JOURNAL ONE (1987 – 1998) Dream List for Dave Barber: *Greed, Erich von Stroheim *The Old Dark House (), Dir. James Whale w. Karloff, Melyvn Douglas, Charles Laughton *Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, (), Dir. Rouben Mamoulian w. F. March, M. Hopkins *The King of Jazz (), w. Paul Whiteman *Broadway Melody () *Scarlet Empress, von Sternberg *Dames, Busby Berkeley *The Merry Widow (), Ernst Lubitsch, Mad Love (), Dir. Karl Freund w. Peter Lorre *Little Match Girl, Jean Renoir *The Devil’s Cleavage, George Kuchar *Fireworks, Kenneth Anger *Any Popeye cartoons from the s Pather Panchali, Dir. Satyajit Ray Bizarre, Bizarre [Drôle de Drame] (), Dir. Marcel Carné Blessed Event (), Lee Tracy; Dick Powell The Canary Murder Case (), Louise Brooks, William Powell *Umberto D., The Children Are Watching Us (), Vittorio De Sica Cleo from to , Agnès Varda Day Dreams ( min, ), Dir. Ivor Montagu A Day in the Country (), Jean Renoir Day of Wrath (), Carl Dreyer *The Devil Doll (), Dir. Tod Browning Fashions of , Dir. William Dieterle, Bette Davis; William Powell Crime of M. Lange, Dir. Renoir The Greeks Had a Word for Them () Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (), Al Jolson, Rogers & Hart Berlin, Symphony of a City If You Could Only Cook () The Italian Straw Hat Le Jour se léve (M. Carné) Arletty; Gabin Laughter 16 ( ‒ ) November ave to move Mom out of the house – the only home H our family has ever known – tomorrow morning at eight. Last night I had the first of what I presume will be many haunting dreams concerning the shop – or what- ever it is I should call it now that I write about it for the first time, ironically, upon the eve of a moment after which I shall always have to refer to it in the past tense. In the dream I discover a new room in the basement, a room which has been there all along but which I have been too unobservant to notice. A nice long bowling lane of a room with an equally long stor- age area clumsily grafted overtop of the concrete entrance and stairway. There is a secret panel entrance but also a door, obvi- ously located, it turns out, beside the other, always-used door, with a window in it as well, which has led into the basement area for years. Should read that Agee/Evans book to see if lengthy descriptions of home interiors are readable even in the prose of a brilliant writer before I waste any of my little spent effort on this passage. December Just tucked Jilian in after Anne of Green Gables at Playhouse Theatre. Watched a special Untouchables episode starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ed Asner as police officers helping Ness and in the process taking over the show … Since I last wrote in here too much has happened. I am lonely – a little – but I think it is good for me. It has been a long time since I was lonely. This period will allow me to overhaul my soul, throw together some genuine qualities and eventually dispel all loneliness with a bang. I’ve even considered working for a charity. Other things to do: paint a picture of Cousin’s interior in Jilian’s acrylics. Hand tint that photo of Tiffany perhaps. I slept for over two hours Xmas afternoon. My nerves completely shot. Twenty-four hours with Amma wound up tight by her organizational urges, all of us grating to each other, blasting even the dimmest recollections of the season’s tradi- tions to oblivion. Xmas Eve in a seniors’ home; four p.m. dinner lasting seven minutes; all the presents ripped open in a piranha frenzy by kids who will never know the torture of waiting. 17 All this leaving me exceptionally irritable. Klymkiw told me a great story about his family at Xmas. He must be near the break- ing point. I had a good day with Jilian today. But I did spank her for the first time in perhaps two years. I think we understand each other more as a result … that’s a phrase. She’s a very sensitive, feeling little girl who makes me very proud of her character, but I’ve allowed her access to my weakness, and we dislike ourselves when this access is negotiated. These are quite the phrases too. Strictness makes for happy pups. We both feel better now. December Careful plays on cinema’s th birthday, in Paris, the city of its birth. Merci, E.D. Distribution. (Just a press screening, but a projector in Paris played it all on this holy day!) January One hour with hockey at Steen. My delight. One hundred more pages of Hugo. Tomorrow I finish that and commence another draft of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. Elise watched Long Day’s Journey into Night this afternoon. At dinner, we rewatched All About Eve. George has a flu for the first time in his life. He and I discussed W. Herzog and Ross McMillan as Dr. Solti. Ritchard Findlay wants Tim Roth for Glahn in Twilight – a horrible actor and fortunately out of our league. 3 January Susan Minas at Alliance has suggested my name to the Cowboy Junkies for rock video work. Now I know where you go after you die. It is painful for artists in hard times, dead artists, artists no one wants, but in Canada we are put on life-support systems. No one lets us go to the grave. We walk the earth after midnight, howling. Won’t someone just drive stakes through us? January Spent entire day working on Twilightof theIceNymphs script revi- sions, to be sent to Keith Griffiths, but not in the streamlined form I promised him; instead I sent an all-new enriched purple edition. I now have a stack of books to read in between produc- tion designing and skating (which Rob Shaver agreed was unwise 18 ( ‒ ) to do in –º and windchill, a warning which suited little responsible me fine.) My book stack: Swinburne’s poems; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Savinio’s The Lives of the Gods; Chateaubriand’s Atala and Rene; LaForgue’s Moral Tales; Sachey Sitwell’s Splendours and Miseries; and Beardsley’s Under the Hill. January, : p.m. Glahn – (#) Kyle McCulloch, Aden Young, Brendan Fraser?, rock star of some sort? Solti – Maury Chaykin, Werner Herzog, (#) Christopher Lee, John Neville, Armin Mueller-Stahl, John Colicos, Jan Rubes Cain Ball –Jim Keller (deceased), Maury Chaykin, (#) John Neville Juliana – (#) Julie Delpy, Mia Kirshner, someone from Rozema’s pic Zephyr – (#) Alice Krige, Mitsou, Lena Olin, Sadie Frost, Katy Gardner Amelia –(#) Samantha Eggars, Deborah Harry, Jackie Burroughs, Diana Rigg Please, Guy, make yourself watch Whale Music for the two leads. Steal set designs from Max Ophuls’s Le Plaisir! January Dubbed Le Plaisir. Watched Vertigo and Daughter of Horror (). Browsed through Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory. Strongly considering showing up absent for my director- observer stint on My Life as a Dog – the series. Skate not yet fixed. There seems to be absolutely no progress since I got three producers for Twilight of the Ice Nymphs a month and more ago. Six weeks! Everyone can just fuck off, fuck off, fuck off! Oh boy! They sure can help, these producers. Seventy thousand dollars each and they have other jobs, paper routes for all I know! They are fucking with me. They wank with their office overhead and they fuck with me. And there hasn’t been a movie made in this country yet that doesn’t stink more than a dogturd! (Except Léolo, which stinks of excrement in unsurpassably brilliant ways.) Have another Jaguar, boys. Good night. March Have made a Gatsby list which is far too crushing a confession 19 even for these pages. Having turned forty recently, I may as well arbitrarily choose now as the time to assess my life: at least thirty-five years wasted, if not more. If I could pull a few productive months, or even a year, out of the remainder of my days, I think I shall shit my pants from astonishment. My Gatsby list identified the usual trouble spots, but I’m realistic about the love handles. If I can generate a handful of genuine smiles on somebody’s face without ventilating my head, my list will have done its job. I want to talk about my list, but I’m afeared it probably looks the table of contents from any self-help book at Coles. At least this much is obvious: major blocks of my life-array need to be shifted, reversed, restacked, mulched. I know what needs to be done, and where; all I have to do is do it! March Just finished a phone conversation with a Kristin Lehman, actress. Seems very nice. Wouldn’t it be nice if she just fit Juliana fine, then we could proceed with some ostriches, a studio and two actresses locked. At : I coffee with R. H. Thomson, distinguished star of Avonlea. There is a blizzard piling slush onto already six-foot-high snowbanks, and I’m wading through this shit to hobnob with Canada’s elite. Is that where this gooseflesh has come from? Okay, here on the very next page is the Gatsby list of what’s wrong with Gatsby. All my diary false starts seem to have naked confessions similar to this. I need the whole page, I think. Gatsby List . Lonely . Physically unfit . Unreliable . Chronically depressed . Spinelessly incapable of refusing to perform unpleasant favours . Don’t read enough . Don’t have very many real friends . Don’t really have many fake friends . Never create genuine laughter or happiness in others .