Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Saturday, June 24, 2006

sunny walk in the park


these are photos from a fun sunny walk, xedar showed paul how to play wildlife explorer in the trees, (a game she learned from real life explorer aunty ingrid), xochitl wears sunglasses, photo of me taken by xedar who is only 3 years old - but already a fine photographer.

the last photo is of my mom's dog winston, the bulldog. that's his bum.




my mom and my brother

Friday, June 23, 2006

Thursday, June 22, 2006

clarke for mayor

here's my little video of local street preacher clarke for mayor.

he was being santa that day.

its hot death

"perhaps the phone rings, reminds the man
he knows nothing
about that place where poetry
was led to its hot death."

from the poem Room:A Still Life, From the book Grass Psalms by Jonathan Garfinkel

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

my parents


this is my parent's engagement photo.

no photos exist of their wedding day, because, apparently, it was too sad. they had a tiny service at city hall which neither of their parents attended because it wasn't god-affiliated. an uncomfortable tea was held afterwards at my grandmother's house. she was very catholic.

my father passed away from cancer in 2001.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Friday, June 16, 2006

Donald Hall

Donald Hall is the new Poet Laureate. I have always loved him. Specially since the 90's when I saw him read poems at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He was teaching there then.

This is from www.poetryfoundation.org By Arthur Allen:

In “Affirmation,” one of dozens of poems written to or about his late wife, Hall mourns her disappearance, abandons her garden, yet cannot help but finish with cosmic distance,

Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.


Hall is often considered a nature poet, but his eyes have seen much more than the ducks on Eagle Pond (his personal Walden). For example, the pain of a divorce in “Shrubs Burned Away”:

My daughter curled in my lap, wailing and red,

six years old. My fifteen-year-old son’s long legs,
writhed from a chair as tears fell on his spectacles.
Their mother was leaving them . . . I was leaving them.
Their muscles contracted knees to chin,
as I watched from my distance.
And their limbs twitched and jerked in the velvet room.

Esteemed rock critic Greil Marcus chose Hall’s 1988 poem “The One Day” for his Top 10 list of rock ’n’ roll moments:

Your children will wander looting the shopping malls
for forty years, suffering for your idleness
until the last dwarf body rots in a parking lot.

His book "Without" is essential poetry reading. This is from that book about his late wife Jane Kenyon's illness:

When the infusions are infused entirely,
bone marrow restored and lymphoblasts remitted,
I will take my wife, bald as Michael Jordan,
back to our dog and day.

That book is guarenteed to make you cry. I reread it when my father was dying and couldn't believe how painful, plain and apt his writing was. Succint as well. If only I could write that well. Maybe one day.... To get the pain in just the right amount, by not overstating anything, is a tremendous skill.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

party. night shot.

bert and ernie



Jenn's bert and ernie. after being reunited. happy day.

and by the way, this photographer is great. you can rely on this site for your daily dose of awesome images.

and don't forget to head over to Elimae for new poems by me. Well... they are old but i'm lazy at sending stuff out there.

cat power cont'd

this is my friend victor's cat playing d.j.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Mount Forest Family Reunion


This past weekend we went to a big family reunion in Mount Forest. It was filled with hikes and fishing and food. Unfortunately, when Mat tried to play a bit of football he dislocated his finger. Poor sweety.


Monday, June 12, 2006

Good Lordy He's Forty!


Mr. Sean Yelland is Forty years young. Sir you are an inspiration to our entire organization.

To see some of Sean's Incredible paintings go to his website.
www.seanyelland.com

This is Stef and I!

Below are some more pics from Chris' several going away parties. We miss him already.





the daily soup

Do The Robot!


Chris' Goodbye Party. Mat and Chris did the robot dance with the kids. They made us oldies look even older. Have a great time in Africa Chris. We'll miss you.

Friday, June 09, 2006

sew


sew darn jenny can sure make some great crafts. go see what she and her friends can do with felt and crochet. lovely.

Thursday, June 08, 2006

highschool...

This article appeared in the past sunday star about my highschool reunion.

Album maters
Jun. 4, 2006. 07:44 AM
BEN RAYNER
POP MUSIC CRITIC


"Fear" is the motivational slogan Kevin Drew has scrawled across a blackboard to rally the young troops arrayed before him in the Etobicoke School of the Arts auditorium, but the Broken Social Scene frontman's return this particular morning to his old high-school hallways is actually a rather comforting one.

For students living and breathing the very sorts of cultural pursuits that are usually first on the chopping block when governments start tightening the education system's belt, the international success of the Broken mob and its numerous indie-rock offshoots is reassurance that devoting your life to those arts so often dismissed as "fluff" by a business-minded society can eventually pay dividends.

Indeed, Toronto's recent indie renaissance has established the Etobicoke school — attended in overlap roughly 15 years ago by Drew, his Broken compadres Amy Millan of Stars and Emily Haines of Metric, as well as Tangiers and Deadly Snakes members — as an historical pillar of the contemporary Canadian music scene.

ESA, as it's known, has even come to rival Thornlea Secondary School — a Thornhill institution known to some of its grads as "Rock 'n' Roll High" as the breeding ground for notable late-'90s acts from Hayden to hHead to the Philosopher Kings — as the region's most fruitful supplier of rock-inclined graduates.

ESA's "incubator" status isn't hard to explain, since it's the sort of place where the halls get littered with sheet music for Romberg's Concertino: Opus 51 for cello and piano rather than discarded potato-chip bags. Its annual auditions draw 800 to 1,000 students from points well beyond the city limits (and sometimes beyond the border) vying for a chance to immerse themselves daily in classical music, vocal training, theatre, dance and visual arts.

The school celebrated its 25th anniversary this weekend with a reception Friday night at the Drake Hotel and a gala at the school last night featuring alumni stars and today's students performing works that span its curriculum.

"It wasn't like any other high school," says Drew. "They pushed you in a direction you chose at a very young age. You were constantly asked what you wanted to do with your life. Your age didn't matter — age was just a number there ...

"You get a big chunk of time at ESA to figure out what you want to do and to express it constantly. It was a gift, and if more people had that opportunity, we'd be in much better shape, I think."

While the "starving artist" stereotype is often invoked by opponents of liberal arts education, it's a satisfying turnabout that an environment such as ESA's — where artistic and academic achievements are treated with equal importance, and cultural endeavours aren't shunted behind sports as in so many other schools' pecking orders — can actually lead to sustainable careers. Be they Broken Social Scene-sters, National Ballet conscripts or Shaw Festival actors, many graduates go on to earn a living through their art.

The school "taught you about the work you needed to do and the work you had to do," says Drew. "And it was always testing your emotions, not just your art. For all of us drama kids, it taught us `drama' at a very young age. You've gotta have `Don't give up' tattooed on your eyes to go there."

Haines, who transferred into the musical theatre program alongside Millan in Grade 10, remembers ESA as "a life-saving escape from high school jocks, and a chance to play music all day." And that perception seems to be shared by attendees old and new.

"It was very much like Fame," laughs Lorraine Lawson, a local songstress who arrived at the school in its fifth year of existence. "It had an energy unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. It was literally people singing and dancing in the hallways."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`(Thornlea) was kind of a stoner school. It was funny, but the very culture of the school to some extent — and I say this, maybe, because I was in that culture — was a lot of kids walking around the building with guitars'

JIAN GHOMESHI,

graduate, musician, CBC personality

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


At ESA, the "artsy" kids aren't a pack of outcasts. So naturally, a remark dropped by Drew during his speech about never having to worry about "jocks" or fitting in with the "popular" kids draws a loud whoop of approval from the ESA auditorium — almost as loud as the moment when he hauls Paris-exiled Broken starlet Leslie Feist onstage as a surprise guest.

ESA might be sort of a clique, but at least it's a unified one. The intermingling of disciplines there — so that, for instance, music majors compose scores for theatrical productions and art majors design posters and T-shirts for the annual, student-run Solstice music festival — negates any stratification of subjects and encourages ensemble participation by the various faculties on major projects.

"It's not like other schools where people are just there because they have to be," says Jamie Peters, 18, a music major. "Here, I've met a lot of interesting people because everyone is interested in something."

"You're just immersed in arts in general," concurs Phil Nozuka, 18, another music major. Teachers "give you a good attitude. They really, really support you in your aspirations. You feel great about it. There's no guilt about wanting to be an artist because it's not the `best' career."

Thornlea's "Rock `n' Roll High" reputation stems from a similarly supportive attitude towards the arts.

The school was hailed as a landmark experiment in unstructured, progressive education during the 1970s, and although some of that '60s-born idealism had cooled by the '80s and '90s, it still helped to spawn a diverse roster of musical talent that includes Moxy Fruvous, Hayden, Poledo, half of the Sadies, members of By Divine Right, hHead and the Philosopher Kings, go-to Canrock producer Gavin Brown and one of his successors in the drummer's seat for Danko Jones, Damon Richardson.

Ex-Fruvous member and current CBC radio and TV fixture Jian Ghomeshi recalls "a real emphasis on arts and fine arts" that found space to thrive in a trimester system. Students were able to get "serious" subjects like math and science out of the way during the first two semesters, then spend all day indulging in music or drama for the rest of the year.

"Really, really strong teachers" addressed by their first names didn't hurt either, he says. Ghomeshi described one of his music instructors (and Thornlea "cult figure") Bob Leonard as the "late 20th-century, CanCon version" of the Richard Dreyfus character of Mr. Holland's Opus.

"Plus, I've gotta say this, it was kind of a stoner school," says Ghomeshi. "It was funny, but the very culture of the school to some extent — and I say this, maybe, because I was in that culture — was a lot of kids walking around the building with guitars."


By Divine Right's Jose Contreras, who tipped his hat to his alma mater in a song entitled "Rock High," wonders if the late-'90s band boom of which he was a part might have stemmed from Thornlea eventually clamping down on its "very hippie" past.

"When I went to Thornlea, about halfway through, they changed back to the `three Rs,'" he says. "My theory is, we got that taste of freedom and then the taste of that authority. Maybe that makes it all more poignant.

"Still, it was a very Neil Young, Pink Floyd, pot-smoking kind of school. I remember turning up to class very, very stoned many times and nobody calling me on it. There were lots of Pink Floyd lyrics scratched into the walls. All the lyrics to The Wall were somewhere on the walls."

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Lived in Bars.

Lived in Bars.
Cat Power.

we've lived in bars
and danced on the tables
hotels trains and ships that sail
we sim with sharks
and fly with aeroplanes in the air

send in the trumpets
the marching wheelchairs
open the blankets and give them some air
swords and arches bones and cement
the lights and the dark of the innocent of men

we know your house so very well
and we will wake you once we've walked up
all your stiars

there's nothing like living in a bottle
and nothing like ending it all for the world
we're so glad you will come back
every living lion will lay in your lap
the kid has a homecoming the champion the horse
who's gonna play drums guitar or gorgan with chorus
as far as we've walked from both of ends of the sand
never have we caught a glimpse of this man


we know your house so very well
and we will bust down your door if you're not there

we've lived in bars
and danced on tables
hotels trains and ships that sail
we swim with sharks
and fly with aeroplanes out of here
out of here