Music not chores
To the editor, How benevolent a gesture to give a food voucher, and not script, to a street musician, as was suggested in the Chronicle-Herald on May 15. I cannot speak for the well-known musician in the photo, who may or may not have given his permission for his picture to accompany the article. However,…
Un-Common treatment
To the editor, On Sunday, May 20, the Bluenose Marathon organizers used the north-east quadrant of the Halifax Common as an entertainment venue. Today, mud ruts gouge the entire area. Large tracts of grass have been compacted or torn up. It is a disgraceful, unsightly mess. Even partial restoration will be expensive. The promised rejuvenation…
Coaled comfort
To the editor, I was glad to see Tim Bousquet’s column on Nova Scotia Power in last week’s Coast (“Unjust rewards,” May 10). With respect to greenhouse gas emissions and the company’s ecological footprint in general, we should also take into account the source of NSP’s coal over the last several years. Even though we…
(Th)inking again
To the editor: I applaud tattoo artist Amber Thorpe and others who organized the Tattoo Festival this weekend (“Body of art,” May17), but when Thorpe said, “You’ll never see a tattoo artist’s work in a gallery,” she was wrong. As a graduate student at UCLA in the 1990s, writing my MA Thesis in anthropology on…
Light bulb moments
Dear Lezlie Lowe, I couldn’t agree more with your article pointing out the intrinsic flaw in the flourescent lightbulb scheme. Interesting, though, that after reading this, I returned to The Coast homepage to see a flashing advertisement for the campaign, encouraging us to visit Home Depot. Easy to criticize, but not so easy to escape!…
Light bulb moments
To the editor, As usual, Lezlie Lowe nails it (“Green bulb, red light,” May 17). When I got the “How many Nova Scotians does it take to change a light bulb?” card in my mailbox, my immediate mercenary response was that it would cost me more to drive out to Bayers Lake than I’d save…
Foodie kudos
To the editor, I’ve been a faithful reader of The Coast for years. I enjoy almost every section, but I am always particularly eager to read where Liz Feltham has dined. Until Liz, I had always found that food critics seemed more interested in either finding things to complain about or stroking their own egos.…
Touring Green – Blog 7: Hedley to Osoyoos (May 22)
After and amazing stay at The Old Hedley Road Inn (http://ww.oldhedley.com) with some fantastic people, I took some shots of the horses and the passing cattle herd who graze around the property. A couple long climbs through very dry, desert scenery and I was at the top of a very large mountain area with a…
Touring Green – Blog 6: Manning Park to Hedley (May 21)
Manning Park to Hedley brought its own challenges with down pours and having to grip the breaks so hard on a couple descents that walnuts would have barely survived the pressure. (For one thing… walnuts are under constant pressure in today’s society and why? They didn’t ask to be the easiest of cracking nuts… I…
Is that a pronoun in your pocket?
If you think no one is paying attention to your blog–think again (I learned my lesson after the Young Triffie fiasco). At least once a week I read the Zeke’s Gallery blog from Montreal which is a good, irreverent source of art news. Anyhow, in November, its writer Chris Hand wrote a post stating, “a…
Touring Green – Blog 5: Hope to Manning Park (May 20)
Leaving Hope was like leaving “it’s all fun and games”-land and the first of the serious mountains (like “I’m trying to get this work done for tomorrow’s 9am deadline” serious). So these videos say it all… things just got intense for the first time this day.. I mean biking 112km the first day and then…
Touring Green – Blog 4: Abbotsford to Hope (May 19)
After hanging with some great farmers and some million-dollar steeds, I began the trek through the first hills (hills not really mountains) on the way to Hope. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcYsdKiLY-M http://www.i129.photobucket.com/albums/p207/RichAucoin/100_0038.jpg http://www.i129.photobucket.com/albums/p207/RichAucoin/100_0043.jpg This bedroom used to be a grow-op and was hidden at the back of the garage. “Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So……
Touring Green – Blog 3: Vancouver to Abbotsford (May 18)
Finding it hard to find the time to write, I realized that I should try and capture the suckiest (and usually most comic parts of my day for you guys… because, as we know, every moment is “beautifully tragic, retrospectively comic or mundanely fantastic”): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci6zSLuzWNo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lww–9TP8Ak Other than those moments, I had The Golden Dogs’…
Touring Green – Blog 2: Vancouver (May 15-17)
So, as I write my second blog entry over a week after my first, I realize that it’s hard to update a blog when you’re in the mountains and the people who have been kind enough to put you up don’t have the internet (not to mention how hard it is to compose these after…
Math
A reader recently asked for documentation for the various stats I threw around in my rant about Nova Scotia Power exec’s excessive pay. This is excuse enough for my entry into The Coast blog world, and if you read through, I’ll even make an additional point. First, the numbers. For provincial energy use and greenhouse…
Word nerds unite!
In the middle of something half-way important, I got distracted by this completely unimportant but engrossing memory test. You see 15 words in 15 seconds, then write down all you remember. And you can do it over and over and over again, with different words every time. The average 20-year-old gets seven. How about you?…
Up and at them
Some good news coming out of the upfronts this week. Private Practice, the Kate Walsh/Grey’s Anatomy spin-off, has gotten a green light. All the Law and Orders, Friday Night Lights and sleeper comedy Notes from the Underbelly (Jennifer Westfeldt! Love!) are coming back. Someone has seen fit to give the fab Judy Greer her own…
Book ’em
This is a week full of winners and short-listers and otherwise awesome artists. First up, here be the winners of the Atlantic Book Awards, handed out at Pier 21 on May 11: Atlantic Fiction and Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction: Linda Little, Scotch River Atlantic Poetry: Steve McOrmond, Primer on the Hereafter Atlantic Published Book:…
Small but mighty
Kicking off a miniature, but powerful, Maritime tour, Toronto-based The Guest Bedroom just wants you to have a good time. They play “dramatic post-punk that dabbles in good times and party favours.” Sandi Falconer (guitar), Tim Smith (drums), Alan Kelley (bass) and Rob Castle (keyboard) will “continue to assault middle Canada for the rest of…
Passing the torchinelli
Da Maurizio restaurant, a long-standing favourite in Halifax, will soon be changing hands. The Bertossi Group has decided the time has come to let one of its downtown restaurants go, selling it to Andy and Tanya King. The Kings are the husband and wife team that already runs the upscale Northern Italian eatery in the…
Lost in transition
While you read, listen to “Don’t go easy” by Jill Barber. Jill Barber’s 2007 East Coast Music Awards weekend was a coming out party that fans won’t soon forget. Building on the success of her 2006 release For All Time, Barber wowed audiences with a string of stellar showcases that left the entire conference buzzing…
Taking flight
The Winston Churchill statue that stands in front of the Spring Garden Road library is a Halifax institution. Forever fixed mid-pace, the great leader frowns and guards the library’s path. Stephanie Domet describes the statue as “calming and encouraging.” It’s fitting, then, that the library is where much of Domet’s new novel Homing takes place.…
The screens of summer
May Shrek the Third (directed by Chris Miller) Two weeks ago Spider-Man 3 ushered in this sequel-saturated summer. Some may be stinkers but others we just can’t resist. The first Shrek made my teeth ache, but the second one had more mature gags and the incomparable presence of Antonio Banderas as Puss in Boots, who…
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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
Get ready, get set, ask, Aries, says Rob Brezsny.
SAVAGE LOVE
Dan Savage puts the blowjobs=cancer equation into perspective.
Green bulb, red light
Figures. Off I went in my last column blithely praising the provincial government. I should have known that kind of out-of-character move would come back to bite me in the ass. See, I bitched last time around about the Harper government’s 2006 axing of the One Tonne Challenge environmental education campaign and, silly me, I…
Drinking food
We’re at Gatsby’s, in a booth with no springs left in the seat, with music blaring so loudly we have to bawl at each other. I’m thinking that I’ve eaten a lot of good meals lately and I’m about due for a bad one, and if the start of this dinner is any indication, this…
28 Weeks Later
It was around the time of 2003’s 28 Days Later that zombies moved from their niche to be the dominant go-to movie monster—beating loyal standbys vampires, werewolves, mummies and child-murdering bogeymen. Not just in major films either—zombies stand alongside drug abuse and suicide as popular topics of amateur productions. One benefit is that zombies aren’t…
Body of art
Amber Thorpe stares—absorbed—at the work of another tattoo artist on a monitor in her Quinpool Road tattoo studio. “As an artist, I feed off other people’s ideas,” she says. Professional tattoo artists such as Thorpe look closely at each other’s work, something that will happen a lot during the first Maritime Tattoo Festival, a Halifax…
Burning ears
Murder most foul—from Los Angeles, Toronto, England and the blogosphere The city has been on edge since last Friday, when local police drew a connection between the murders of Michael Knott and Trevor Brewster, and the news has reverberated widely. “The RCMP has issued a public advisory about gay cruising areas in the Halifax area…
Good citizens
Congratulations to Stephen Kimber, Lezlie Lowe and Robert Plowman, the members of Team Coast honoured at Saturday’s Atlantic Journalism Awards. Kimber took home a silver award for Enterprise Reporting. Lowe and Plowman were both nominated in the Feature Writing category; Plowman was awarded silver, Lowe the gold for her profiles of Haligonians with HIV. Three…
7-up
While you read, listen to a few tracks by Gypsophilia off their new album Minor Hope. The name is a tip-off. Then take a single good look at the seven-piece called Gypsophilia and you’ll get a sense of what you’re in for. It’s a gang of players, dressed in the best vintage clothing local thrift…
