Stanley Airfield Magic carpet time travelling. The field was used by the Royal Air Force, and operated during WWII when it was known as Elementary Flying Training School #17. Pilots trained in Fleet Finches and DeHaviland Tiger Moths. If you go off-season, Stanley is a quiet time-out-place experience. The huge green aerodrome remains, now in […]
Jane Kansas
Posted inArts + Music
Church music
Chris Church is sweating out a three-month tour around the continent. It started on May 4 in Scottsdale, Arizona, including stops in such far-flung places as Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, and Pomona, New Jersey, winding up in Boulder, Colorado, on July 29. Halifax isn’t among the 25 stops listed on the tour schedule at chrischurch.ca, but all […]
Posted inArts + Music
Pedalling performance
Mary Ellen MacLean is rehearsing her new play, Velocipede, in the Dalhousie Arts Centre. Studio Two is a large cavernous cube. A metal grid is suspended from the ceiling, just above a catwalk which wraps around the room. Far below on the studio floor, about 20 cycles are parked, a herd of rust, rubber, chrome, […]
Posted inArts + Music
Flight plan
On September 11, 2001, at 10:03am, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Forty-four on board died. United 93, the movie about that flight, was released last Friday, 1,670 days later. It is, of course, not too soon to release a movie about the fourth plane to crash that day. United 93 is the […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
All the small things
Last Saturday, the Shearwater Aviation Museum was home to a number of craft much smaller than its usual big birds. The Eighth Annual Model Makers Showcase & Contest was on. Downstairs, folks were showing off their handicraft, which ranged all over the historical time line. They sat at tables with models, tackle boxes of tools […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
One-booth wonder
On a recent Thursday I have supper in this one-day diner. A diner. Open for one day. With one booth. Sweet. I bump into the painter-slash-musician Mitchell Wiebe and he says, “do you know about the secret cafe?” Of course I don’t. He says, “well, that’s one place, but friends of mine have this other […]
Posted inArts + Music
antenna’s up
Lucy Liu, best known for her work as an actor in films such as Charlie’s Angels and the Kill Bill volumes, will show off another side of her expression—her multimedia art. Her show antenna opens on Sunday at emotion picture gallery. There are connections between visual art and the film world for all involved: emotion […]
Posted inArts + Music
Quitting Brokeback
The talk’s all wrong. Everybody’s saying that Brokeback Mountain is a brave movie—the brave gay cowboys, the chances the brave actors take by playing brave gay cowboys, the sheer nerve of the brave gay cowboy film to be showing on 1,600 screens across the continent (compared with 158 for Transamerica). The brave gay cowboy movie […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
The cleaner
Instead of a doctor for premier, Nova Scotia will have a fisherman. It’s not that John Hamm, now stepping down to make way for the winner of this weekend’s Progressive Conservative convention, brought his stethoscope to work (but the image was used over and over by political cartoonists), or that there’ll be a lobster in […]
Posted inLifestyle
Up in smoke
There are a few really good free things in this town. At least two are offered by Capital Health’s Addiction Services. The first is the free nicotine patch and gum you can get through their Tobacco Intervention program. The second is auricular acupuncture. If you’re addicted to a drug, let’s say nicotine, it’s very, very […]
Posted inArts + Music
Proper conduct
It is, to use Dinuk Wijeratne’s word for it, serendipitous that he is here in Halifax, of all places. Wijeratne and his mother, Vino, a well-known ballet teacher in Dubai, wanted to be residents of Canada. Why Canada? Because Vino’s best friend lives here. In Toronto? No. In Vancouver? No. In Clayton Park. So Wijeratne […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
A place called Home
The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children opened in 1921. It was big, a house, really, three floors and lots of bedroom windows, on Main Street, in what is now Dartmouth. Back then it was Preston. The children it took in were orphans, mostly, and not allowed in any of the local orphanages or schools […]
