I don’t think it’s art, but it sure is pretty.
What is it? It’s a colorized text version of an image found on Google that represents the search phrase “deckchairs” rendered from many hundreds of repeated search phrases.
Love is nice, too.

I just wrote up a five paragraph review of tonight’s Prairie Theatre Exchange’s Carol Shields Festival of New Works. Then, somehow, with my MFA-artist-trained hand-eye coordination, I hit a the Refresh button and deleted the whole damn thing.
Jesus Christ, what a dope. Here’s what I wanted to say:

1. Tonight was a phenomenal introduction to some of the best theatrical, dance, and performance talent in Winnipeg. I loved watching these performers. Every one of them.
2. The entirety was inspired. The directors threaded the multiple performances with overt, and sometimes covert, little narrative threads.
3. I saw ballet dancers perform three song-stories that I think I actually understood. One, the very first one, was about a young man witnessing his life construct his own failure through love. Maybe I didn’t understand it at all. But I liked it.
4. My friend, Donna Lewis, performed her Leotard Cohen piece, wherein the long lost (and lost) sister of Leonard Cohen comes out of her darkly lit shell. It was hilarious.
5. I missed a lot of references to Canadian culture. But, as an outsider going on two years, I recognize that Canadian artists, to a large extent, have the luxury of not being burdened with the turgid, violent history that American artists do. It’s not that Canadian history is one of clean hands and squeaky feet; rather, the utter racial and economic pain that many American artists bear does not, thankfully, affect most artists here, nor should it. I may be utterly wrong about this and I’m willing to be raked over the coals, if I have to be, on this one. But my point is that the unstraining humility and self-conscious humor that Canadian artists tend to show is perhaps derived from a less contaminated historical narrative and a less tortured personal aesthetic.
6. Winnipeg is a small big place. During intermission, I ran into two performing artists I actually know. This is, to me, still shocking.
7. Coming back to the first point, I consciously realized tonight that I quite literally fall in love with those performing on the stage. I mean, I really, truly start to love the performer. It’s a fleeting love, thankfully.

Last night I had a chance to see Strike! – The Musical at The Burton Cummings Theatre here.
Disclaimer: I’m not a usually a big fan of musicals. Most professional musicals that I’ve seen (which probably amount to less than two dozen in my lifetime), are either simply treacly or trite and unconvincing. The music of musicals typically sounds like cats (pardon the reference) thrown in a bag. And the storylines usually remind me of children’s literature by failed writers. Further, musicals, to me, falsely try to equate emotional musical content with disconnected fictive worlds. They fall flat because they try to heighten the senses while hiding their subject matter.
Not so with Strike! I went into the performance, as I always try to do, open minded and excited to see what composer Danny Schur has been working feverishly to accomplish. Strike!, in my mind, succeeds because it’s a fundamentally moving story of a fictive group of people in 1919 who accidentally and unintentionally changed the way things work in the world. These people, despite the sheer diversity of their backgrounds and experiences and beliefs, sing their way to a kind of freedom.
As my wife said last night, the people portrayed in the performance worked 60 hour weeks, six days a week and made next to nothing doing it. The delight in the actors’ voices, the solemnity of the characters’ desires, and the lovely and lovingly written score combined to make a powerful statement about being alive and being free.

My friend Danny Schur, an award-winning musician and playright, is rapidly preparing for the next stage of his Strike – The Musical about the Winnipeg General Strike and the riots and deportations that took place here in May of 1919. (A CBC Radio Concert Special will be recorded on May 15th, the 88th anniversary of the event.) The music is, well, striking—and powerful. O’Reilly’s Song is shown below.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmRGG3qrAWI]

I couldn’t stop reading this (long, beautiful, sad, articulate) Washington Post article about a most amazing violinist playing in a lonely subway in a fast-moving city, at the center of everything. [Sent to me by friend, V.S.]

I’m sitting here, post-watching Children of Men, watching the CBC and all I can see is mayhem. The news is on and I see houses with a man and woman walking peacefully and destruction is everywhere. There’s another woman being interviewed; she’s holding a child and I can’t believe there’s a kid on the tube. A documentary on environmental building looks like a special feature of Homeland Security. The sky on the tube is 60% grey, the color of nothing and fire and endless pollution and chaos. It almost looks like the next television series is on safe houses, tucked amidst giant wind turbines and barren land, the near future part of the next future. [Written on 3/15/07.]

I don’t know why exactly but I really want to see 300, the super-crazy, Spartan Frank Miller flick by Zack Snyder. From the previews I’ve seen online, the movie comes closer to a moving painting than any film I can recall, including those by Terrence Malick. Everything about 300 smells of the sweat of Géricault, the pain of David, and the solemnity of Rembrandt. I love how, at least in the trialers, the shapes and forms looked burned and blurred around the edges and the colors drip gothic lust. The sepia and pale blue colors, the harsh contrasts, the glorious backlighting are, to me, simply stunning.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to ever note this observation, but here goes.
When we are spending our leisure time, we do so by observing others’ spending their non-working time. And when we are working, we spend our time unable to witness others’ leisure time.
The converse of this is interesting to me as well. Who would want to spend two hours at the movies watching people at an office typing? Only a few of us. And who among us would want to spend our paid work time watching others enjoy themselves? Very few of us.
So, we go to the movies, watch television or read a novel about people living their lives and not working. These characters go on vacation, get in fights, make love, and cry tears of joy and sadness.
And when we go to work, we disallow ourselves the ability to watch people go on vacation, get in fights, make love, and cry tears of joy and sadness.

For some forsaken reason, the movie Children of Men wasn’t on my radar screen. It looks quite incredible, just having read the synopsis. It’s exactly how I kind of imagined 2027 – nuclear terrorism, totalitarianism, environmental degradation, and a secret sect of scientists seeking to keep humanity on life support.
In fact, my theory is that there are four inescapable reasons that I was not told about this movie beforehand:

1. The government has built, between my ears, a wire cage made of invisible bolts, powered by dark matter and managed by ISK10.
2. My long-time fascination with and adoration of Julianne Moore has destablized my relationship with the newspapers that I acquaint myself with each day.
3. My college honors thesis, written about William Blake in 1989, is now controlled by Universal Pictures, who is distributing this film. Blake’s lyrics are featured in the original film score by John Tavener.
4. The word “bummer,” which I used randomly when I was 8 years old, is now considered a legitimate term of art by New York Times writers like Manohia Dargis, who wrote of this movie, “Children of Men may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking.”

I just got back from seeing Borat’s Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan with my friend D.C. Man, it was fun.
We got to the theatre right on time and, funnily, there was no one there to sell us tickets. Instead, we went straight to these machines and we had to touch their screens to buy tickets. We each bought one ticket, which cost $7.95. You had to swipe your credit card through the machine and get your ticket that way. Then the ticket came out. A receipt came out, too, which was weird.
We walked into the theatre and there were six teenage attendants standing around the concession stand, talking and looking at candy. No one was there to take our tickets but that was okay. I made it straight to the Twizzler Nibs and bought a pack for $5.13. (I actually wanted Sno-Caps but they don’t have those in Canada.) The bag was huge! I paid with a $20.00 bill and got back $14.87.
Then we sat down in the theatre. D.C. had seen the film before and it was packed but tonight there were maybe 15 people scattered around. We chose seats toward the front, probably in the sixth row, towards the center right, making sure not to block our fellow moviegoers’ views. There were no really good previews unless you count the upcoming Night at the Museum, but we did watch ads for Toyota Camry (it was pretty good) and a couple of other products that I don’t remember. I remember when they didn’t have ads in theatres and now they do.
When we got out, I was still laughing and we got back in the car and drove home. When I got inside, I ran the tap for about 30 seconds because all of the water in the house had been warmed and the water standing in the pipes outside is really cold. I had two glasses. Man, those were good.