Beautiful Feet

I did something that I haven't done in a while and that I hate doing: I gave up on a book. Now that I'm a big kid, I allow myself to do that, but I don't like to. I was so  looking forward to reading Fifteen Dogs , but alas 90 pages were enough. It started out great. As a classicist, I loved the premise of the intervention of Hermes and Apollo. I enjoyed the dogs' perspective of co-resident cats (p. 65). My heart strings were yanked taut about animal neglect, pain and death (p.18–19). I had enjoyed listening to interviews on CBC radio with the author. But my god, was I bored otherwise! I can't offer much of a critique, because I'm not even sure where it fell flat for me, but  blech .  What I did like—love—was Fiona Barton's The Widow. Wa-hooo, what a ride! [At this point, I hope you aren't drawing the conclusion that I just don't understand literature and only like commercial page-turners. That ain't the point.] Actually, this book had it...

Homeless On Bloor BY  DAVID BARKER   |  PUBLISHED  MARch  25,  2016 I’m working on a photobook tentatively titled  The Disposable City . It’s a vehicle for exploring urban concerns like ephemera, waste (garbage, demolitions, pollution), and the commodification of everything, including people. Every now and then, I do another spread, then let it sit for a time to see how I feel about it. A while back, I did one on a homeless woman who camped out for a few weeks in a doorway across from me. It seems like a reasonable piece to post on Good Friday. I’ve included the text and a few images below, but for the full impact, you can  download  the two spreads in pdf format. From  The Disposable City : I live high up in a condominium on the north side of Bloor Street. Across from me on the south side, one by one, the retailers are leaving their shops as a new owner—a developer—prepares to demolish the existing structures and build a...

A good piece of art takes you out of yourself. Last night, Toro , the ‘dance’ piece, allowed me to forget an unrelated incident from an hour previous that had left me shaking. I put dance in quotes for positive reasons, not to denigrate the performance. As Matthew Jocelyn likes to do, we were presented with a genre-bending performance that focused on dance but also employed world music, singing and drama to create the kind of eye-opening and enlightening CanStage offering that Toronto is beginning to expect from it. Toro was the quickly re-visioned performance after one of the two booked dancers, Israel Galvan, had a serious knee injury in Paris and had to withdraw. But the audience did not suffer for it: four remarkable musicians augmented the dance of Akram Kahn , and I had an education. David Azurza, countertenor, B C Manjunath, percussion, Bobote, flamenco and Christine Leboutte, contralto, provided an organic background of vocalization, and instrumental and body percussion wh...

Mark Alpert’s The Orion Plan took me back to a large astronomy poster I had as a girl; I’d get lost in looking at its details for hours. This Wine and Cheese Award -winner gets my grudging Ebertian thumbs-up: I whinge because the reading went by too quickly, so gripping was the storyline. Unlike The Six , which was a YA-oriented novel (see my review ), this is an adult sci-fi thriller. (Although really, either book is equally readable by any age group, thanks to the lack of gratuitous sex in Orion .) But like The Six , there is non-saccharine treatment of characters with flaws or University-of-Life knocks; Alpert comments unapologetically about the notion of punishment and the breakdown of Western correctional systems, and he illustrates compassionately the issues around homelessness, grief, addiction, the call to ministry, ecological disasters and colonialism. But he is not preachy. As Terry O’Reilly said in a recent radio show , “Story matters” and this novel centrifugal-...

I asked Tracy Groot, author of Madman (which is next on my To Read list), if I could share her review on Facebook about Risen (2016, dir. Kevin Reynolds). Here it is, followed by my own thoughts on the movie. Dear Readers, Writers, Storymakers, and Film Buffs, File this one under: Risen, indeed. Went to an advance screening of Risen last night. (Won tickets.) It's a film about a Roman tribune tasked with the investigation of a certain resurrection. Had rational expectations with names like Joseph Fiennes and Tom Felton--our own Draco Malfoy--in the offing. But I wasn't sure about Kevin Reynolds. He'd directed a fave, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, but that was what, 25 years ago? Who was this guy now? Was he still good, or did some Christian power producers hire a reasonably credible name to helm a get-‘em-saved agenda? I feared it, because dang, I love a good movie but I’m hyper-sensitive to agenda. Too often I’ve seen craftsmanship sacrificed in favor of missi...

Photo credit: Julien Lambert CanStage's presentation of  Cold Blood was the much-anticipated follow-up (but not prequel or epilogue, they point out) to last year's Kiss and Cry , created by  Michele Anne De Mey, Jaco Van Dormael and the Collectif Kiss & Cry, with text by Thomas Gunzig. While some reviews found it not as satisfying as the fi rst, I disagree, with one exception. Cold Blood is  very different than the other, and that is a good thing. While I loved last year's, this one was more disparate because its text was on a theme, whereas last year's was a theme along a narrative, and more linear. This week covered the topic of death but with humour, and there was more variation in the scenes: contrary to promotional material, there are more than just fingers and miniatures, including some surprises. Add music ranging from Bowie to Arvo Part and clever filming ideas, and you have a very satisfying show--and it's perfect for those with timely short at...

It just worked out that four works I encountered recently — in a movie, a foreign film, a video and a novel — all dealt with various aspects of death. Surprisingly, none of it was depressing. Book cover design by Kelly Blair; image from www.goodreads.com Well, okay, some people find the apocalypse depressing, but I LOVE it. Especially when it's presented as well as in  The Road or Station Eleven. The Dog Stars  was recommended by a fellow editor when I put out a social-media call for apocalyptic-read recommendations. Peter Heller's first fiction book takes place in the next few decades after a pandemic has killed most of the population and left many of the survivors with The Blood Disease, an auto-immune system threat. The protagonist is tortured by an act in his past, let alone trying to survive a new agricultural production system, murderous gangs and loss. But despite his flaws, we cheer and cry with Hig all along. Best of all, the book manages to have a satisfying e...

The only connection I could make between the two works I’d like to recommend this week is that both have blue covers... Photo In the better-late-than-never category, I found a CD called Trinity Requiem with music composed by Robert Moran. It was commissioned to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and features a youth choir from, poignantly, Trinity Wall Street Church, and the recording includes, serendipitously, a siren left unedited at the beginning of the Offertory. There are three other good pieces on the CD (Seven Sounds Unseen, Notturno in Weiss and Requiem for a Requiem), but the eponymous composition is exactly what this minimalist likes. My only disappointment was that I couldn’t find a photo credit for the cover image, which is Turrell -ish. (Which means utterly beautiful and sublime, all you millennials who’d never heard of him before Drake’s “Hotline Bling.”) My other blue cover is on Nancy Horan’s Under the Wide and Starry Sky (Ballantine, 2013). This...

I have seen several pieces on screen lately that deal with using our heads. However, each discussed the head in conjunction with other factors.     Brit TV series, River , lives up to its acclaim. A one-off mini-series of six episodes, it managed to grip me immediately in its treatment of how grief not only affects the heart but also the head. Stellan Skarsgård and Nicola Walker are police officers in this crime drama but in the name of spoilers, I won’t say much more. Other sympathetic performances come from actors like Lesley Manville, but I didn’t really buy Georgina Rich as a police psychologist, at least in the way she chose to/the director asked her to act it. Anyway, the takeaway is that you can’t always use your head in exclusion of the contributions of the heart, either personally or sometimes even professionally. Encouraging symbiosis between the two can facilitate redemption, serenity or at least a sense of acceptance.           ...