What Mike Savage’s campaign contributors mean to Halifax
Wednesday morning, mayor-elect Mike Savage made public his list of campaign contributions. This is my quick analysis, and a few additional thoughts. List is too late to help voters Savage is releasing the contributors list long before the December 19 legal deadline to file the list, but even so, making the list public today doesn’t…
Mike Savage’s campaign contributions made public
Mayor-elect Mike Savage made public his list of campaign contributions today. See the names and dollar amounts here. I’ll be on CTV news with Steve Murphy this evening, discussing the contributions.
SAP outsourcing decision to come within a week
The union representing provincial SAP workers has been told that a decision about outsourcing SAP jobs will be announced by the end of the month, and the union is pessimistic. “I don’t think we’re going to win this one,” NSGEU president Joan Jessome told The Coast this afternoon, as about 50 union members picketed Province…
Klarka Weinwurm
Heavy bass and lumbering electric strum lace most of the tracks of Continental Drag, requiring a close listen if you want substance. On “Tractor and Crane,” where Weinwurm unplugs and enlists Old Man Luedecke for backup, a simple eloquence is allowed to shine. “They are building our new sky” is her dry assessment of the…
So you’ve decided to have Katrina Roberts make you a drink
“Start with fresh ingredients and quality spirits,” says Katrina Roberts as she mixes a simple syrup infused with fire-roasted plums into one of Morris East’s signature cocktails, the Nova Libre. Roberts, wine and beverage director at Morris East, has built her reputation on the use of fresh and fragrant ingredients, like spry sprigs of rosemary…
Free Will Astrology
Happy Birthday! SCORPIO (October 23-November 21) “It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas,” said French painter Paul Cezanne. Many writers make similar comments about the excruciating joy they feel when first sitting down in front of an empty page. For artists in any genre, in fact, getting…
Inlet Sound
From the moment the first note sounds on the first track from the debut album of Ontario’s Inlet Sound, it’s clear that the two years spent working on The Romantics with producer Laurence Currie (Wintersleep, Hey Rosetta!) has allowed the band time to get it right. Lush arrangements meld banjo twangs, strings and piano harmonies…
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
First-time author and full-time geek Robin Sloan’s fast-paced new novel, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, is comfortably nestled between the Google headquarters in Silicon Valley, a cramped and curious bookstore in San Francisco and a secret society in New York. On his website, Sloan claims “I wrote this book because it’s the one I wanted to…
Rock Reject
Williams’ debut novel, winner of the inaugural Beacon Award for Social Justice Literature, packs a solid educational punch and boasts an engaging plot. In 1974 Peter, heartbroken and guilt ridden, flees his urban home and the unbearable pressures and perpetual disappointment of his successful perfectionist father, to be a grunt monkey in an asbestos mine…
Playing Indian
Fall: It’s the best of times and the worst of times. Shellacked root vegetables find their hand-painted way onto tables everywhere, orange and black-themed displays festoon shop windows and with the chill of October comes my spooky sixth-sense that craves old ’80s horror movies and an unhealthy amount of candy corn. It’s itchy sweater, apple…
The Age of Miracles
It’s hard enough to be a young girl navigating the treacherous world of middle school without the Earth’s rotation slowing and causing a series of end-of-the-world phenomena. But, that’s the lot Julia is cast in The Age of Miracles. It would be easy for Karen Thompson Walker to go full nutty sci-fi with the concept…
Nevermore forever
As a child with a dark streak, I was fascinated by Edgar Allan Poe’s meditations on murder and madness. In Nevermore, Shakespeare by the Sea has brought four of my favourites to the stage: “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Raven” and the “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Of the four, I was…
Borderlands 2
Gearbox Software took everything we loved about Borderland (guns, irreverent humour, more guns) and made it even better. The planet of Pandora is the perfect location for this interstellar spaghetti western—it’s been mined and taken over by several mega-corporations, the latest being Hyperion and its ldictator Handsome Jack, who provides some of the best humour…
Nights of Gore haunts hard
A cornfield, just past a graveyard in a place called Gore? That’s a spot just begging to be haunted. But the Nights of Gore Haunted Corn Maze wasn’t always a place to fear when the sun goes down. By day, it’s the Courthouse Hill, a family-run farm that just happened to have put its fields…
Mixed media
Autumn: A season of changing leaves, crisp breezes and fuzzy sweaters. It’s also harvest time, which means a cornucopia of flavours has arrived in time to create some tantalizing seasonal cocktails. You can’t just drink pumpkin spice lattes and apple cider all month, so why not try one of these unique recipes from some of…
Animal‘s attraction
Dalhousie’s current exhibit, the multi-media group show Animal, will get you thinking about power dynamics. It’s a reminder of the complicated and varied relationships humans have with animals, and the different ways in which we see them. We have the power while viewing Dagmar Dahle’s “Rare, Common, Extinct” where hole-ridden ceramic birds, Victorian women and…
Cool Lunice
You may recognize Montreal DJ and producer Lunice from Azealia “hottest girl ever” Banks’ “212” video, where he’s doing a cool conga line-style goofball dance with Banks. This Friday at the Palace you get to put yourself in Banks’ shoes and throw your booty around to the crucial sounds of Lunice. Of course, aside from…
Charter party
Did you know Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms celebrated its 30th this year? I’m going to go ahead and assume you didn’t. No one, including the federal government, really made a big deal about it. Maybe you forgot, but the Dalhousie Feminist Legal Association didn’t. And they’ve taken it upon themselves to do the…
The myth of pornography
Q What do I say to my straight 14-year-old son about porn? Should I say anything? My sister tells me that all the research shows my son has been looking at porn for three years already. Am I too late? –Distressed Anxious Dad A According to The Today Show and the Boston Globe and the…
Outskirts wisdom
Sue Goyette, whose outskirts has won three significant poetry prizes this year, exhales pearls of wisdom like they’re commonplace. “I drive my kids crazy with this stuff,” she says when I tell her she speaks in verse. Goyette is an environmental poet. Not to pigeonhole her. By environment I mean our habitat, surroundings, home and…
Mix master
Jeffrey Van Horne brings an old-school touch of class to drinking in the city through his posts at The Bicycle Thief and Untitled Eats. by Melissa Buote With his Lindberg-era under-cut and Hercule Poirot-meets-handlebar moustache, rower-turned-bartender Jeffrey Van Horne looks like he fell out of a photo of the Paris Crew and into a lithograph…
Brothers of invention
Sage Mixology’s bottle within a bottle proves to be Dal students’ dream within a dream. by Michaela Cavanagh The enlightened student’s constant quandary: how to make alcohol consumption harder, better, faster, stronger. From shotgunning beers to alcohol enemas, it seems like young people have gone to the ends of the earth (or off the deep…
Arc story
“Our projectionist came up with the name,” says Siloën Daley, founder and director of Carbon Arc. “A carbon arc is a kind of projector that used carbon rods instead of lamps. They were really cheap and would take 20 minutes to burn out, so you’d have to buy a whole lot of them. It was…
Muddling through
Made With Love, a Canada-wide mixology competition, hit Halifax this month, bringing a lot of inspired drinks and thoughts on cocktail culture. by Melissa Buote As house music thumped its way around the maze of rooms at The Halifax Club last week, bartenders from around Halifax shook and stirred, muddled and mixed their way through…
Heaven on Earthworm
“God lives underground/in a dark and dirty hole.” So begins “Merry Christmas Jim,” the addictive and ironically upbeat first track on The Tom Fun Orchestra’s much-anticipated sophomore album, Earthworm Heart (available November 13). A follow-up to 2008’s East Coast Music Award-winning You Will Land With a Thud, the band’s first album in almost five years…
Tame Impala
Australian psychedelic art-rockers Tame Impala return with Lonerism, a gloriously indulgent follow-up to 2010’s critically acclaimed Innerspeaker. Leaving behind the Yes-inspired daisy chains and vibrant King Crimson-esque guitar drudge of their debut, lead maestro Kevin Parker cranks the ambient textures on Lonerism even higher, using an array of layered vintage-synths and guitar reverb to flush…
Spectator sport
“They are things I believe in, things I am afraid of, things I want desperately to explain to others. Things I am suspicious that may revolve around the absolute meaning of life,” says Amelia Curran. “Things that I am so very certain tie us together in the human condition, and if we could only understand, we…
Sampson
Somewhere between Rich Terfry and Marshall Mathers lies Halifax rapper Sampson. Elements of both aforementioned artists abound throughout the solo debut Ill-Mannered. Tracks such as “3 the Hard Way,” “Greatest Story Ever Denied” and “Venomous” just go to prove that this talented emcee is no joke, he’s here to stake his claim in the diverse…
Hemsworth the wait
Fresh from being winked at saucily by The Guardian—the British news site cited him as the band of the day on Monday, lavishing praise on his “woozy/hazy with a side order of slurry/blurred” style—former Haligonian Ryan Hemsworth makes a quick visit home this week, opening for Zeds Dead at the Palace on October 30 (with…
Hal-Con all night long
Hold onto your autograph books, this weekend’s Hal-Con 2012 sci-fi, fantasy and gaming convention (Oct 26-28, World Trade and Convention Centre, 1800 Argyle Street) is set to break the record (also previously held by Hal-Con) for the so-called “nerdiest weekend in Halifax”. Featuring esteemed guests in the fields of film, TV, books, comics, music and…
