Category: Uncategorized
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Gigs – Recent and Upcoming
Been gigging steadily lately. April gigs included a wedding with my awesome soul band The Funktion, a punk show at Babylon with my rowdy noise-trio Caymans and another gig with The Funktion last Friday at The Rainbow. All were excellent, if exhausting. March gigs included Montreal’s Coolfest and Treehouse Talks in Toronto. Next up is…
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Latest Leveson News & Analysis
I have been irregularly blogging about the extraordinary Leveson Inquiry into media ethics in the UK, that has to date resulted in the arrest of dozens of journalists and editors, the overnight shuttering of the UK’s largest newspaper, the resignations and possible prosecution of the number 1 and 2 policemen in the nation, the resignation…
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You Are Your Media – recommended article
I rarely do this but I want to recommend an extremely worthwhile article in The Guardian by James Ball. It is called: Me and my data: how much do the internet giants really know? http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/22/me-and-my-data-internet-giants At the end of this fascinating and appalling canter through one man’s examination of his life history online, we learn…
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Larrikin Music + Copyright = R.I.P. Greg Ham
EDIT to this post: as you’ll see if you check the comments to this post, someone has informed me that in fact the Girl Scouts/Guides had nothing to do with the suing of Men at Work and in fact it was an Australian publishing company called Larrikin Music that pursued the suit. I apologize to…
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Everybody Say Hell Yeah!
One night in the early ’80s I found myself at a club in Montreal called Cafe Campus, dancing furiously to the live scratching of a hiphop DJ from New York, Grandmixer DST, and his MC crew, The Infinity Rappers. It was en event I will never forget, my first exposure to live hiphop, and blindingly…
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Conversations – Che & Abe
This has been a busy time, with some long-term artistic projects coming to fruition and others popping up out of the blue. I like to track these on this blog, although it does seem like recently most of my writing here has been about various artistic projects and less about ideas and current events, which…
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Coolfest Was Cool!
So a while back I came across an ad on a musician’s website here in Ottawa for a ‘beach-thrash’ band looking for a horn player. Needless to say, being the musically curious soul I am, I answered it. And so it was that I recently performed with Caymans at Montreal’s Coolfest 12, an excellent microfestival…
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Solitary Pleasures – Fortner Anderson
LitLive.ca is a website devoted to Canadian poetry in performance. I wrote a review in the latest issue of a new book and CD by an old friend and fine poet named Fortner Anderson, called Solitary Pleasures. There’s lots of other good material on this site too… I met Fortner in Montreal back in 1984…
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Know Your Media Know Your Self
A few weeks ago I gave a talk at the Toronto Reference Library as part of an excellent series called Treehouse Talks. It was a lovely event, attended by about 100 people and held in the spectacular 5-story atrium of the library. I gave an updated version of the talk that I call Know Your…
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Moses Znaimer – TVTV
Back in 1991 I was hired to write and perform a poem about television for the opening of Moses Znaimer’s 3-hour history of television called TVTV. We shot an amazing sequence in front of MuchMusic with my Poetry Band, which at that time featured trombonist Tom Walsh, drummer Paul Fitterer and bassist Ben Carlsson. Looking…
SOBOLTALK 