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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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Toronto Life online has an article by Robert Fulford about blogs. Once he gets through the seemingly mandatory intro phase (blog is short for Weblog) including quotation marks around words like “blogosphere” and (heh) “posts”, he gets into some interesting detail on bloggers with extra-internet writing cred.
[Terry] Teachout writes books, magazine articles and drama reviews for The Wall Street Journal, but he also adores his blog; it provides “immediacy, informality and independence that you can’t find in the print media.” Although he’s paid for his theatre criticism, he tells us for free about every concert or dance performance he attends, apparently every record he hears and even what deadlines he’s in danger of missing.They also have a side feature here of local bloggers (including yours truly) picking their favourite other local bloggers.
These full-time professionals have turned themselves into part-time amateurs, in the root definition of “amateur”: someone who acts out of love. Because it’s so economically independent, blogging encourages freewheeling individualism, which has affected mainstream journalism. In Foreign Policy, an influential American journal, two scholars recently noted that “What began as a hobby is evolving into a new medium that is changing the landscape for journalists and policy-makers alike.”
This is the passport that the Governor General carries. (no, really!)
I'm enough of a nerd to have watched the swearing in ceremony on Monday. The GG holds this symbolic role as Head of State so that we can freely show our contempt for our elected officials (as they deserve). This sentiment is truly non-partisan, as they are all sleazy, stupid and self-serving. (It just usually goes without saying.)
I could have done that GG job. (Shit.) I'm good at making chit-chat with the military. (And was I the only one who noticed that Batiste, the billy goat mascot for the Vandoos (Royal 22nd Regiment), was heavily sedated?)
"L'histoire veut qu'en 1884, un couple des ancêtres de Batisse fut donné en cadeau à la Reine Victoria par le Shah de Perse. Ces bêtes étaient originaires du Tibet et leur présence faisait l'orgueil des habitants du pays. La Reine Victoria accepta ce cadeau et ordonna que le bouc devienne la mascotte de son Régiment. De ce jour, fut créé le troupeau royal qui prit logis au jardin zoologique de Londres. Le troupeau y est encore et on dit que ces boucs et ces chèvres sont les derniers survivants de cette race. Nos boucs régimentaires sont les descendants directs de ce troupeau."
Thank you thank you to L.M. for her gr-8 guest blogging! The good news is she's agreed to keep it up, so we'll both be posting for awhile.
I've been so engrossed in work that there's a bunch of things I neglected to write about. The following is a quick list, off the top of my head:
Angela Leach! Angela Leach! Her work is so pretty I just had to steal this jpeg from the Wynick Tuck website. Leach's amazing painting stole the show at the already pretty cool exhibition Dimensionality, that Andy Patton curated for YYZ. Exhibition is on until Oct. 22.
The interminable CBC lockout. Is the damn station ever coming back on the air or what? I can't even decide if I care.... I have always liked the idea of the CBC more than the real CBC. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure I still want Canadian public radio and TV, even if it mostly sucks! Does anybody else care (other than the employees of course, for whom I have great sympathy)? What gives?
Gene Threndyle and friends (so sorry I didn't catch everyone's name) singing in exchange for dollars at the Queen West Art Crawl. They had a modified roulette wheel for selecting songs. If your spin ended up on "Brit Pop" the one guy (Mark?) with a voice as deep as L.Cohen would do a kickass Britney Spears number for you (my favourite).
Michael Maranda's sweet conceptual art show at Akau: a bound set of the great works of philosophy, true to length, but only the punctuation with spaces where the words had been removed. Exhibition is on until Oct.15.
John Porter's new website! www.super8porter.ca
Brock Silversides' kitsch-fix exhibition of vinyl dance album covers at the Media Commons, Robarts Library (2nd floor). Exhibition is on until Nov. 1st.
Our show in Sudbury looks great! Rebecca Diederichs and Gordon Hicks made art that blew me away, our curator, Corinna Ghaznavi, put it all together beatifully, and the director, Celeste Scopiletes, was amazing. There was a really good turn out for the opening/performance and people were engaged and talkative afterwards. Von Bark brought the keyboard and played a perfect plinking sound sculpture accompaniement to the lecture. And Lara Bradley wrote a really good article about the show in the Sudbury Star (one of the best reviews of my work ever). Yay Sudbury! I am really thrilled with the show (also thrilled I don't have to work on it anymore for awhile), and I'm very glad it is going on next year to Directore/Curator Jan Allen at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston.
 | Von Bark says: Sudbury is a city where giant rocks grow out of the sides of your hotel room. This is but one reason to visit Sudbury. |
Geopolitically speaking, we are considered enchanting and as cute as buttons. (If anyone should ask, this would be the most central and forceful argument in this blog) That said, everyone loves our passports. (but this may be more of a curse)
An interesting story on passport abuse was done on CTV's W-Five about allegations of a passport fraud ring within the Canadian High Commission in Hong Kong that operated in the 90's, prior to the British hand-over to main land China. (I recall that the Canadian business community were peeing their pants in excited anticipation of all that investment money that would arrive here.)
But even more fascinating events occurred in 1997, when Mossad agents, carrying Canadian passports, were arrested in Jordan for the attempted assassination of a Hammas leader named Khaled Mashall.
Canadian officials quickly claimed that the passports were forgeries, but Norman Spector, a former Canadian ambassador to Israel, AND chief of staff to former (Yay! Former!) Prime Minister Brian Mulroney made the claim that Canadian secret services routinely dangled passports to other security services. Basically we ain't got much when its time to trade info with the other services, so here, take a few passports, and by the way, would you happen to know what the U.S. is bidding on that grain sale to the Ukraine?
Be reassured that an official signal of our displeasure over this event was proposed and perhaps even delivered.
I also googled for images of everyone else and their passports, but this is all I found for you.
How dare he not want my passport.