Unity 1918
Our little town’s arts council has been extremely fortunate to have drawn the interest of some brilliant young folk. They wanted to do drama. Dinner theatre, they said. We were…
arts
Musings on The Lone Ranger, Tonto, and Cultural Appropriation
Yes, I get the reason some people might have been outraged that a white guy (Johnny Depp) played an indigenous person in the 2013 movie version of The Lone Ranger.…
Musings on Art and Taste
Many years ago, I had a lengthy correspondence with a friend in another part of Canada about what constitutes art. His basic argument was that art was not neutral or…
A Charter Poem
A Charter Poem A charter poem slipped onto the shore where I sat daydreaming about you it came from a flooded place back up the river and seemed happy to…
La Bohème at the Galaxy
Starving bohemian artists living in drafty Paris attics in the mid-19th century, struggling to produce their art, falling in and out of love, sharing and suffering, living and dying, all…
Our civic centre the Block forgot
During the January 15 council meeting, there was a lengthy presentation of a strategic planning exercise (a real one, not the bogus one The Block call our “community-based strategic plan,”…
Does poetry make things happen in 2018?
I was thinking about how little poets seem to matter to modern political administrations. Maybe to modern society as a whole. Their light has, it seems, been waning for several…
Some Sculptors
Subodh Gupta “Subodh Gupta (born in 1964) is an Indian Contemporary artist based in New Delhi. Trained as a painter, he went on to experiment with a variety of media.…
Leadership 2018 Links
The latest from Saskatchewan’s NDP leadership campaign as the entry deadline has passed and the membership deadline approaches. – While I haven’t tracked endorsements all that closely, it’s certainly worth…
Guillermo, monsters and me
Tucked away at the bottom of a tall display case in the ‘At Home With Monsters’ exhibit at the AGO is a small collection of seven old, well-thumbed books, all…
Cultural appropriation is the new gluten free
Like food fads, political fads wax and wane as the gnat-like attention span of their followers gets diverted by the Next Big Thing. Political Correctness has of late given birth…
The Giants in Montreal
Went downtown today to check out the giant marionettes that are dominating the scene in the city this weekend. It is pretty cool because the crew that accompanies each giant…
Printemps
I may have said this before but it bears repeating… I once had a problem photographing something in terms of composition, or maybe it was just attitude, in any case,…
Auden, Trump and poetry
There’s a poem by W. H. Auden (1907-73) going the internet rounds these days with suggestions of Auden’s prescience towards the latest American president and contemporary politics. It’s a powerful…
Leonard Cohen deserves the Nobel Prize, too
News that songwriter Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature shook the literati worldwide. Here was a pop icon sitting in the august company of Alice Munro, Mario Vargas…
Why Fonts Matter
The first problem I have when receiving a new book on typography is that I spend far too much time looking up the typefaces described or sampled therein, and searching…
Boris Godunov
I’m not sure why Boris Godunov, moves me like it does, but it has a curious, emotional effect on me. It’s a sprawling tragedy mixed with politics and betrayal, weighted…
Loteria de Camacho
Ever since I first visited Mexico, more than 30 years ago, I’ve been fascinated by its culture. It’s beautiful, exotic, alien, yet also comfortable and attractive. One of the things…
Michael Geist: The Trouble with the TPP’s Copyright Term Extension
The TPP's copyright term extension discourages creativity, restricts access, and imposes enormous costs on Canadian consumers and educational institutions, argues Internet law expert, Michael Geist. Meanwhile, the term extension is…