort to get you to watch. Or, better yet, starting a longer thread than the one I started on FB.

For those who have no idea what I'm on about at all, Treme is set in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and is written by the guys who did The Wire, but is strangely less depressing than The Wire. Mostly. This season takes place in 2007, just over two years after the storm. Relief money has flooded into the city, but corruption is rampant. Crime is still on the rise. Developers are looking for an opportunity to profit from the city's tragedy and remake New Orleans as a playground for tourists while expelling its mainly poor, mainly black original residents.



Things I loved

So much. I don't know where to start.

Let's start with Antoine, the closest thing the show has to a main character. When last we saw him, he finally caved to financial necessity and got a real job, coaching the marching band at his wife Desiree's school. If you guessed that this is my absolute favourite plot line of the season, you'd be right. He ends up bonding with a teenage girl who, while musically promising, has never learned to read. Through them, the story of the public school system in New Orleans, a test case for the Shock Doctrine, unfolds. It's heartwrenching and uplifting all at the same time.

I'd been hoping that Desiree would get a storyline of her own since season 1, and it finally happened this season. After her mother's house is torn down (her mother was forced to abandon it after the storm, but planned to renovate and return at some point), she hooks up with a bunch of community activists and bloggers documenting civic corruption. Watching Desiree raise hell is fantastic, and watching her relationship with Antoine evolve as they both come into their own ("Don't get arrested at the protest, dear") is excellent.

I hated LaDonna's plot last season—she's my favourite character, and I think Khandi Alexander is the best actor on the show—so it was nice that this season's plot was slightly less horrifying. Slightly. Circumstances force her to move in with her bore of a husband's snooty family, and she actually gets some comedic moments out of it, which is good. And then in the second half of the season she's back to dealing with the trial of her rapists, and their friends intimidating her, and it would be completely awful were it not for the fact that her storyline after three seasons finally collides with Albert, my second-favourite character. And they hit it off. Possibly romantically. I actually made noises at the screen. Happy, happy noises.

Albert's plot completely depressed the shit out of me but it was really good. I've been convinced they were going to kill him off every season, and now he has cancer. There's an easy story in there, where the old radical passes the torch to his prodigal son, but they keep subverting that because both Albert and Delmond are more complicated than that. Delmond gets involved with a seemingly altruistic development project that makes all the right noises about involving the community, running up against his father's cynicism and relatively extreme politics, and to my utter joy, Albert gets to be right.

Loved the new characters. Louis, a grad student, aspiring investigative journalist and dorky metalhead, is awesome. I was sad to see him go in the last episode, but I was so convinced that he was going to be killed off that it was nice to see him get on a plane and away from the NOPD. I'm not sure if the FBI guy was in previous seasons—I feel like he might have been in one or two episodes—but I really liked him too.

Janette being back in New Orleans. And boinking Jacques. Alas, both of these plots are headed in an unfortunate trajectory but there were some moments of pure happy there. Also moments of food porn. It makes me wish her restaurant was a real place and I wasn't a vegetarian.

Two biggest surprises: The show finally managed to convince me that Toni/Terry was a good idea, and getting me solidly invested in Sonny/Lin/Lin's family. Given that I wanted Sonny to die horribly in season 1, it's amazing how much I was rooting for him to not fuck up his life. I feel like this is a natural end for their story and I'll be disappointed if they reappear in S4, but I thought it was genuinely touching and surprising.

What impressed me most about the season: The subtle but relentless tension. I was seriously a nervous wreck watching the last half. Without having a shocking death like in the last two seasons, the sense that the characters' lives were precarious, that the stakes were real, and that horrible things were coming was incredibly visceral. It got to the point where I would reach the end of an episode and be relieved that everyone had survived at the end. Most of the violence is understated (the worst thing we see, Henry Glover's murder, happens off-screen) but that just makes it all the more realistic.

Things I didn't so much love

Sad to say it, but Davis was boring this season. After going through immense character growth, he's back to his S1 self: whiny, obnoxious, and inconsiderate. I do like the "I Quit" song and very much hope that there's a full, uncensored version floating out there somewhere. But really. STFU Davis.

Annie was also boring, other than when she was playing fiddle or revealing that her mother is Isabella Rossellini. I wouldn't have minded so much if her success=corruption story hadn't so closely paralleled Janette's; it has Unfortunate Implications. The two female characters having to sell out in order to realize their dreams, contrasted with Delmond's continued rise—and refusal, in the last episode, to compromise his ethics—was a wee bit problematic.

Nelson showed hints of being interesting in S2, but seems to have shed that complexity now. Which isn't the worst thing, since the Jazz Center plot is so complicated that having more than one character evolve through it might have made things confusing. But he still got way too much screen time.


Shorter sabotabby: It's amazing. There is, alas, only one half-season left despite it being one of the most relevant, engaging, beautifully made TV shows I have ever seen. Go watch it!

I did something mildly out of character and went to the ballet last night.

I say out of character because while I'm a bougie snob who loves opera, ballet is not generally my thing. I mean, I have a hard time connecting to dance in general; I like it as part of other things (Opera Atelier's dance sequences are always fun) but on its own, I find it inaccessible and unless someone's really awful or there's something incredibly strange going on, I can't tell the difference between okay dance and really great dance. But—the National Ballet was doing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. and I am a sucker for that in any form.



At any rate, it was spectacular. I don't know much about dance, but the maniacally athletic White Rabbit was amazing to watch. The performance seemed to be a hybrid of traditional ballet, tap, and modern, the latter two of which I find more comprehensible than the former.

I do know something about staging, and this was some of the coolest I've seen in a good long time. They went all-out with massive sets and video projection and, well, this:



If you can't make it out from the picture, each part of the Cheshire Cat is being manipulated by one or two puppeteers, so the whole thing can move or come apart. It struck the absolute perfect balance between adorable and terrifying, which can also be said for most of the show.

Other highlights: The Sweeney-Todd-esque scene with the Cook and the Duchess, complete with gigantic dangling organs, the flamingo croquet scene with the hedgehogs played by tiny children, and the Mad Tea Party with the most adorable Dormouse.

The production wasn't without flaws, namely the Knave of Hearts being a totally unnecessary love interest for Alice, and an overly Orientalist take on the Caterpillar, but overall it was really quite amazing. I think it's on for two more days—we were able to get half-price tickets in the orchestra section, so there's still a chance if you're local and want to catch it.

There is not a lot that could get me out to Nuit Blanche (which combines huge drunken crowds, exhaustion, cold, and corporate sponsorship of the arts) but I have very few celebrity crushes, and one of them was speaking at it. Accordingly, I ventured out to Symposium: Until the End of the World to see Slavoj Žižek talk about the apocalypse at Toronto City Hall.



( the apocalypse will be averted because the Communists will win )