“Those Mainlanders” and other racist ways to start a sentence
I was at a restaurant with friends a few weeks ago. The conversation was kind of slow, so I mentioned my plans for travelling to Hong Kong next year and…
Culture
How many chords?
How many chords does a musician need to know? How many does an amateur musician who plays mostly popular, folk and blues music, need to know? My first answer has…
Random grumblings for a Sunday afternoon
Why can’t I buy Yorkshire Gold tea in town? I can buy Barry’s tea, from Ireland, and Morse’s tea packaged in Nova Scotia locally. As well as other brands. Surely…
Reading music and music theory
I write about reading a lot, because I read a lot of books. There are other kinds of reading – other languages, too – that I don’t write much about.…
More reasons to read
On the Inside Higher Ed website, Joshua Kim recently asked the question, When do you find the time and energy to read books? That surprised me. What energy does reading…
#VanCulturalSpaces @VisionVancouver event summary: “Protecting Vancouver’s Cultural Spaces: How we can preserve culture in a growing city”
I Live Tweeted the Vision Vancouver-sponsored event “Protecting Vancouver’s Cultural Spaces: How we can preserve culture in a growing city”- You can search the hashtag #VanCulturalSpaces for related tweets on…
Just Six Songs?
Author, musician and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin says all music can be classified into a mere six types of song. That’s part of the premise in his 2009 book, The World…
Pseudo-patriotic madness
This is news, right from the CBC, not April Fool or The Onion: The Massachusetts House of Representatives has finally granted initial approval to a Bill naming the Fluffernutter the…
Help Conservative Senators Stop Harper’s Banana Republic
Emperor Stephen Harper and his double double. Interesting times indeed. 8 Conservative senators have decided that Emperor Stephen Harper has no clothes. The Emperor has whipped and intimidated his backbench,…
Manners, bloody manners
I was in a local grocery store not long ago, standing mid-aisle and peering at shelves of canned products, trying to find the ones I wanted for my cart. As…
The difficult art of reading poetry
Synecdoche. Metonymy. Not exactly words that trip lightly off the tongue. Unless, I suppose, you’re Harold Bloom. Those are two of the four fundamental tropes in literature, Bloom tells us.…
Electronic music, raves & Toronto’s moral panic on drugs
…they do the work because they want to re-produce the type of city they want to live- the type of city that is worth living in. … …not all entertainment…
Oooh, shiny….
Religious texts are full of admonitions about avoiding temptation. The Lord’s Prayer tells God to “lead us not into temptation.” Fat lot of good that does. Not only do we…
Honing In On Friday’s #WaveOfAction
We need to think about two things for this Friday’s Occupy Movement reboot in the Worldwide #WaveOfAction: When thinking about pursuing social, political and economic equality, what is the list…
Mad As Hell
I got up this morning to a fog rolling into the city. It’s not from rain, or from temperature change or any other natural reason for a hazy day. It’s…
Reading: A Canadian tragedy… or not?
The map above might show the making of a serious tragedy for Western and especially Canadian culture. It indicates in colour which nations read the most. Yellow is the second…
Indigenous Food and Cultural Protection
Food and ecosystem knowledge which has been passed down for centuries is constantly threatened by the modern mechanical market. To stymie this change in food (and knowledge) consumption there is…
If the 1% Has Russell Brand Killed…
If the 1% has Russell Brand killed, we will see it in the corporate media as a drug OD relapse, or a freak accident. Why? He is dangerous because he…
Systemic Pressures Make Journalists Sloppy
Gosh, the corporate media sure can be sloppy. The heart-wrenching photo of a four-year-old Syrian refugee pictured alone crossing a desert into Jordan spread far and wide this weekend, but…
The Harlem Renaissance is “Coming Back Again”
Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes dropped earlier this month. My esteem for Langston Hughes, his insight and vision, and the too-often ignored human/cultural catalyst that was the Harlem…