1.Three Tall Women by Edward Albee at the Stratford Festival: At one point, as I watched Martha Henry playing A, I listened to her speak Edward Albee’s meticulously crafted lines and let my eyes wander into the deep darkness above the last row of the Studio Theatre. Henry’s authoritative voice then became and took hold of that absolute realm of darkness where physical body becomes sound, a resonance of human existence that we see in the voices we hear. It was a breath-stopping moment for me since, if anywhere, live theatre, live dance and live music, say, tend to offer for me a deeper intimacy in spirit with my own species.

Theatre, like dance and music, is the language of now and essential to us. Now is most often taken away from us, but all the arts – not too many years ago I was transfixed by a Barbara Hepworth sculpture at London’s Tate Modern – keep us real in now. Watching Lucy Peacock working her own unique magic as B, I also remembered once taking my mother, who had never in her life been to a live play, to a performance of As You Like It at the Festival Theatre in which Ms Peacock did some essence of rustic charm as Rosalind and inspired affection, even love, love from all of us who watched. My mother’s response: “Can we come back and see it again?” Theatre had worked its unique magic again.

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2.Mikis Theodorakis (1925-2021): Long ago in 1969, during the seven-year period of the junta that imprisoned the recently-deceased Mikis Theodorakis, we were walking through the Plaka area of Athens and got into a casual chat with, of all people, a Greek soldier. A month later, we saw the film Z which had just opened in London, and started to feel deeply uneasy because, as All Movie Guide says, “The Greek junta or Regime of the Colonels was a far-right military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. On 21 April 1967, a group of colonels overthrew the caretaker government a month before scheduled elections which Georgios Papandreou’s Centre Union was favoured to win. The dictatorship was characterized by right-wing cultural policies, restrictions on civil liberties, and the imprisonment, torture, and exile of political opponents.” The producers had used the music of Theodorakis for the film.

Many years later, I went backstage at Madison Square Garden during intermission to ask Theodorakis for an interview when he brought his company to Toronto in a few days. We spoke in French and, soaking in sweat, he willingly agreed. Alas, singer Maria Farantouri fell ill and the interview, like the concert, was cancelled. Nevertheless, I had already got to attend several Theodorakis concerts and have played – often weekly – LPs (some bootleg), CDs, and even a DVD of his music for decades. Many of his recordings have been essential to my life since I discovered them years ago; they seem to push the blood in me through my veins and into the earth we all of us share.

Allow me to recommend some of these:

-Axion Esti that uses the poetry of Greek poet Odysseus Elytis, especially with distinctly-voiced and legendary Grigoris Bithikotsis singing the lead parts;

– Canto General that uses poems of Pablo Neruda (I prefer the live recordings from Piraeus and Athens in August, 1975, in which Petros Pandis and Maria Farantouri are featured;

-The Ballad of Mauthausen which uses  lyrics based on poems written by Greek poet Iakovos Kambanellis, a Mauthausen concentration camp survivor;

-L’Otage based on a play by Brendan Behan and featuring the well-known To Yolasto Pedi;

-18 Lianotragouda that uses poems by Greek Yannis Ritsos, especially the recording by singer George Dalaris whom I did indeed once get to interview with his wife in Toronto (he later sent me five of his LPs from Greece), all signed “very friendly”;

-the soundtrack to the film Z, the soundtrack to the film Zorba the Greek of course, and so many songs sprinkled throughout his recordings.

-Oh, yes, Peoples’ Music, The Struggles of the Greek People from Smithsonian Folkways contains a personal favorite: In the Cellar of the Taverna.

I remember two very useful books by Gail Holst and read long ago: Theodorakis Myth & Politics in and Modern Greek Music and Road to Rembetika: Music of a Greek sub-culture, songs of love, sorrow and hashish. Each provided, many years ago, much hard to find information. I also just remembered that I used to track down stores on the left bank or at the Bastille in Paris that sold hard to come by books of Theodorakis songs.

And this just popped into my memory: I once bought a copy of Axon Esti by Elytis at a Greek bookstore on Charing Cross in London, so I might understand the musical works, and when I stepped outside, Vanessa Redgrave walked by and I asked her to sign my book of Greek poetry, which she did.

3.If You Should Fail by Joe Moran: We live and we fail, repeatedly, over and over, endlessly. Why? Because we are alive, because we are human. Of course, you can’t tell this to the folks at McMaster University near my home, since they promise, blank at heart and thus blanketly, the achievement of excellence to all who enter here (thank you, Dante, for “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” – but that was another kind of hell). Moran eschews the automatic, empty-souled, and out-of-touch, cowardly “positive thinking” of our time and prefers our looking into the mirror, where fourth-placed Olympians and Leonard da Vinci (yes, even the master reconsidered as a failure) also dwell. One feels a new beauty to one’s fucked-up life while reading Moran’s hard-hitting but insightful, provocative, and very kind book.

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4.I’d been long wanting to re-experience Leos Janáček’s opera The Cunning Little Vixen, and some of his other operas too, since Opera Canada’s productions long ago at the O’Keefe Centre, Then recently, in the middle of Milan Kundera’s book of essays titled Encounter, I got the needed push when Kundera writes “Among Janáček’s operas are five masterworks…” Immediately I ordered two DVD recordings of “Vixen,” one conducted by Charles Mackerras, widely valued as a right-on specialist in the composer’s works and the other featuring the uniquely timbred and hauntingly heartfelt soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian. Kundera’s book is rich with meaty prose, charm and sophistication, mind and passion – it’s a book I eagerly returned to each day, and now it’s Janacek’s turn.

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5.Casablanca: Script and Legend: Certainly, there are six essays included here by the likes of Roger Ebert and Umberto Eco, but it’s an especial pleasure to read the truly classic film’s script and mutter the lines under one’s breath as one’s memory and imagination work side by side, with the help of “25 classic stills” included in the book, to become Bogie, or Ilsa if you will, and bring the film to life again for the thousandth time.

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6.Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir: Eddie Muller’s now “Revised and Expanded Edition” appears on glossy paper with sharply-focused photos throughout, so the book is both a visual and tactile delight that one holds respectfully but lovingly in one’s hands. Muller, who hosts TCM’s weekly Noir Alley, is encyclopedic in his references and here he lives and breathes the idiom with an infectious writing style that sends us all, unselfconsciously, back to the forties and fifties. This is underbelly of America stuff, stylishly done, and very irresistible, whether you own a trench coat or not.

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7.If you want to explore the hollow, pretentious, cowardly, self-centred, artificial, destructive, stifling, unsportsmanlike, clueless, selfish, jealous, self-limiting, phony, spiritually-vacant, culture-killing, and pathetic (etc,etc.etc.) dominance of patriarchy in our culture, two invigoratingly passionate and scholarly-based series from historian Amanda Vickery are essential viewing: “The Story of Women and Power” and “The Story of Women and Art,” both highly-recommended, will surprise you at every turn, inform you richly, make you angry in your heart, fill you with admiring respect, and inspire you in ways you didn’t yet know about.

In this vein, what better ending for this posting than an example of male limitation, here from critic Norman Lebrecht’s The Life and Death of Classical Music, in which he describes contralto Kathleen Ferrier as “devoid of beauty, brilliance, or sexual appeal.” Such unreflective and puerile posturing, one that points elsewhere and does not look into the mirror at oneself, does not reflect on Ms. Ferrier at all. But it does bring into question the life experience and the personal biases, of this critic, that determine the aesthetic limits of his views, whatever the subject at hand.