Burning Ears for Monday
Don’t call it a comeback, as my friend LL Cool J says, I’ve been here for years. I just haven’t been posting Burning Ears for a while, because it’s been crazy busy around The Coast office. However, news that Iranians are scared of a Halifax disease ship made me realize this town needs the Ears,…
Last night
My Saturday was pretty low-key compared to some of the earlier days at the festival, a fitting finale, I thought. I saw Forever, a meandering, meditative documentary on Pere LaChaise cemetery in Paris. It is a sprawling city of a graveyard, the final resting place of a huge number of writers, artists and scholars, including…
Awards time
I was looking back at the guide and getting that feeling that has come upon me every festival I have covered: There’s so much that I missed. I heard great things about Portage, Angel-A, Over The GW, Low and Behold, Lust, Caution… and many, many more. Sigh. Now as the festival is winding down, I…
Descendo
David Foster announced this afternoon that in March of 2008 he will produce Crescendo, a charity concert taking place at the Metro Centre. The event aims to raise $1 million for his foundation, which assists the famlilies of kids who need major organ transplants. The line-up is still TBC; the only for-true guest is Sinbad…
Love will tear us apart, they said
Control is the story of Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division, a much loved band whose stature and influence has far outlasted its rise to fame from the Manchester post-punk scene. Adapted from the book written by Curtis’s wife Deborah, it details the band’s beginnings and Curtis’ fall into depression, the collapse of his…
The winning Pot
For years the Atlantic Film Festival has been running a program for emerging screenwriters, in which a handful of scribes spend the summer workshopping an original script each with legendary Canadian story editor Allan Magee, then pitch it to producers during the fest itself. Last year, which focused on first-draft features, was the first time…
Keepin’ it small(town)
Applewood, Ontario sounds like a pretty quiet place. A nice place to raise a family. It’s 10 minutes from Toronto and relatively suburban. However, Keeping 6, Applewood’s most raucous homeboys, are not as quiet. Touring Nova Scotia in support of their summertime fresh debut CD, Uncensored, the lads are set to harm some eardrums at…
A world without…One World
The pots, food supplies and coffee-makers have all been carted out and the fridge is gone, too. As reported last week in Scene and Heard, the One World Cafe—an adored north end all-ages venue and community gathering-place—is officially closed. Owner Ken Pilkey’s dad, Dennis, locked the cafe’s door on Sept. 12. Dennis has spent the…
Market Value
The new Seaport Farmers’ Market made a push for funding this week, which is an ongoing concern for market manager Fred Kilcup. Yes, the conceptual art looks beautiful, but the new market comes with a 9.75 million-dollar price tag. On Tuesday, Kilcup took his case to city council, and had a generally positive response. “It…
One World view
To the editor, It was a sad day when the One World Cafe closed. This was a neighbourhood cafe in the truest sense: A place to hang with friends and perform with my band. In August, I took between 500 and 700 pictures/video clips at the cafe, recorded a song and put together a video,…
Thanks…but no thanks
To the editor, I am writing to thank the person in a black Volkswagen who hit my wife while we were cycling along Quinpool on September 13 around 7:45pm. We’ve always been curious about how fast an ambulance, fire truck and police car could respond in such an emergency (remarkably fast, thankfully), and it was…
Police politesse
To the editor, After hearing what I consider to be an irresponsible minimization of the risks associated with visiting the Common, expressed by senior police officers after yet another poor soul was attacked, my opinion of Halifax Regional Police dropped pretty low. However, I’ve been so impressed by the high level of service I recently…
Foster visits Halifax
I have been cordially invited to a press conference tomorrow for an event called Crescendo, “an event that will electrify Halifax, transforming the city into a glittering world stage of entertainment.” Making the announcement? Superproducer and reality show star David Foster. How very odd. Check back Friday afternoon for the deets.
Markit’s work
Markit’s solo album Mark My Words isn’t motivated by misplaced ambition and delusions of grandeur. This isn’t Markit’s big move in an effort to “make it.” If anything, Mark My Words seems part of an organic process, growing out of his love of poetry and concepts, and a desire to work outside the collaborative process…
Telling a tale of eastern promise
The best movie I’ve seen this year on the topics of violence and morality didn’t come from David Cronenberg or Neil Jordan. It’s a New Brunswick-shot B-movie called Stuck from Stuart Gordon (The Re-Animator) about a nurse (Mena Suvari) who hits a homeless man (Stephen Rea) with her car and then leaves him in her…
blind faith
Michelle Butler Hallet shows great empathy for her characters in her short stories and in her new novel, Double-blind, which she’ll read from at Word on the Street this weekend. Psychiatrist Josh Bozeman narrates the story of his own work with a secretive research group, the losses that plague him, the damage he’s done in…
SAVAGE LOVE
Q I have a swim-cap fetish. I don’t know why; it’s not like I saw my grandmother bathing with a shower cap on or anything like that. My GGG girlfriend is willing to wear a swim cap during sex and I think that’s wonderful, but it goes beyond that. I go to the pool several…
Get your fest
“Desperately disappointing” is how Peter Greenaway was describing the contemporary corpse of film to a luncheon audience of Canadian filmmakers, producers, broadcasters, distributors and their international guests. The iconoclastic British director went on to say that the death of cinema really occurred on September 31, 1983, with the invention of the “zapper”—the television remote control—and…
The grey area
Toronto’s CN Tower lost its title as world’s tallest free-standing structure last Thursday, with the announcement that construction of the Burj Dubai had reached 555.3 metres. The developers behind the Burj are keeping their planned finishing point secret, but said besting the CN Tower (553.5 metres) is just a milestone on the way to world’s…
Bandwidth battles
Even the information superhighway has speed limits—limits that are enforced without you even knowing about it. It’s called “traffic shaping” and most internet service providers have some form of it in place. Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, defines traffic shaping as “ISPs limiting the…
Road warriors
The irony is not lost on Christopher Sweetnam-Holmes. A founder of Montreal green-development and consulting firm Ecocite, Sweetnam-Holmes arrived in Nova Scotia last week to speak at the province’s Power of Green Conference, which set out to discuss a society that could “eliminate waste” and “renew itself through creative adaptation.” But before he arrived, Sweetnam-Holmes…
Vaccinate my love
I have a sexually transmitted infection. It was so long ago that I contracted the damn thing, it was called a sexually transmitted disease. Thing is, it never felt like one. A disease, that is. Because no one ever told me about HPV. The sex-ed I received was shockingly and sadly out of touch with…
Green meat
How eating a hamburger can help save the planet.
Think globally, eat locally
At Chives Canadian Bistro, Craig Flinn serves a (delicious, exquisite) helping of politics on every plate.
The farming industrial complex
Why food trucked in from all over the continent gets priced lower than Nova Scotia’s organic strawberries
Jamaican yum
Sweet Spice turns up the heat with damn good results.
