July 6th, 2008

Onrush

So many lovely new blogs this summer. Shouldn’t everybody be out in the sunshine? Canadians are funny.

Ideal Tigers is the work of musician/scholar/example-to-us-all Ross Hawkins, and it contains examples of all his roles in society, such as this:

“What I want to know is, where have all the fools gone? Where are the jesting ne’er do wells? Where’s Puck? And most importantly, where’s the trickster? In another age, joking might have been a courtly, even stately practice; or it might have been a means of accessing the sacred. Could it really be that pranking now is mostly the business of morons on MTV, office zaniness, or kids beating people up and filming it on their mobile? I hope not, and that’s why I’d be very grateful to be the vicitm of a great divine prank.” (April 1, 2008)

The blog dwells especially on Ross’s one-man dream-factory/band, the Idle Tigers. You could, if you were inclined, see and hear those tigers, this Friday night at the Drake Hotel. It should be the best kind of bizarre.

David Whitton has a blog…website…thing with amusing anecdotes about music, cool/disturbing art (take a real close look at the kissing couple), and most importantly, links to a bunch of his stories. My favourite is “Robin”

“Everyone worked in financial services nowadays. My mom, my dad, my aunts, my uncles, my parents’ friends. Even the Goat worked in a bank when he wasn’t making art films. If you don’t fall off a balcony, you’ll end up in financial services eventually.”

But I’ll let you choose for yourself. I guess this is the other best kind of bizarre. I guess I shouldn’t hierarchize.

Alex Boyd has a new movie-review blog at Digital Popcorn. I can’t much speak to the accuracy of the film reviews, because I have seen exactly one of the dozens he’s reviewed so far (it was Sicko and I agreed with that review 100%). This is another proof of the already impressive thesis that I have crap taste in movies (if I had my life to live over again, I might not see both Harold and Kumar movies, but then again, I might.) But the reviews are a joy to read even if you don’t know the films, because Alex writes like this:

“Some men are cruel and some men are pretty darn OK and just play the harmonica or whatever. And, it’s a pretty darn sad world when the cruel ones get ahead. In the final ten minutes or so the enemy invades, and even our best stock footage doesn’t stop them.” (*From Here to Eternity,” review June 24, 2008)

Even better, he also wrote a beautiful book of poems called Making Bones Walk, which I spent the afternoon reading in the park:

“If I demand of the air that my head turns
back to look at a woman, the air holds my chin,
turns it like a lover.”
from “Shapes of the Air”

There will always be reasons to go out, and reasons to stay in.

I’ll cover you
RR