Dragazines 

Previously on RuPaul's Drag Race, Milan was a bit of a mess again, and was sent home. Jiggly was also in the bottom, and we learned that he is a balding dude. Willam won the Pride float challenge, and was generally annoying.  

SheMail arrives, and it is all about libraries today. That's right, these gals are getting read. As we learned in past seasons, "reading" is kind of like roasting. It involves slamming your fellow queen with details about how they are slutty, ugly, fat, or whatever. It isn't as mean-spirited as it sounds, and all of the girls seem to enjoy it. 

Galerie St-Laurent + Hill is pleased to present a series of new works by
  Montréal artist Nina Cherney.

  The trademarks of Nina Cherney`s work are exuberant colour and dynamic
  brushwork. In this exhibition, the artist presents a series of paintings
  evoking the sights and smells of the landscape around her country home in
  the Laurentians. These paintings refer to a sublime moment, when natural
  beauty overwhelms us. The large scale and thick layers of paint translate
  this awe and joy. The quirky perspectives and shapes and vivid colours
  deliver intense emotions, forcing the viewer to react.

  Nina Cherney lives and works in Montreal and is a graduate
  of Concordia University, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in
  Painting and Drawing .She has exhibited her work in galleries in Canada .Her
  work can also be found in numerous corporate collections.

Exhibition Dates

  April 28 to May 11, 2010

Reception

  Thursday April 28, 2011 5-8pm
___________________________________________________________

Come join us for readings by 2010 Ottawa Book Award Winners Craig Poile and Andrew Horrall at the AlphaSoul Cafe 1015 Wellington St. West.

Hosted by Ken Rockburn
Admission free.

Thursday April 28th, 7:30 - 9:00pm.

Friday

Face to Face proposes a contrapuntal dialogue between two players: an artist and a scholar. Each will present his/her current art making or research concerns followed by an open-ended discussion that attempts to uncover correspondences hitherto unknown, bringing to the fore overlapping areas and converging ideas.
This February 4th we welcome artist Claire Savoie and Theorist
Marie-Josée Jean.

La présentation sera en français.

Remerciement au Conseil des Arts du Canada pour son appui a ce projet.
Thanks and acknowledgements to the Canada Council for the Arts for their support.
DATE:      Friday, February 4th 2011
TIME:      11:00 a.m.
PLACE:     Department of Visual Arts
          100 Laurier Ave. East
          Room 114

--

FOLD, SPINDLE, MUTILATE
Artist:  KARINA KRAENZLE
Vernissage:  Friday February 4th, 2011, 18:00 - 21:00
On View: February 4th - 28th, 2011
Mon - Fri 10:00 -18:00, Sat 10:00-15:00
Fold, Spindle, Mutilate assembles in the Red Wall Gallery for the first time, photographic images from three related bodies of work by Karina Kraenzle. The Red Wall Gallery is located in SPAO at 168 Dalhousie, at the corner of Bruyère, in the Byward Market.

Two fun Mad Men-related things:

1. A mash-up of "Mad Men" and "Mr. Men", from the British humour website The Poke.

2. "Sterling's Gold: Wit and Wisdom of an Ad Man," the much-anticipated memoirs of advertising guru Roger Sterling will be published in time for the Christmas shopping season.

On Tuesday, October 26, Tree will host poet/prose author Betsy Struthers and slam poet Oni the Haitian Sensation at the Ottawa Arts Court. An open mic will begin the night at 8pm.

Preceding the reading from 6:45-7:45, Ronnie Brown will host a workshop for new writers for the second of four times. The topic this week is excerpting the world--using events in your life and from the world around you in your poetry.

Betsy Struthers was the winner of the 2004 Lowther Award for Still (Black Moss). She has published eight books of poetry and three novels as well as co-editing an anthology of essays about teaching poetry. Her new book, Relay: Short Fictions is a series of linked pieces that transcend the boundary between prose and poetry to present a picaresque, intertwined portait of modern life in all its rich complexity. Betsy recently won first prize in the GritLit Poetry competition for a series of poems titled Family Matters. Her poems and fiction have been published in many anthologies; most recently, Pith and Wry: Canadian Poetry; In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry; and Going Top Shelf: An Anthology of Canadian Hockey Poetry. She has taught workshops in both poetry and fiction to students of all ages.

On Tuesday, August 10th, Tree will host Hot Ottawa Voices, where three local writers will be showcased at the Ottawa Arts Court. Performing will be Cameron Anstee, Christine McNair and Gillian Wallace. These poets are selected because they are doing interesting and creative things in the Ottawa poetry community. They should be on your radar to create more of a buzz in the near future, and chapbooks will be for sale at the reading.

Preceding the reading from 6:45-7:45, Claudia Radmore will lead her first of four workshops on contemporary poetry and how everything is connected: the beauty of juxtaposition, Japanese forms and grabbing inspiration. The evening commences with an open mic at 8pm, which is the second-last chance you have to enter Tree's Origami Crane open mic competition.

All entries in Tree's Origami Crane open mic competition must be read at a Tree open mic session no later than August 24, 2010. The video must be recorded and posted to Tree's YouTube account. Printed entries can be no more than one page in length (double-sided, 8.5”x11”) and no less than 12-point type. Readers must also submit one self-photograph electronically. There will be two winners announced in September 2010: one for best poem and the other for best performance of a poem. The winners will also be featured in the first issue of Tree Leaves following the announcement. For more information, please visit the website.

Today, in various places around the world, men are dressing in bowler hats and suspenders, and women are wearing Edwardian-era dresses. The more sedate of them will drink tea at public readings; the more boisterous will eat kidneys and go on pub crawls, drinking Bass Ale. Why? Because today is Bloomsday!

Held to commemorate June 16th, 1904, the day on which the fictional events of James Joyce's novel Ulysses take place, Bloomsday is a celebration of Leopold Bloom and his wanderings and musings through Dublin. He eats breakfast, has a bath, goes to a funeral, eats a sandwich for lunch, meets up with some people drinking in a pub, and after some further digressions, ends up having a drunken conversation in the early hours of the morning with his surrogate son, Stephen Dedalus. In the meantime, his wife Molly is fooling around with Blazes Boylan, a local boxing manager and ladies' man.

A recent book, Ulysses and Us, by Declan Kiberd, is an attempt to wrest control of the novel's legacy from the esoteric, ivory-tower discussions of academics, and assert its relevance to the everyday life of ordinary men and women - the very sort of people whose existence the novel celebrates.

As mentioned before, Ayaan Hirsi Ali will be in Ottawa on June 10, as part of the Ottawa International Writers Festival. The event coincides with the publication of her third book, "Nomad," which is primarily a charting of her alienation from the Muslim faith she grew up in. The Globe and Mail's reviewer, Theodore Dalrymple, is, on the whole, very positive and notes that she states her case "with both modesty and great eloquence." His sole caveat is that "the Enlightenment ideal that she espouses is rather too simple as an answer to the problems of human existence."

The latest issue of Brick magazine contains a series of three essays on the passing of Allan King, the versatile Canadian filmmaker most known for his powerful documentaries on social issues such as race, poverty, domestic abuse, and death. (Here is an insightful youtube clip incorporating an interview with King and footage from some of his films. It also has Orson Welles, smoking a cigar and saying that movie directing is "the only profession in the world where you can be incompetent and go on being successful for thirty years with nobody ever discovering.")

And Prairie Fire magazine contains an interview with Austin Clarke, the author of the Giller Prize-winning The Polished Hoe, in which he discusses race, immigration, and the concept of "home."

The New Quarterly's latest issue -- No. 114, "To List is Human" -- is guest edited by Diane Schoemperlen, and contains, among other things, a charming story by Julie Paul, "The Black Forest."

The esteemed New Brunswick journal The Fiddlehead celebrates its 65th anniversary with stories by Deborah-Anne Tunney and Julie Curwin, and poems by Emily Carr and charles c. smith.

And finally, a note on Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil, which, while it was lauded in the Globe and Mail as "ingenious," the New Yorker has, in a mini-review, derided Martel for making "a series of baffling choices" in his attempt to create thoughtful art out of the Holocaust. Sounds like the only way to decide which one is more accurate is to read it yourself.

1. Go to the Louvre. Skip the most famous pieces, the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo - or, if you must, run past them just so you can say you were in the same room as them. (Watch this video to see how it should be done in maximum, floor-sliding style.) Instead, go to the Dutch and Flemish paintings to see works of Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Ruysdael, and others. Particularly impressive is the Medici room, a series of 21 paintings by Rubens depicting the life of Marie de Medici, the wife of the French king Henri IV, and mother of Louis XIII. Spend as much time there as you can stand, and then go out into the Tuileries and sit down for an ice cream cone, and then a glass of wine and a sandwich at one of the outdoor cafes.

2. Go to the Shakespeare  & Company bookstore, just over the bridge from Notre Dame Cathedral, on the left bank. Go up to the second floor, grab a book from the shelves, and find a chair or couch in a quiet corner to read it. (This is not only tolerated, but encouraged - in fact, most of the books on the second floor are not even for sale.)

3. Go to a cemetery. Pere Lachaise is the famous one, with Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison, Piaf, Proust and Chopin; but the Montmartre and Montparnasse ones also have loads of famous dead people (including Hector Berlioz, Francois Truffaut, and Louise Weber, aka the can-can dancer "La Goulue" in Montmartre; Sartre, de Beauvoir, de Maupassant and Susan Sontag in Montparnasse). Just make sure you have a good map of the cemetery and the notable graves in it before you go. They are not neatly, geometrically arranged places; there are acres and acres of tombs and gravestones, many of them old, faded and mossy, often hidden behind large sepulchres of long-forgotten aristocratic French families, and few pathways through them.

E.O. Wilson, an 80-year-old Harvard biologist, has just published his first novel, called "Anthill." One section of the work tells, in great detail, of the triumphs, the conflicts, and the downfalls of four separate ant colonies in Alabama. The other parts of the book are more autobiographical, and tell the story of a man who gives up a successful career in law to protect the particular plot of land where he learned, as a boy, to love nature -- the plot of land on which the four ant colonies are based.

Here's an excerpt from "Anthill," recently published in The New Yorker.

And here's the Globe and Mail review.

Friday

Visit arts&architecture for our next show, “Forests of Lost Dreams,” a collection of textured black & white photographs by Michael Van der Tol. Join us for the vernissage Friday, April 9th from 7 pm – 10 pm for refreshments and to meet the artist.  The exhibition will be on display from April 7 – April 18.  This will be Michael’s second show at arts&architecture; in February 2009, Michael exhibited “Vecchia Struttura,” a stunning collection of textured black & white photographs of Italy. 1181 Bank Street

La Petite Mort Gallery presents...
ONE NIGHT ONLY Exhibit
REMI THERIAULT, "POLAROIDS / INSTANT STORIES."
Vernissage Friday April 9, 2010 / 7 - 10pm
306 Cumberland

Saturday

The Writer’s Room
At The Ottawa School of Speech & Drama
294 Picton Ave. Ottawa (Westboro)
Saturday, April 10, 7:00 p.m.
You are invited to a special evening of readings by some of Ottawa’s best writers of creative non-fiction: Denise Chong, Charlotte Gray, Phil Jenkins, and Kerry Pither. The event is presented by the Ottawa School of Speech & Drama.

Sonnet L’Abbé in The A B Series

Sonnet L’Abbé is the author of two collections of poetry, A Strange Relief and Killarnoe, both published by McClelland and Stewart. In 2000, she won the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for most promising writer under 35, and in 1999 won the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. L’Abbé has taught writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She reviews poetry for the Globe and Mail and is currently doing doctoral work at the University of British Columbia.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7, 2010
7 p.m. doors open; 7:30 p.m. performance
MERCURY LOUNGE | 56 ByWard Market Square
$7 admission at the door / $5 for people with low income

Following on a previous post mentioning David Grann's "The Lost City of Z," here is some (very old) footage of Theodore Roosevelt, a few years after his presidency, looking for thrills by joining an expedition to map the source of the River of Doubt, in the Amazon rain forest.
Roosevelt went in 1913-14, but much of the footage of the actual river was taken in 1927, by George Dyott, another American explorer who followed the same route.

 

Russell Smith of the Globe on why we should lament the decline of the book:  "[W]e lose forever the pleasure known to humanity for 500 years of taking a stroll up and down the aisles of someone else’s brain by perusing their bookshelves."

Also: some recommendations for books to read: De Niro's Game, by Rawi Hage;  Evelyn Waugh's satire of Fleet Street journalism, Scoop (featuring the nature columnist William Boot's immortal line, "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole"); and, in the non-fiction aisle, The Lost City of Z, the journalist David Grann's story of following in the footsteps of the British explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in the Amazon rainforest in 1925 while searching for a mysterious lost civilization.

American author/actress/socialite/designer Gloria Vanderbilt is establishing a literary prize for Canadian short-story authors. The prize is dedicated in the memory of her son Carter V. Cooper, who committed suicide in 1988. So, she's responsible for real life hottie Anderson Cooper, fictionally related to hottie Nate Archibald, and giving to the literary community in Canada? Gloria Vanderbilt is some kind of magic.

On Tuesday, February 23, Tree will host two writers at the Ottawa Arts Court. Local poet / writer and Archibald Lampman award-winner Stephen Brockwell will perform some of his work, followed by Stuart Ross reading from his first collection of stories in over a decade, Buying Cigarettes for the Dog. The evening will begin at 8 p.m., and preceding the reading from 6:45-7:45 Terry Ann Carter will host her first of a series of four workshops for emerging writers.

Stephen Brockwell currently lives in Ottawa but has spent a large part of his life in Montreal and other equally exhilarating places. His Fruitfly Geographic won the 2005 Archibald Lampman Award for best book of poetry by an Ottawa resident. He runs his own IT consulting business from home, and he is the author of several books including The Wire in Fences, The Cometology (ECW Press, 2001), and The Real Made Up (ECW Press, 2007). He has written reviews and articles for The Danforth Review, Rubicon and Books in Canada. Recent work of his has appeared in Arc, Prairie Fire, the Fiddlehead, the Antigonish Review, and Queen St Quarterly.

Stuart Ross published his first literary pamphlet on the photocopier in his dad's office one night in 1979. Through the 1980s, he stood on Toronto's Yonge Street wearing signs like "Writer Going To Hell: Buy My Books," selling over 7,000 poetry and fiction chapbooks. A tireless literary press activist, he is the co-founder of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair and now a founding member of the Meet the Presses collective, Poetry Editor at Mansfield Press, and Fiction & Poetry Editor at This Magazine. Stuart has edited several small literary magazines including Mondo Hunkamooga: A Journal of Small Press Stuff, Syd & Shirley, Who Torched Rancho Diablo? and Peter O'Toole: A Magazine of One-Line Poems. He is the author of two collaborative novels, a previous collection of stories, and six full-length poetry books. He has also published a collection of essays, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (Anvil Press), and edited the anthology Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence (The Mercury Press). Stuart has taught writing workshops across Canada. He lives in Toronto. In spring 2009, Freehand Books released his first short-story collection in more than a decade, Buying Cigarettes for the Dog. In spring 2011, ECW Press will release his first novel, Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew.

The Guardian has asked 29 well-known writers - including Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Neil Gaiman, and Jonathan Franzen - to submit ten rules for writing fiction:

Macy Halford at The New Yorker's book blog The Book Bench, has written a thoughtful response.

Losing Hope for the Future of Humankind Dept.:

http://www.slate.com/id/2244062/

http://www.slate.com/id/2243797/

Friday

The Ottawa Art Gallery is pleased to invite you to a tour of the exhibit Nightlight (pictured: "Green Nocturne" by Philip Surrey) in the Firestone Gallery. Friday 11 December at 12:30 pm

ONE DAY ONLY !
It’s my FIRST EVER
ARTWORK INVENTORY CLEARANCE PARTY!!!
Bring your friends & family!
Original oils, watercolours
& pastel drawings
up to 50% off
Where: at my STUDIO,
1900 Merivale Road Ottawa  Suite 216
Ottawa, ON K2G 4N4
When: Friday Dec 11th, 1-5pm
Refreshments provided

PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY presents THE BEST OF THE SEASON, a holiday group exhibition.
DECEMBER 9, 2009, TO JANUARY 2, 2010
ARTIST RECEPTION:
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2009
5:30 P.M. TO 9 P.M. | 2401 Bank Street