A real mixed bag
To the editor, Just went to your website for the first time once I saw the banner headline on the front page of this week’s edition, which I get at Dave Doolittle’s. Read Stephanie Domet’s very moving column. Two points: For those of us who aren’t very computer savvy, what are blogs and how do…
Rock out with your lockout
Dear HRM and Canadians everywhere, I don’t even know where to begin. My understanding of the CBC lockout was that the union was threatening a walk-out. In a pre-emptive strike, CBC management locked them out just ahead of the walk-out deadline. Just because someone beat you to the punch doesn’t give you the right to…
Is that a park in your pocket?
To the editor, I feel compelled to write to you on behalf of the merchants, property owners and residents of Quinpool Road and the surrounding area. The “Neighbourhood watch” article that was written in your September 1 Back to School issue has ruffled many feathers and created disappointment and frustration on the street. We very…
Sign of the times
To the editor, Your recent Back to School edition (September 1) includes a fascinating photograph of some students gathered at the gates of a concentration camp, grinning at the camera like a gaggle of tourists at Disneyworld. It appears to be advertising some kind of a cultural literacy course for Saint Mary’s. I’m not sure…
Repertory roll call
Dear Coast, OK, I can’t take it any more. Every 12 months or so The Coast runs an article about a non-existent repertory cinema in Halifax and reports on how they’re not doing (like Shayla Howell’s September 1 feature “Tarnished rep”). Why isn’t there a repertory cinema in Halifax? The answer is simple: there isn’t…
4,827 kilometres
Ontario writer and Exclaim! editor Jason Schneider — who co-wrote the essential Canadian rock music tome Have Not Been the Same with Michael Barclay and Ian Andrew Jack — has just released his debut novel, 3,000 Miles, on ECW Press. It follows a handful of Quebecois teens in the aftermath of Kurt Cobain’s suicide as…
Murph no slow one
It will be almost three years to the day since Sloan last played an open show in the streets they called home when they perform at the McInnes Room on September 23. Now residing in Toronto for the better half of a decade, Chris Murphy reassures that despite their absence, the band has kept a…
Blues, brother
The name is a storied one in Halifax, but the latest incarnation of Scoundrels (beneath Club 5171 at 5171 George Street) is less homage and more mnemonic device. “The bar that used to be there was called Scoundrels,” says general manager Gary Demone, “and we kept the name again so that people will know where…
Lockdown at City Hall
At about a quarter to six on the average Tuesday evening, you will find a small collection of city staff and councillors milling about the front steps of city hall (and the surrounding parking lot) grabbing a final few puffs on their cigarettes before heading inside to do the business of the municipality. And occasionaly,…
D’oh! Where’s my deer?
You might not notice anything out of place among the Mutations in the Garden of Delight. In fact, unless you look at the map for the Port Authority and NSCAD University’s new outdoor sculpture park at the entrance to Halifax Harbourwalk, you wouldn’t know that something is terribly amiss. At some point during the night…
Playing’s the thing
Peter Gabriel hadn’t released a proper album of new material since Us in 1992. He’d staged the international Secret World tour, then for years, silence, broken only by a largely instrumental project in conjunction with the opening of the Millennium Dome in London. When he released Up in 2002 and launched the Growing Up tour,…
Crappy daily troubled: expert
It’s depression time at the Green Toad, the glass building that squats on the Halifax waterfront near the foot of Sackville Street. Journalists who toil in the Toad’s Daily News offices worry “the people’s paper” is going down the tubes. Shaune MacKinlay, one of its best reporters, recently departed to the greener pastures of PR.…
Cowboy Show
Dustin Harvey used to be such a trusting young man. One year ago, he happily promoted his new stage production Winding Up Godot, a parody of the classic Waiting for Godot starring wind-up toys. Unfortunately, the estate of Samuel Beckett found out about Harvey’s little spoof (possibly from a Coast article) and threatened to sue…
Week six: Lockout night in Canada
It’s week six and frankly, it’s hard to believe we’re still out there. Do I start every entry like this, or does it just feel that way? I haven’t been to the picket line yet this week. I’ve done a bit of clerical and committee stuff, but not nearly enough to earn my $350 lockout…
Save-the-world tour
After nearly five months and thousands of revolutions of their bike pedals, the group of young activists who comprise the Otesha Project Coast2Coast Tour is wheeling into Halifax. The team hit the road in Vancouver on May 2, with 15 riders, and has since visited nearly 100 cities and towns across the country, speaking to…
Getting it together
How can the benefits of living in a co-operative be communicated to today’s youth? That’s the question facing organizers of this week’s Halifax Co-operative World Café, an event designed to inject some new blood into the city’s many co-ops. “There are very few young people under age of 30 who start co-ops or are involved…
Writing the streets
It’s a well-documented fact: Canada is an enormous land mass. You can make this country your home and still never, in your lifetime, experience isolation in the flat prairies, vertigo peering up at the Rockies, or rapture from the alien glow of the Northern Lights. This sense of mystery, which in its darker moments can…
Sleater-Kinney saves the world
I’ve just caught shit from the drummer of Sleater-Kinney. In asking Janet Weiss about the state of women in music, I should have known better and she lets me know it. “How do you feel about men in music?” Weiss fires back. “I feel like you’re putting me in the ghetto just asking that question.…
The outsiders
“I was up at 3am one morning and was really bored so I just decided to send some of our songs to Jeffery at Art & Crafts,” says Adam Nimmo, drummer for The Most Serene Republic. “He got back to me the next day and was really excited about what he heard. The rest, as…
Stills standing
A band releases a great record and tours its collective ass off, playing its music to thousands of eventual converts and achieving the status of a band with a bright future. But over the thousands of traveled miles and similar sounding records being produced by sound-alike acts, the group starts to question itself and the…
The big sell
So, crybaby, can’t score tickets to your fav-ourite band’s sold-out show? The big night’s approaching and you’re empty handed and broken hearted? Chin up, kid—you don’t have to miss out, you just have to get creative. Some tried and true methods include buying tickets on eBay (or from dodgy-looking men near the venue); being the…
Corpse Bride
Necrophilia is the unspoken threat in Just Like Heaven and Corpse Bride. Both are highly accessible. But where Just Like Heaven is soap opera treacle, only the Tim Burton film has the courage to address the lure of dead things as a rejection of established civility. Yeah, Burton went there already with Winona Ryder’s Lydia…
Suburban splendid
Halifax has more sushi spots than you can shake a sheet of nori at, which makes it hard to imagine how one manages to stand out from the other. But Milamodo succeeds quite nicely, with a two-step business model: First by locating itself outside the downtown core, and then quietly going about business. The only…
