Category Archives: notes off to the side

Update

Looks like we’re going to do the jewelry store thing again.  We’ll have our own work there, of course, along with a dozen or so other artists and some accessories.   Wish us luck, if you’d be so kind.

Gary Kamiya on Leonard Cohen

April 17, 2009 | For the people fortunate enough to see Leonard Cohen on his current national tour, as I did Monday night at Oakland, Calif.’s Paramount Theater, the world is a bigger, deeper, older, more bitter and radiant place. Every Cohen performance is an epic event. And in his three-hour-plus performance, part of his first tour in 15 years, the great songwriter, poet and novelist once again used his powerful body of work to create, for one night, a theater of his life, a public confession so intimate, complex, combative and profound that it felt as much like prayer as performance. At the end of the evening, as the audience floated out, still transported to whatever unknown inner place his words and music had carried them, you could almost feel a palpable sense of collective gratitude that such artistry still exists in a weary world – that Leonard Cohyen is still around.

Much more here

I mention this not only as a longtime fan of this man (in 1967, a cool English teacher at our high school brought in a CBC film on the mesmerizing young poet) but because this coming Sunday I drive up to Vancouver to gather up my splendid daughter and some friends I’ve known since earlier than ’67 for dinner and then Cohen’s concert.  Yummy.

This got me crying

Introduced by Andrew Sullivan as follows:

There is, mercifully, more to humanity than Cheney’s sadism and panic. From Antwerp’s rail station, take it away, Julie Andrews!

Once again, thank you Andrew.

Serious fun

Tom Waits interviewed on CBC long time ago

Love the CBC interviewer.  Signal question that arises…what drug?

grandfathers

A few years ago, I read a family story of this man of some 25 years.  He’d been talking with his grandfather who said, “I don’t like satin sheets. You just can’t get a good purchase”

Which brings me to the wonderful piece up above. The family thing. On Sunday afternoon, after church.

If we’re honest about things…

which is a fair bit to ask. but if we could be for a second, it does seem to be the case that there is one group who, for a bonus, will gather up $1 million, on top of whatever they’ve already gathered and on top of their salary and their severance package…and that other group of people who, for a bonus, get a turkey.

Just as a side note…

My last book, “The Pope – His Mother Should Have Eaten Him While His Bones Were Still Soft” is now remaindered. In this wintry economic climate, you might expect me to be despondent. Yet I am not. I am quite confident my upcoming book will do well, given the day and the age. It’s a self-help volume titled “Demon Wresting – Dos and Don’ts”.