Has it only been three years? The calendar tells us that we’re now a few days into Year Four of Covid. If the pandemic were an undergrad, it would be well on its way to a Bachelor’s. As many have said, the passage of time has been so off kilter for so long that I honestly can’t decide if it feels like the original lockdown was ten years ago or six months ago. At the moment it feels like forever ago, that this bloody thing has always been with us. Yet I’m hearing from businesses—including restaurants—that sales have nearly recovered to pre-pandemic numbers, that people are increasingly out shopping and eating. That’s pretty much what we’ve been seeing, too, and with the weather warming up I suspect that spring 2023 is going to look a lot like spring 2019…The shoulder season—for travel and news: Our main man Don Rickers is off on a European holiday for a couple of weeks, so there may be a bit of a lull in the breaking news around these parts. That’s about par for the course anyway, as this is tends to be the slowest time of year for news. In decades past the lull came during the “dog days of August,” but there hasn’t been a quiet August, news-wise, for a good 25 years or so now. All this said, keep those tips and story ideas coming to [email protected]….One such tip got our attention: As you may have seen from our reporting over the last two weeks, a reader tip led us to East Fonthill and Port Robinson Rd., where, unbelievably, vehicular traffic exiting from 90-plus homes in various new developments is not controlled by a single stop sign. Adding to the incredulity, this is perfectly permissible under Ontario’s Highway Traffic Act. Well, as the proverb goes, sometimes the law is an ass. That something so clearly contrary to the public good is legal is bad enough. That those who developed, built, and/or now manage these streets full of condominiums seem unwilling to install their own stop signs is inexcusable. How much could it possibly cost to erect four stop signs? Is this greed, stupidity, or willful ignorance of common sense?
We didn’t last for the last of The Last of Us: We tried. This dystopian HBO drama was so well reviewed, so well spoken of, that we were expecting to be blown away. Instead, we got halfway through episode 2 before skipping ahead to what we thought was the finale (turned out there was one more episode to come). Then we bailed after getting ten minutes into the real finale. I won’t catalogue the deficiencies. I’ll just say that if you ever want to adapt what’s basically a zombie-themed video game into a television series, here’s your model, because that’s what happened. A first-person shooter game that the producers and writers managed to turn into a sequence of largely predictable, plodding set pieces. With a cranky teenage girl along to complain about everything. Well, I’ve said it before and I’ll harangue you with it again: For not just dystopian drama, but for one of the best television series of all time—up there with The Sopranos, The Wire, The Bob Newhart Show, The Office, Veep, Mad Men—is Station Eleven. It’s an HBO Max production available through Crave. It suffered from bad timing, given its appearance in January 2022, when the world already had plenty of real-life dystopia on its plate. Yet this is a series that will still be as relevant ten years from now as it is today, an exquisitely crafted piece of art on every level. In fact, the 2014 Canadian novel it’s based on was named to this year’s Canada Reads Shortlist, one of five books to be debated on CBC starting next Monday.
Performance art of a different kind: At Christmas, over our abbreviated break before the launch of PelhamToday, I took the advice of a friend and went looking for Buster Keaton comedies on YouTube and elsewhere. For understandable reasons—yet incorrectly—as a kid I had lumped Keaton in with The Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy and other early slapstick comedians of the 1920s and '30s—you know, the visual gagsters whose routines were derived from vaudeville, and who didn’t require much in the way of brainpower to appreciate. How wrong I was. Keaton was truly a genius, ahead of his time both artistically and as a filmmaker. If you’ve suffered from the same prejudice, do yourself a big favour and go poking around on YouTube. His short films from the ‘20s are the best. Meanwhile, here’s one his last performances, The Railrodder, made in 1965 for the National Film Board of Canada, extolling the scenic and other virtues of our fine nation. Enjoy!
