Author: Peter

Best of

Lenni Jabour and The Third Floor, Les Dangereuses
You all knew this was coming, so there’s no sense keeping it for the end of the list. Lenni et al’s new CD departs a bit from the sound of their more recent independent releases and live performances, evolving the music into something I can only describe as filmic. They’ve included more instrumental pieces than they’d play in concert—Rosa Dances In Her Kitchen in particular is wonderfully evocative—and added a range of new ideas, including vocal effects, that make Les Dangereuses a Third Floor experience unlike anything I’ve heard from them before. It’s exactly, but also not at all, what I expected. (Full disclosure: Lenni’s a dear friend, and I helped sponsor the CD.)
Angie Nussey, Paint and Turpentine
Angie’s got a unique vocal style that perfectly matches her personal lyrics: both are quirky yet often powerful. Paint is a great complement to her previous release, Circumstantial Overload. There’s a lot of great music on the disc, and I think Take Me Home distills it all better than I could hope to describe.
Kristin Sweetland, Root, Heart and Crown
OK, Kristin’s CD was actually released a couple of years ago, at which point I wrote (but then took back) some not-entirely-complimentary things about it. I’ve gained a new appreciation for the disc—and for Ms Sweetland in general—since then, and she’s been a highlight of my listening and concertgoing in the past year.
The London Fringe Theatre Festival
‘Nuff said.
Stratford Festival, The Tempest
I had the honour of seeing William Hutt on the last night of his final stage performance, playing Prospero in The Tempest. Are there any more fitting lines to close fifty years at the festival than these:
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please….
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
Harmony Trowbridge, Amoraphobe
An EP release in advance of her first full-length CD, Amoraphobe is a nice introduction to Harmony’s distinctive phrasing and phrases. I’m a sucker for clever imagery, and I find her lyrics—like woop! go the v-birds, from Nothing Runs Like a Deer—stick in my head for hours.

Reach for the Top

I started writing this post on September 12, 2002, with the intention of completing it shortly thereafter. Three-plus years later I still haven’t, but I might as well get this part of the story out there… and who knows, maybe I’ll rediscover the story in another three years and finish telling it.

For the last few months I’ve been using a quote from Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes comic strip as my e-mail signature:

I’m not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.

I use the quote because it’s accurate: among other things, I’m a serious trivia geek.

I’m a serious competitive trivia geek. As long as I can remember I’ve been interested in facts—I think a lot of it comes from having two teachers as parents, because both of my siblings have a similar bent—and for six years, from Grade 8 through to Grade 13, I was in my element as a member of my schools’ quiz teams.

It helps that I had some early success. I was on the first Super Quiz/All Star Quiz team from Warwick Central Public School with my teammates and friends Jon Craig, Susan Hoeksema, Scott Burchill, Bob Bork, Jeff Frayne, and Peter Agocs, all coached by Frances O’Neil… and we kicked ass, winning the county championship in our first time out. I don’t have tape of any of the televised games, but I do have a photo on the set of our team playing against a group of people I’d eventually be teammates with in high school.

(It’s also that group, plus Shelly Demers, Jodi Cable, and Pam Wilcocks, that built a computerized buzzer system for the school and won the computer science prize at the county science fair… despite discovering halfway through that the person we had doing wiring was colourblind!)

I was hooked.

I’d heard from my father that there was a team at North Lambton Secondary School that had some pretty good players, and soon discovered he was right. Murray Watson, Jason Dodge, Ian Coulthard, Gary Peters and Bev Rider were forces to be reckoned with; Murray and Jason had been recruited years before by Roger Harrington, who’d just given up the coaching position to Ann Walker. Also joining the team that year were Maryann Moons and Dave Mallick, who I’d played against in elementary school. The intermediate team (grade 9 and 10 students) did reasonably well in county competition, as did the seniors, but Sarnia’s St. Clair Secondary—henceforth known as the enemy—won the county.

In Grade 10 I was introduced to Mark Lade—current voice of the TD/Canada Trust automated banking system—who hosted CFPL-TV’s regional Reach for the Top competition. To this day I can recall his distinctive voice at will, and not simply because of what I’ll write about later. CFPL, a former CBC affiliate, had kept Reach running after the main corporation cancelled it nationally. North Lambton hadn’t been in regional televised competition for several years for a variety of reasons, but we managed to back-door our way onto the show.

I graduated to the television team, with Murray, Jason, and Ian, for our wondrous return in a first-round game against London Central—henceforth known as the enemy—in November 1986. That we lost. By 70 points, given up during the snapper round at the end of the show. We were finished.

Well, not quite. The less-glamorous (i.e. non-televised) county School Reach competition remained for the senior and intermediate teams. (School Reach and Reach for the Top are run by the same organization.) By April the seniors (with Gary) had won the county, allowing them (with alternates Maryann and yours truly) to compete in the Southern Ontario School Reach competition in Windsor. That we won. By 5 points. On the final question. Which meant two things: we were going to provincials… and we were going to be on CFPL again.

A couple of things have changed since I wrote that part: Warwick Central has closed, and CFPL was bought by CHUM and renamed to The New PL, and then again to A Channel. Neither is particularly relevant to the story, except as trivia… which was kinda the point.

Declaration of Principles

The universe speaks in many languages, but only one voice.
The language is not Narn, or Human, or Centauri, or Gaim or Minbari.
It speaks in the language of hope.
It speaks in the language of trust.
It speaks in the language of strength and the language of compassion;
In the language of the heart and the language of the soul.

But always it is the same voice.

It is the voice of our ancestors, speaking through us,
And the voice of our inheritors, waiting to be born.
It is the small, still voice that says
We are one.
No matter the blood, no matter the skin
No matter the world, no matter the star:
We are one.
No matter the pain, no matter the darkness
No matter the loss, no matter the fear:
We are one.

Here, gathered together in common cause,
we agree to recognize this singular truth:
That we are one
and this singular rule:
That we must be kind to one another
Because each voice enriches us and ennobles us
and each voice lost diminishes us.

We are the voice of the Universe,
the soul of creation,
the fire that will light the way to a better future.
We are one.

We are one.

Letter to candidates, chapter 3

I sent this followup letter to the four local major-party candidates, now that a week has gone by without a response and it’s unlikely there will be anything from any of them during the holidays.

Dear London North Centre candidates,

Below is a letter I sent to the four of you last week. These are important questions that will help direct my vote to one of you in a month’s time, and I’m disappointed that I’ve received no response—not even an acknowledgement of its receipt—from any of you or your campaign staff.

I understand your respective campaigns will be out of commission for the rest of 2005, but I hope you will each see fit to respond to an interested voter in the new year.

Sincerely,

(signed)

Update: The first (and still only) candidate to acknowledge my followup note is Green Party representative Stuart Smith, who as well as running a campaign is also a very expectant father-to-be. Thanks very much Stuart!

Update 2: Number two is the campaign office of John Mazzilli, the Conservative candidate. Thanks Bill!

Update 3: First to check in with a detailed response to some of the questions in my note is NDP candidate Stephen Maynard, at 10 a.m. yesterday during what was supposed to be a break week. Thank you Stephen!

Update 4: I forgot to update this post with the information that I received an acknowledgement of my e-mail from one of Liberal candidate Joe Fontana‘s staffers on January 2. Thanks Kenneth!

Letter to candidates, chapter 2

Last Thursday evening I wrote a letter to my candidates asking for their opinions on various issues. I’m somewhat surprised to report that I’ve received no responses at all. Not even an acknowledgement of receipt. No answer from the incumbent trying to retain his seat; silence from the candidate hoping to rebuild support for his party in southwestern Ontario; nothing from the young representative who should be stumping for any notice at all; and zero from the multi-careered gentleman from the (apparently) single-issue party.

But hey, I’m just a guy with a blog… oh yeah, and a vote. Should I really be surprised, when reliable sources say the politicians just don’t get it yet?

It’s only been two business days since my letter, so I suppose I should give them all the benefit of the doubt. I find it a little disheartening, though, that there’s doubt for which benefit needs to be given.

I missed the bus (yeah I did it again!)

I’ve been working on a new website for almost four months, and I figure it’s about time to say something about it since it’s been live for that entire time. So here’s the formal introduction: the new site is the online home of Bohemia ProductionsBlack Hand Theatre, a theatre production company started by my friend Stephanie Demas.

I met Stephanie at this summer’s London Fringe Festival and we hit it off almost immediately. She’s a young playwright, actor and producer whose first two shows Blow This Popsicle Stand and P&J have been met with critical and popular acclaim. (P&J was actually my introduction to her work; I originally went because it starred my friend Amber Cunningham and London theatre maven Jeff Culbert.) For some reason Stephanie’s allowed me to glom onto her rapidly rising star, and it’s an absolute pleasure to be working with her.

There’s not much to say about building the site except that it’s been a chance to try out some things that I’ve never attempted before, like downloadable fonts and text/image replacement. The most interesting part has really been our development and update process: Stephanie’s currently living in Ottawa, so we’ve done the majority of it by instant messaging back and forth at three in the morning.

Unfortunately, as of August 13, 2006, I will be resigning as webmaster of blackhandtheatre.com. I wish Stephanie all the best!

Cadenza

While transcribing the previous item I was reminded of a stylistic point that went through my mind during the debate: it’s difficult to understand Stephen Harper, not because of what he says but because of how he says it. He’s got a stereotypically Shatneresque speaking rhythm, pausing at odd times during sentences and emphasizing words apparently at random, and I find his cadence very hard to follow.

I don’t know if it adds to my troubles understanding him, but to quote Antonia Zerbisias, the eyes don’t smile with the mouth. Those half-expressions are unsettling.