This year’s Hamlet, directed by Antoni Cimolino, makes sense. I say that as the highest praise. I’ve seen the play many times and it never flowed so naturally before.Like… Ophelia’s pregnant. She always struck me as a bit of a cry-baby, going bonkers…
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Yappa Ding Ding: Elora Festival – Bach B Minor Mass (review)
Friday night at 7:30 the audience was seated in the Gambrel Barn in Elora. Onstage were the Elora Festival Orchestra, Elora Festival Singers, the VOCES8 choir, and Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montréal. Noel Edison was at his podium, his back to the audience, arms at his sides. There was
Continue readingYappa Ding Ding: Elora Festival – Bach B Minor Mass (review)
Friday night at 7:30 the audience was seated in the Gambrel Barn in Elora. Onstage were the Elora Festival Orchestra, Elora Festival Singers, the VOCES8 choir, and Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montréal. Noel Edison was at his podium, his back to the audience, arms at his sides. There was
Continue readingYappa Ding Ding: Elora Festival – Bach B Minor Mass (review)
Friday night at 7:30 the audience was seated in the Gambrel Barn in Elora. Onstage were the Elora Festival Orchestra, Elora Festival Singers, the VOCES8 choir, and Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montréal. Noel Edison was at his podium, his back to the audience, arms at his sides. There was an almost-overlong pause, maybe a minute of dead silence. Then Edison raised his arms and the choir and orchestra opened up at full volume. It was like a knife edge between silence and music. If beauty can be shocking then that’s what it was. It was so beautiful I cried.
Bach doesn’t do filler. It started and then it just carried on as this breathtakingly beautiful experience. I wish the soloists hadn’t walked out to the front from their places in the choir because it broke my concentration a little, but I suppose the musicians needed to catch their breath.
The Elora Festival Singers are better than ever this year. There are such distinctive, beautiful voices, and Edison has made use of them in many solos during the festival. VOCES8 added three countertenors to the choir for the B Minor Mass, and Edison created moments when their sound was able to shine through.
It’s a tragedy that the barn was only two-thirds full. This was the greatest musical event of the summer in southern Ontario and seats were just $45. The production wasn’t promoted or reviewed by local or Toronto media, as far as I can tell.
Continue readingTrashy's World: Bring on 2015!
Like any year, there were ups and downs over the past 12 months. However, 2014 was unfortunately a bit more about downs, than ups. On the positive side (cuz I like to mention good things first): First, and most importantly, the kids are thriving. My eldest is working full-time in
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The DWR Movie Recommendation of the Month
I rarely watch good movies. I spend my screen time on the blog, and with my current Diablo 3 addiction. Last night however, I did get the the opportunity to watch “Her”, a movie about a dude whose marriage is all but dissolved finding a new companion. The twist is
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The DWR Movie Recommendation of the Month
I rarely watch good movies. I spend my screen time on the blog, and with my current Diablo 3 addiction. Last night however, I did get the the opportunity to watch “Her”, a movie about a dude whose marriage is all but dissolved finding a new companion. The twist is
Continue readingYappa Ding Ding: Chili Cook-Off in Uptown
I take my chili seriously. One of the nicest things anyone ever did for me occurred a number of years ago when a colleague brought a container of his chili to work – and his recipe. He used coffee, cocoa, beer, cumin and oregano in his chili. I have been
Continue readingArt Threat: Gender Mender: XXY is a cinematic exploration of intersexuality
From a purely organizational standpoint, there are plenty of reasons for the gender binary. The system delineates male and female characteristics as separate and static, ostensibly facilitating a natural and sustainable social order. It readily assigns roles and packages gender identity. It is convenient – when it works. The problem
Continue readingThe Scott Ross: Mike Duffy & Why An Elected Senate Would Have Made This Worse
Nobody really thinks Senator Mike Duffy received $90,000 in return for some political favour, but that public perception would most certainly change if he and every other Senator faced regular expensive election campaigns that depended on large contributions and even larger political favours. An elected Senate requiring hundreds of thousands
Continue readingThe Scott Ross: Mike Duffy & Why An Elected Senate Would Have Made This Worse
Nobody really thinks Senator Mike Duffy received $90,000 in return for some political favour, but that public perception would most certainly change if he and every other Senator faced regular expensive election campaigns that depended on large contributions and even larger political favours. An elected Senate requiring hundreds of thousands
Continue readingThe Scott Ross: Mike Duffy & Why An Elected Senate Would Have Made This Worse
Nobody really thinks Senator Mike Duffy received $90,000 in return for some political favour, but that public perception would most certainly change if he and every other Senator faced regular expensive election campaigns that depended on large contrib…
Continue readingcartoon life: Impress
Impress is a new, free drawing app. I think the developer decided to take some very few elements from Paper and write the code. Sometimes things show up like they are ‘proof of concept’, or like they are an end of coding school project. Either the choices made here are
Continue readingWalking Turcot Yards: Jack Kerouac’s On The Road In Film
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; © 1953, 2012 Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved.William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, photographed by Allen Ginsberg in his East Village living room, 1953; from ‘Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg,’ an exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art and on
Continue readingYappa Ding Ding: Too Many Goblins…
…Orcs, whatever. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean. Otherwise, quite good.
Continue readingezra winton: Scrap America – A conversation with Scrapper filmmaker Brian Ashby
This week’s Friday Film Pick is the beautifully shot and tenderly rendered Scrappers, a documentary that quietly follows two Chicago residents as they eke out a living from the salvaging of metallic refuse. It’s not fist-in-the-air advocacy filmmaking for the downtrodden, but in its own way Scrappers gets under the
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Diablo 3 Review – Pretty Fun, but Pretty Modular
Diablo 3 is an action RPG, in other words, it is one happy dungeon romp after another, always in search of the biggest and brightest loot to make the character of your choice that much more powerful. D3 does a wonderful job at using a variable reinforcement schedule when
Continue readingArt Threat: Invocation of the Queer Spirits – Book review: Queer Spirits by AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs
Invocation of the Queer Spirits (Governor’s Island) – AA Bronson There is always a certain magic to be found in the moment of queering. As bodies are opened to unsanctioned desires and sensations, tense moments of wonder unfold before them. Static charges crackle and spark as genders and sexualities are
Continue readingYappa Ding Ding: Henry V (review)
A pivotal moment in Shakespeare’s Henry V is when Henry tells his army to kill their prisoners. Shakespeare has taken Henry through a long epic of personal change. In Henry IV Part I, Prince Hal is a dissipate, fun-loving, rich man’s son, feeling guilty about the bad deeds his father
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Good Book Review on Health
Drop Dead Healthy by A.J. Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, April 2012) acts as the conclusion to the author’s bestselling “humble quest” trilogy. As with The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs takes his readers on a wild and crazy journey, this time into the world of health. We
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