My dad died a month ago. Among his photos I found some he’d taken on the shoots of movies and TV he‘d worked on as a sound recordist/mixer — including some nice ones of the late Graham Greene while filming Clearcut, the 1991 indigenous horror movie that was featured at that year‘s TIFF.

Slightly regretting that I didn’t pick up this 1979 album from my neighbour’s lawn when I had the chance.

My annual photo of books I read over the past year *and still have a copy of in my house*: a really odd stack this year of an early 20th C travelogue of Canada, War and Peace, Natalia Ginzburg, and a fascinating history of East Germany. I read a lot more fiction, too, not pictured!

My stack of 2023 reads represents books I read over the last year *that are still in the house* - which, absent library books and anything I’ve shared onwards (I’m an active donor to neighbourhood library boxes), makes it a pretty random pile!

Christmas tree at my father-in-law’s retirement residence, festooned with empty Moderna vials.

From the must-eat list at a local “sugar water cafe”, some Brontë-inspired snacks.

Fave recent Toronto little free library find was this 1958 British edition of Nadine Gordimer short stories, which someone bought at a Cape Town bookstore and left a ripped-out a magazine ad for 1950 Studebaker inside. (Not sure how the timing works…) And really enjoyed the book.

How easy it is to transform an otherwise unremarkable part of a major arterial into a nice place to walk with some good trees.

Was glad to spend an hour or two at the 38K mark of the Toronto Waterfront marathon today cheering on runners. Friendly cheers helped me hugely in my one and only marathon (especially that last stretch) and crowd support is limited in this city!

New nominee for favourite fall tree, early edition: the honey locust. Not strictly local, but pretty close (?) — and glorious just now.

You know there’s a word for that.

I knew I took this photo at the Old Burying Ground in Halifax for a reason.

Using an image, show a movie you are sure you have watched more than ten times.

This was a first: rerouting my running route due to a collapsed house. (Not a great photo but to the left of the squat brick one is the collapsed second story, now being extricated.)

Facing up to the existential dread of another birthday by writing about birthday and birthday-adjacent songs... and Yo La Tengo. Read here, and tell me what you would add!:

open.substack.com/pub/mollymcc...

Montreal Snowstorm by Helen McNicoll, from the current exhibit at the AGO. Winter is coming!

Started reading a story in a litmag today. The first sentence had a glaringly wrongly-used semicolon where a comma should have been. And another semicolon popped up two sentences later in the same paragraph! It's best to tread carefully when calling up Ensign Semicolon.

Summer edition of the Song a Day (or Week or Month) substack features Eastern Bloc trams, Rupert Everett, and lots of stylish sounds from The Style Council:

https://mollymccarron.substack.com/p/summer-style