Barkerburgh

A few months back, my friend Greg, a guitarist with a flair for the above mentioned Rock’n Roll with a heavy metal bent, went to Toronto’s Necropolis cemetery for some moody album cover shots.

I was the art director and photographer. Greg brought his guitar.

I thought the cemetery closed at 8:30pm but they had just changed the closing time to 6:00pm for the winter, so when it began to rain and we decided to leave, we discovered we were locked in and had to climb over the high wrought iron gate in the rain.

Good times. Good times.

From Michael Moore’s Wednesday, November 5, 2008 newsletter:

“But today we celebrate this triumph of decency over personal attack, of peace over war, of intelligence over a belief that Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs just 6,000 years ago. What will it be like to have a smart president? Science, banished for eight years, will return. Imagine supporting our country’s greatest minds as they seek to cure illness, discover new forms of energy, and work to save the planet. I know, pinch me.”

Pinch him, not me.

Oh hell, pinch me too!

(Read the whole thing here.)

The Yahoo News AP story about how the title of Kevin Smith’s new movie offends people, especially Dodgers’ spokesman Josh Rawitch.

Quote: Commercials for the film during Los Angeles Dodgers games on Fox Sports were dropped at the team’s request after some viewers complained, said Dodgers spokesman Josh Rawitch.

One complaint came from a man watching a game in September with his young son, who did not understand a suicide-squeeze bunt the Dodgers tried, Rawitch said.

“He was explaining to his son what a squeeze bunt was. Commercial break, the ad comes on, and the kid asks, ‘Dad, what does porno mean?”‘ Rawitch said. “Dodgers baseball has always been about family (emphasis Himself’s), and we’ve always been sensitive to the type of advertising that runs on our games.”

Unquote.

So ‘porno’ is worse for a child than ’suicide’. Yeah. Great fuckin’ dad.

I was always a big Inspector Morse fan, both the books and the series, and was sad when all ended as all human things must end.

Now, Kevin Whateley, who played Endeavour Morse’s faithful sidekick, Sergeant Lewis, has returned to PBS’ Masterpiece as Inspector Lewis, and is welcome. There was one episode (as far as I know) a few years ago, but with last night’s episode and next week’s promised one, there are least two more. The ads for DVDs during the show suggest there’s an entire series; whether PBS will carry it all, I don’t know yet.

Seven words you won’t be able to say on TV anymore.

I will always laugh about Cardinal Glick.
(more…)

Leslie and Peter (and Simon)  invited me to join them for a Sunday afternoon on the Oak Ridges Moraine at the former Koffler estate known as Jokers Hill, now a U of T biological reserve.  It was a horse farm once and the outbuildings still stand.  There’s an overgrown race-track overlooking the Holland Marsh on one side of Dufferin and hectares and hectares of beautiful forest on the other

As you all probably know, Peter is an Indiana Jones biologist, (the Tibetan Plateau, the California coast, Western Australia…but just let him loose in Pellucidar or on Skull Island) and he’s worked a lot at Jokers Hill so he knows the ecology and biodiversity of the area.  And where to find newts, one of which Simon found fascinating.

(I have a picture of the newt he found that Wordpress won’t let me upload…)

What I got was an amazing natural history tour of the area, from the bedrock up, the moraine being about 100 metres of glacial sediment topped with that beautiful forest.

The day was warm but neither hot nor humid.  There was a light breeze even in the forest and, lots of sand.

We saw many patches of white trilliums ranging from one or two in number to a dozen or fifteen or more.  There were several lone red trilliums, patches of different kinds of violets, of little blue wildflowers, of yellow ones, a patch of dog-tooth violets (leaves only, no flowers) in a shaft of sunlight, small streams, swampy seeps, a lovely stand of quaking aspens demonstrating the reason for their name in a mild breeze, the scent of sun-warmed hay off a small feral meadow, a low stone wall made from glacial erratic boulders (probably from back in the olden days when settlers tried to farm the moraine), an old-fashioned stubby beer bottle which I snagged, many cool rocks which Simon found and carried around until we found a pond or a stream, and only one (that I noticed) patch of good old jack-in-the-pulpits, one of my favourites when I was a kid in Georgetown nearly forty years ago.

We must have walked about fifty kilometers - or like three or four

We had a nice French farmyard lunch of baguettes, cheeses, sausage, pate, oranges, and water - not local, from a water-cooler

When I got home, I napped like crazy.
 

…while I was housesitting for Peter and Leslie. Go on. Guess! (more…)

I have recently reacquired copies of two of my favourite albums; Joni Mitchell’s 1985 album ‘Dog Eat Dog’ and Jennifer Warnes’ 1986 Leonard Cohen tribute album ‘Famous Blue Raincoat”.

Wow. Listening to these tracks after not hearing them for a few years is still visceral, still exciting and suddenly startling.

Why startling? Well, my situation is considerably different now from what it was in, say, late 2001. The music while still beautiful, means so much more. Email me and I’ll send you a breakdown. I dare you.

I’m listening to ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ as I type this. ‘Bird on a Wire’ right now, as it happens.

Ah. Cohen’s poetry and Warnes’ voice.

Kill me now.

Well, not now. But you know, let me finish listening to the albums again. And I have a week of house-sitting to do involving feeding cats, and I have a doctor’s appointment on May the 8th, and some genetic counselling and testing in July, so kill me later. We should talk.

Laura invited me to join her on Thursday evening at the Princess of Wales Theatre to see “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Part I”.

It was based on/cut down from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage version of Charles Dicken’s 1838-1839 serialized novel of the same name, minus the ‘Part I’. In 1980, the RSC produced a version that “lasted more than ten hours (counting intermissions and a dinner break - the actual playing time was approximately eight-and-a-half hours)”. This play, and Part II, which I will again be joining Laura to see, were condensed out of that first grand production. Both parts together are six hours, so we didn’t lose much.

In 1982, a miniseries of the production was produced and was later broadcast on America’s PBS. I remember it being on and being interested, but I didn’t watch it, and I don’t remember why. Maybe the length…

Laura, being a big fan, had lots of background on the original production and the original novel, and I enjoyed her sharing immensely.

Being unfamiliar with the story but for the very basics, I did some research on Wednesday about the novel and the stage presentation, which I had heard of, and was intrigued and impressed.

And just so I could catch up a little, I downloaded the Gutenberg text of the novel. I hope I can be prepared for Part II.

(Sometimes when I am really impressed or moved by a show like this, including a TV show or a cinematic movie, I tend to try and replay it in my mind, to think about the language or the imagery or the story, and maybe I have cool dreams. Well, I had cool dreams last night; I just can’t remember what they were - and I really wish I could.)

For the first time since I saw it at the cinema when it was released here, I saw Serenity the other night. It was on TV, I forget which channel. Wow. It was even better than I remembered. And I usually hate seeing cinematic releases on commercial TV - that is to say, if I’ve seen them recently at the movies.

Anneli saw Serenity in London, England, when she was on sabbatical abroad. I liked what she said about it, and I paraphrase shamelessly from a bad memory, “It was like a condensed second season of Firefly”, to which my reaction was something like, and again paraphrasing shamelessly from a bad memory, “Hear, hear!”

Now she sends me a link to a story about a new Firefly novel written by Steven Brust. It is downloadable under a Creative Commons license. The Future is cool.

Of course, the Brust fanbase loves it, and the Browncoats do too, but some are calling if ‘fanfic’.  Which is good since members of that last group are not as irrationally psycho-loyal as, say, hardcore old guard fandroid trekkies. Yeah, I said ‘trekkies‘.