What I'm Watching

This is a monthly post wherein I list the movies I’ve watched, the TV I’m watching and the music I’m listening to.

Movies I’ve Watched:

• CFNY: The Spirit of the Radio (2026): This is a hagiographic but interesting documentary about Toronto’s CFNY. Unfortunately I watched the TVO edit so nearly 1/3rd (1/3rd!!!) of it was cut so I have no idea how fair I was in my review.

• The Corpse Vanishes (1942): This is a silly horror movie that is sort of a suburban US Dracula, starring the man himself (Bela Lugosi).

• How to Marry a Millionaire (1953): Jenn got me to rewatch this and I was a lot nicer to it the second time. My takes on these “Golden Age” Hollywood films have softened.

• The Menu (2022): I really enjoyed this satire/thriller/horror film about restaurants with tasting menus. Jenn and I are these people but hopefully much less awful than the diners here. I wanted to see it at TIFF ‘22 but couldn’t get tickets. What a year for big movies attacking the rich, eh? There was one of the Knives Out films plus this and Triangle Sadness and they all got attention. How times have changed. (Now it’s no longer cool to eat the rich but it’s cool if the rich eat us! Well, at least in 2024 it was.)

• Otona no miru ehon - Umarete wa mita keredo (1932): I didn’t really enjoy this coming-of-age silent comedy from one of the greats of Japanese cinema. The first Ozu comedy I’ve seen, I believe.

• Past Lives (2023): This is a remarkably assured debut film about two Koreans who were attached at the hip at 12 but then one moved away to Canada and eventually New York, while the other stayed in Korea. It plays with our expectations of how a movie like this will go – especially an Asian film – and the way it is shot is really interesting.

• Un prophète (2009): I have somewhat mixed feelings about this highly acclaimed prison/crime movie which was incredibly acclaimed at the time and which somebody compared favourably to The Godfather.

• Secrets & Lies (1996): This neo-realist dramedy is one of those movies I’ve been meaning to see for probably close to 30 years. If you haven’t seen it, it’s funnier than you’d imagine.

• Zerkalo (1975): Tarkovsky’s film about how we remember our lives is pretty avant garde but pretty effective.

TV I’m Watching:

• Basketball: Before the all-star break, we were watching the NBA. We were away for all-star weekend so didn’t watch the game and have no idea if it was actually better than normal, as being are claiming. The Raptors are 32-23, currently good for 5th. Last year they won 30 games total and lost 52.

• Leonardo Da Vinci (2024): Ken Burns’ first ever film about someone not from the US (as far as I’m aware) is really quite interesting and less Burnsian than most of his miniseries.

• Master of None (2015): Still plugging away at this, though other things have gotten in the way. Midway through the second season.

• Olympics: Jenn and I are big Olympics viewers and we are watching as much as we can. Currently we’re 10th in medals with 4 golds as I write this (zero in the first week) and 12 medals total.

• Seven Dials (2026): I reasonably enjoyed the first two and a half episodes of this three episode Agatha Christie adaptation.

• Slings and Arrows (2003): Jenn had long wanted to watch this Canadian comedy about a theatre festival (definitely not Stratford!) trying to put on Shakespeare. I had thought I’d watched part of it but I suspect I caught only glimpses of it on Showcase back in the day. I confused it with another show about acting which I cannot figure out the name of. Anyway, a review will come very soon as we have only one episode left in the final season.

• Taskmaster:

  • Australia: We are watching the latest season that is free on YouTube which is something like 2 seasons behind.

  • New Zealand: There is a “new” season on YouTube which is probably a year or two old by now. If you don’t know, this is the best non-British version of the show even though the talent pool is smaller than, like, every other country’s.

What I’m Listening to:

• Music of 1966: I am (slowly) working on a new project and the pivotal year of 1966 is part of it. In 1966, pop rock began to graduate from the music of teenagers to the music of adults. Here’s what I’ve been listening to:

  • The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators: Garagey folk rock which is rendered “psychedelic” by the truly bizarre sound of the electric jug. (It sort of sounds like a synthesizer pulse.) My 25th best album of 1966.

  • The Beach Boys: “Good Vibrations”: One of the most important singles of the 1960s.

  • The Beatles: Revolver: The best album of 1966, one of The Beatles’ best ever albums (it’s this or Abbey Road, probably) and one of the best albums of the 1960s.

  • The Blues Project: Projections: An underrated fusion of a bunch of different styles of contemporary American music. My 12th best album of 1966.

  • Tim Buckley: Buckley’s debut is folk rock with a little bit of music we might call early chamber folk. Nothing like the rest of his career. (He was 19, though.)

  • The Paul Butterfield Blues Band: East-West: Long overrated by white male music critics, this second PBBB album is mostly just well-played blues rock but there are two tracks that stand out. One is their cover of “Work Song” which is the rare jazz song covered by a blues band. (But The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band covered it first!) And the other is the title track, probably the first time American musicians (outside of jazz) incorporated ragas into music. I have this as my 6th best album of 1966 but that needs to be downgraded.

  • The Byrds:

    • “Eight Miles High” / “Why?”: The birth of psychedelic rock in one single.

    • Fifth Dimension: This is very much a transitional album, straddling multiple styles that had and would define the band on different records. But I’m not sure it’s as weak as people make it out to be, and it’s still pretty important in the transition from folk rock to psychedelia. My 9th best album of 1966.

  • Cream: Fresh Cream: Cream’s debut is a good showcase for their musicianship but the songs aren’t really there. My 22nd best album of 1966.

  • The Deep: Psychedelic Moods: Garage rock with weird sound effects and a vibraphone (!!!). This is psychedelicploitation to coin a term.

  • The Electric Prunes: “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)”: This opens with some very psychedelic noise – and a guitar effect buzzes through the song. There’s also some vaguely Indian-sounding guitar on the chorus. There’s backmasking on one of the guitars beginning in the second verse. But the attitude is very much garage. I guess this what people mean by “garage psych.”

  • Jefferson Airplane: Jefferson Airplane Takes Off: A folk rock debut with hints of psychedelic music on, like, one track.

  • The Kinks: Face to Face: Though this is considered by many to be the first or second classic Kinks record, to me Ray Davies hasn’t quite become a great songwriter yet. My 18th best album of 1966.

  • Love: Da Capo: Folk rock (some of it garagey) and a little bit of jazz rock. The second side is a ridiculously long blues jam bookended by Bach as was the style at the time.

  • The Magic Mushrooms: “It’s-a-happening”: This is a pretty wild track that sounds super futuristic for 1966. Wikipedia says it came out in September which makes sense because it’s really out there and some random band making this before the first psychedelic songs of winter/spring 1966 would have been pretty damn shocking. Fun and among the closest things on Nuggets to the subtitle’s promise.

  • The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band: Volume One: Just because you put “experimental” in your band name doesn’t make the music experimental. Okay, so it’s a tiny bit experimental. But not very.

  • The Yardbirds:

    • “Shapes of Things” / “You’re a Better Man Than I” OR “New York City Blues”: The a-side might be the first psychedelic song ever though I’m inclined to give it to “Eight Miles High” (released a month later).

    • Yardbirds aka Roger the Engineer: The Yardbirds’ third album is definitely a move away from straight-ahead British blues towards psychedelia and even heavy metal. And for that, it should be celebrated. But the songs are pretty weak. My 28th best album of 1966.

  • Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention: Freak Out!: It’s quite hard for our ears to put this debut record in perspective but literally nothing had ever sounded like this before. The closest thing I can think of for the most radical music here is maybe a track on the Fugs album from earlier in the year, and that is about it. But, basically, this was the most radical, forward-thinking rock music album ever released when it came out. And, as much as Revolver might be the better record, you could argue that Freak Out! remained the most innovative rock record ever made until the Mothers topped themselves the next year. My 2nd best album of 1966.

• Miles Davis: The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965 (1995): Though these shows are seminal and helped change the way Miles’ Second Great Quintet played, I’m not sure the average person needs to listen to all seven and a half hours of this.

• Eric Dolphy: Out to Lunch! (1964): I really like this avant garde jazz album, it is very much up my alley. I’m not sure I’d put it in the absolute first tier of 1960s jazz albums but some of that just comes from having not listened to a lot of jazz from this era in a long time. It is very good and it’s a tragedy that Dolphy didn’t live to see it released.

• Bill Evans: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings 1961 (2005): This contains some of the best piano trio jazz (especially of the cool variety) you will ever hear, and it’s significantly shorter than the above Miles set.

• Kodály: Sonata for Cello (1915): This is, as far as I know, the piece Kodály is known for. It is considered one of the great cello sonatas, some claiming it is the most significant work for the cello since Bach. The cello is one of my favourite instruments but I cannot claim the historical knowledge to assess the idea that this is the most important piece of solo cello music in hundreds of years. I’m skeptical. It’s an extremely dynamic piece, featuring changes in volume and tempo but also in technique. There are times were he combines bowing with pizzicato, something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before (or rather, heard in something this early). There are pretty passages and more aggressive passages. Though clearly of its era – it sounds very modern to my ears – it is also not so out there as to be unapproachable. It’s still tonal, it still has some catchy bits. Very impressive.

• Mahler: Symphony No. 9 (1909): I am seeing this on Saturday so I figured I should listen to it beforehand. It’s been well over a decade since the last time I listened to Mahler’s symphonies.

• Mozart: Symphonies 39, 40, 41 (1788): I think this has taught me that I should listen to more Mozart but I also worry that it’s only at his most mature that I will really like him as the 39th was far and away my least favourite of these three.

• Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet (1935-1940): I like this. And I can’t help but be fond of Prokofiev – I will be a fan of Peter and the Wolf until the day I die. But as a fan of music I am, constitutionally and philosophically, a fan of innovation and daring and uniqueness and all the things that come with taking risks. This is not a particularly risky piece of music. It’s very nice, though.

• Sightseeing Crew: Muffled Ears, the World Sounds Bad Quality (2026): This guy found me on the internet and asked me to listen to his album. (This is what happens when you have a thousand reviews online.) It’s pretty good. Kind of like pop Talk Talk with muffled vocals.

• Szymanowski: Complete Piano Music (1999) by Martin Jones: My catnip, to steal Jenn’s phrase.

• Various Artists: Anthology of American Folk Music (1952): I think there is no denying this compilation’s importance in the folk and blues music of the ’50s and ’60s, mostly in the US but even in the UK. Though I’m sure there were other sources, I know a bunch of these songs were absorbed into the lexicon and I suspect this was the vehicle. So it’s very important. But there’s no getting away from how utterly arbitrary this is, whether that’s because of [the curator] Smith, or the record label. Putting aside whether or not they had the permission to release all of this, the way they sequence it is bizarre.

• Various Artists: Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968 (1972): Conceived and curated by future Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye, this compilation was one of the first big various artists rock compilations, as far as I’m aware. Some claim the liner notes featured one of the first uses of the term “punk.” As you may have guessed from these two facts – Lenny Kaye as curator and his use of the term “punk” – this is not some kind of definitive psychedelic rock compilation. Rather, it skews towards garage rock and other genres, though there is some somewhat psychedelic music here. Many people have claimed this compilation was a massive influence on the first wave of punk music and some punk historians have even credited it as one of the first punk albums which is, of course, absolute lunacy. Over 50 years later, to me this is just one music fan’s mix tape. It’s certainly better than the average music fan’s mix tape but it’s hard to look at it as more than that. It’s oddly sequenced and idiosyncratically curated. It’s hard to hear it as a big deal all these decades later. And it’s hard to recommend music fans going out of their way to listen to it now unless they love ’60s garage rock.

• Verdi: La traviata (1853): Overall I think it’s pretty good – even if it isn’t the most memorable opera I’ve heard – and I certainly find it more appealing than most middle of the 19th century opera I’ve heard.

• Kazuhito Yamashito: Pictures at an Exhibition (1981) by Modest Mussorgsky: One of the most important classical guitar albums of all time. If you know this piece at all, you know the idea of playing it on one acoustic guitar is batshit insane.

• And of course, there are the usual covers.