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'Steaming like raw meat dropped onto a hot stove'

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1.0: Finding the culture-verse in an FM radio receiver
1.1: The kids today

Driving home yesterday, I did something I almost never do: being bored with CBC Radio and the Montreal AM sports station blathering on about something not hockey, I chanced upon a commercial music station and decided to give it a listen.

94.7 FM it was, "Montreal's Hit ( Read more... )

Publication!
Reviewing Christopher Hitchens' Mortality

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A Prayer for John Irving

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For the record, my copy of N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms came courtesy of a contest conducted by the writer Tricia Sullivan, whose novel, Maul, I read a few years back and which which has since stayed with me far more strongly than most. I wish I could say the same about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. (Edited to fix typos. Thanks ( Read more... )

The best art looks upon the face of change without blinking; the best art acknowledges death.

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I've never liked the aphoristic form, never warmed to twee, manga-style illustrations and have always been suspicious of Utopias - in my experience, the latter tend to be either fascist or ridiculously simplistic in nature - or both.

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1985 saw me dabble in cinephilia. I spent a lot of time at the nearest repertory theatre (at least once, crutched down to Bloor from Saint-Claire and back again; but my Adventures With a Broken Leg are a matter for another day), mostly Hollywood's days of glorious black and white - Casablanca, The Petrified Forest, The Maltese Falcon and other ( Read more... )