Montréal’s steadfast, enviable care for public art, as a community (elected and unelected alike), is no better exemplified than in what flaps gloriously in the breeze just off the south-west corner of Parc La Fontaine in another little park unto itself – Place Urbain-Baudreau-Graveline. Nine rectangular banners are fixed on individual brushed aluminum poles with [...]
I reached another marker this week in my posthumous, intriguing, fan-like relationship with Montréal poet Émile Nelligan (1879-1941) when Craig’s partner, Claude, drove me to the site of his burial in Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges. Even with a map of the cemetery it took us a while to find Marker #588 in Section N. At 350 acres, [...]
The upright grand piano in our living-room was given a good work-out most days when I was a kid, if not from older brother Craig or me (our sisters never took to it) then most certainly from Mom’s many piano students on weekdays after school, evenings and the occasional Saturday. Piano music, therefore, is something [...]
I know, I know – George Frederick Handel’s famous work is actually an Oratorio. (A musical would require lots of period costumes and at least one big dance number! Now imagine combining that with Mel Gibson’s gratuitously blood-letting Passion of the Christ. No, let’s not.) This was the time of year, probably forty years ago, [...]
Songs from a Lost Homeland, which originally aired on Al Jazeera English last year, is in the programming rotation again this weekend. Is there a song in the west right now with even a small percentage of the punch of these musicians? I hope you get a chance to see the entire documentary. There’s another [...]
Yesterday I learned of the death, on New Year’s Eve, of one of my favourite high school teachers. A reporter from The Gleaner, the local small-town newspaper, contacted me when she saw that I had written a letter which mentioned Lindsay Cullen a while back. I was a student of his from approximately 1972 to [...]
Following three successful summer workshops seventeen participants, including facilitators Linda Dawn and me, have signed up for the fall writing group starting 15 September and continuing most Tuesdays thereafter through 8 December from 7:30 – 9:00 p.m. You do not need to have attended the workshops to join us nor are you required to commit [...]
A great scene from “The Golden Girls”, although I remember Bea Arthur from her 70′s show “Maude” and her first portrayal of that character on “All in the Family”. The hilarity of Bea Arthur, and the rest of “The Golden Girls” helped get me through some of the roughest moments in the early years of [...]
Perhaps it is the season but it has been interesting to see the number of hits my night-time photo of Almuth Lutkenhaus-Lackey’s “Crucified Woman” has been getting at my photo blog photosbykenn. The dramatic sculpture stands in a clump of birch trees within a courtyard of the University of Toronto’s Emmanuel College, the local theological [...]
Mt. Sinai Hospital I will be out of town so I’ll miss this, unfortunately, but here’s the information: Life Rattle Press is pleased to invite you to a reception celebrating the publication of STILL HERE: A POST-COCKTAIL AIDS ANTHOLOGY Mount Sinai Hospital and the Department of Psychiatry, The 2008 Narrative Matters Conference: Storying Our World, [...]
Not just a letter to the editor, nor a link from a blog (not that there’s anything wrong with that), I shall be published in a book – an anthology – to be called Still Here: A Post-Cocktail AIDS Anthology and released some time this year by Life Rattle Press. I just signed the consent [...]
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I don’t encourage my being memed (it seems like a modern-day chain letter and is, at the very least, work!) but, when a friend reaches out to me from the heat of California on a day like today, I kind of melt! Now Mame (as in “She’ll coax the blues right out of your heart!“) [...]
