Ramble Through The Looking Glass

Jessie Willcox Smith, Collage from Boys and Girls of Bookland, 1923

I’ve watched Homage To The Rabbits at least 10 times now, and it continues to delight me with its weirdness and the Alice-In-Wonderland feeling of being transported to an absurd dreamscape where things all of a sudden stop making sense. The piece was choreographed by Wade Robson, with music composed by Eric Serra, and danced by Cirque du Soleil for the Criss Angel® Believe show. Yes, the “lie” is boldfaced (!) in the middle of “believe”, which is quite clever but insufferably contrived coming from someone who has registered his name as a trademark. (Despite that, click on the link and you will be taken to a very nice homepage with some awesome flash animation on it.)

I am predisposed to dislike magicians and magic, both of which are simply deceptive as opposed to deliberately surreal. I distrust anyone who creates a fantasy they want to dupe me in to believing is real, while smugly refusing to reveal the artifice behind their craft. It’s the height of arrogance, and the opposite of artful. Whereas, offer me a fantasy that bends the laws of logic, physics and reality as we know it–create an intentional falsehood to amuse and delight me, and acknowledge it as such–and I am putty in your hands.

In other words, I look for honesty in the attempt to deceive, bringing to mind the Dylan quote from Absolutely Sweet Marie, “to live outside the law you must be honest.”

More about fantasy versus reality, and why Alice trumps Dorothy every time, after the jump.

Current Mood: Civic

Happy Holiday Monday!

The holiday that occurs on the first Monday in August throughout most of Canada is a complete and utter farce. A non-holiday. We are celebrating absolutely nothing–but, like the good Canadians we are, we must overlay some kind of veneer of respectability on top of it, to overcome the WASP guilt of actually–gasp!–taking the day off. So, in various places, it’s named after the province (British Columbia Day, Saskatchewan Day, New Brunswick Day) and in Ontario, it changes by municipality to honour some local, long-dead colonist of wig-and-breeches vintage.

Being in Toronto, my non-celebration revolves around: Lord John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada. I dunno what the hell he really did for us, but I think he was in the British Navy, and possibly repelled some Yanks from the northern shores of Lake Ontario. Oh, wait … it says here that he introduced “institutions such as the courts, trial by jury, English common law, freehold land tenure and [abolished] slavery in Upper Canada long before it was abolished in the British Empire as a whole.” (source: Wikipedia — where else?)

Well, then … my hat’s off to ya’, Johnny! In your honour, I’ve:

• updated the Mindgames page with a new jigsaw puzzle and a new brainteaser. Try the jigsaw puzzle, they’re much easier on a holiday Monday;
• added a new widget from goodreads.com — this is a fabulous site for readers that I found just last night. You can click on the little pictures of book covers over there to the right in “On My Nightstand”, and you’ll be taken to plot summaries, readers’ reviews and rankings. You can engage in discussion groups about what appears to be a vast number of topics. And so far, it looks like there is something for every kind of reader, and in particular me. Meaning, the entire thing is NOT dominated by people whose only experience with literature is Harry Potter. What a relief. (I’ve never read it. I’m never going to read it, nor am I ever going to see any of the movies. Ever. I could, and perhaps sometime will, write an entire rant about Harry Potter and how it has contributed to the denigration of critical thinking among today’s youth. Later. It’s a holiday, for goodness sakes. I’m celebrating Johnny.)

My first eccentric musing of the day, in which I take you on a trip from Joshua Allen to Leonard Cohen, with stops at goodreads and Johnny Depp along the way, after the jump.