December 7, 2024
All art contains politics, no matter how overt or covert or messy or inconsistent they may be. This is inevitable because all expression emanates from a particular world view, and every world view is ultimately political.
March 31, 2020
There has been too much confusion around whether we should be wearing masks while in public during the pandemic. I’m in the “Yes” camp, and I’ve noticed that all the doctors I’ve talked to are in the Yes camp too, no matter what politicians and public officials have been saying.
January 6, 2019
Well before the most recent wave of coverage of the crisis of plastic accumulating in our oceans, jeweler and artist Jesse Gray of Gray Metal started picking up beach plastic on Vancouver Island and casting some of it into jewelry.
July 4, 2016
Back row standing: Suzannah Norstrand, Melba Moore, Marjorie LiPari, Lynn Kellogg, Emmeretta Marks. Middle row: Natalie Mosco, Lorrie Davis, Diane Keaton. Front row sitting: Shelley Plimpton, Leata Galloway
Progress isn’t a straight line, so feminism isn’t on a straight line either.
February 14, 2016
Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and the other very excited nerds at the Windows 95 launch.
Fitting because I was helping my mother with her work PC earlier and it was really was like going back in time.
June 21, 2015
Happy National Aboriginal Day everyone!
Wab Kinew, always concise, does 500 years of ‘Canadian’ history in 2 minutes.
May 7, 2015
Briarpatch Magazine, one of Canada’s oldest lefty political mags, has published an abridged version of my earlier essay on heritage hipsters and colonialism redux.
If you want to read the original and longer post (with a far drier title) it is here: Settler & pioneer “heritage hipster” styles in the age of Idle No More, Chinatown gentrification, &c.
April 28, 2015
Apparently this is not a renegade settler war party, it’s a new “bloodgrass” band from Sudbury in Northern Ontario called Murder Murder. You can listen to their banjo-esque non-Northern-Ontario-ish neo-bluegrass murdery numbers at the link above.
April 23, 2015
As a friend pointed out upon seeing this ad, “do we really need Mad Max meets Deliverance”? Actually it would be great to see Tina Turner showing up and knocking something over, a table maybe, or the narrative, but she is exactly not what this nostalgic fantasy is about.
March 5, 2015
Despite all the backlash to Ralph Lauren’s genocide chic advertising campaign last year, it seems designers have either learned nothing, or conversely they’ve learned that outrage is free and effective PR in the fashion world.
