Culture – Page 12 – Scripturient

The Travelling Life

2016-02-24 2016-02-24 Culture / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

The thing I don’t like about travelling is, well, travelling. Being somewhere else is fine. A wonderful, expansive experience. I love waking up to the sounds of the ocean, wandering the streets of a foreign town, eating foods in their restaurants, shopping in their markets, listening to their music and moving to the rhythms of their city. Getting there is, however, overrated. More than that: it’s dreary. Stressful. Boring. The antithesis of the romantic. Most of the time travel isn’t anything of the sort. It’s waiting. Hurry up and wait. You rush from one location to another, one platform, one ……… click below for more ↓

432 vs 440Hz: Science or Codswallop?

Canadian band Walk Off the Earth posted excitedly on Facebook that they had just recorded a new song. Great. I like WOTE and look forward to their new song. What was really different about that notice was that they also said they had changed their instruments from the standard A440 to A432 tuning, and it made a huge difference to them: For all the music nerds out there, you might want to look into this. This has not been 100% proven but the evidence is building. When we were in the studio recording our latest album “Sing It All Away”, ……… click below for more ↓

Aesop is Still Relevant

2016-02-06 2016-02-06 Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Council / Literature / What I'm Reading Now3 Comments

A MONKEY perched upon a lofty tree saw some Fishermen casting their nets into a river, and narrowly watched their proceedings. The Fishermen after a while gave up fishing, and on going home to dinner left their nets upon the bank. The Monkey, who is the most imitative of animals, descended from the treetop and endeavored to do as they had done. Having handled the net, he threw it into the river, but became tangled in the meshes and drowned. With his last breath he said to himself, “I am rightly served; for what business had I who had never handled ……… click below for more ↓

Reading Pablo Neruda

2016-02-03 2016-02-03 Books & Reviews / Literature / Poetry & Lyrics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

One hardly expects poets to generate spirited debate in the media these days*, but they did, not that long ago, well within my own lifetime. Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was one of those who sparked great, passionate emotions in people, for both his writing and his leftist politics. And in his own country, Chile, he was the equivalent of a rock star for many years. Even his 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature was controversial: the award noted Neruda was a “contentious author” about whom the debate still raged. His death, shortly after the coup by the right-wing general, Augusto Pinochet, was ……… click below for more ↓

Decoding Alice in Wonderland

2016-01-18 2016-01-18 Books & Reviews / Literature / Scifi and fantasy / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

It is tempting to suggest author David Day’s lush new book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded is the final word on the mysteries and secrets behind Lewis Carroll’s iconic children’s fantasy, but alas, it would be an over-reach. Surely others will follow, perhaps even Day himself will extend his research to a sequel. Aside from the difficulties of probing the motives of a man dead more than 125 years, there comes the question of interpretation, which is more like opinion than it is fact. Looking back 150 years at possible explanations for a reference or a character sometimes involves guesswork. But even from its original publication, ……… click below for more ↓

Kanile’a Islander GL6

2016-01-17 2021-05-15 Culture / Music & Reviews / Personal Reminiscences / Ukulele: instruments & music2 Comments

What a difference two strings make. Late last week, I traded my Jupiter Creek steel-stringed baritone, solid-body uke for one of these Kanile’a nylon-stringed GL6 “guitar-leles” which the company calls a “guilele.” It’s really a short-scale guitar tuned like a ukulele: a fourth higher. More like a requinto than a uke. Kanile’a says of the GL6 line: Our GL6 is a hybrid instrument that we developed bringing the convenience of the ‘ukuleles’ size with the playability that guitar players love. This instrument has our unique Super Tenor body in combination with our 20 inch scale, joined at the body on the ……… click below for more ↓

Where Have all the Readers Gone?

2016-01-16 2016-01-16 Books & Reviews / Culture / E-books & E-readers / Literature / Media / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

No, it’s not a remake of Pete Seeger’s famous 1955 anti-war song. That’s the title of an article that appeared in the Globe and Mail this week, by Peter Denton, lamenting our overall slide into image-based information with the “…intellectual attention span of squirrels…” * It grabbed my attention from the headline, but I stand at odds over his conclusions and his figures. Denton worries that people are reading less and sliding towards “personal illiteracy”: It’s not that e-books are taking over, either. People hardly buy books any more. Even fewer read them. My e-book sales are almost non-existent and ……… click below for more ↓

Who By Fire

2016-01-08 2016-01-08 Books & Reviews / Culture / Literature / Poetry & Lyrics / Pop Culture / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQTRX23EMNk I’ve been reading a biography of Leonard Cohen, recently: the 2012 I’m Your Man, by Sylvie Simmons. It’s an interesting journey through the life and thoughts of an exquisite artist who is, by nature, somewhat reclusive and stays out of the spotlight, but is deeply dedicated to his art. I don’t normally read “star” bios or autobiographies – frankly they often seem contrived and the lives portrayed, no matter how gussied up in prose, merely shallow. Most of them I categorize as “who cares?” books. Even those musicians I respect and admire have little to keep me turning pages. I struggled with ……… click below for more ↓

Updated Ukulele Songbook

2016-01-07 2016-01-07 Culture / Music & Reviews / Poetry & Lyrics / Ukulele: instruments & musicLeave a comment

Even though our local uke group, CPLUG, is not currently meeting, the songbook has not died. I have updated it with new arrangements and made a few editorial changes to the older content this past fall and winter. I, of course, continue to play the ukulele every day. If you don’t know this songbook, it’s a mix of more than 100 tunes ranging from traditional folk music to the 1980s, most of them arranged by me, with some that include my modifications of other people’s arrangements. There are some songs with more than one version – either the song in ……… click below for more ↓

Lessons from the paper

2016-01-02 2016-01-02 Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Media / Planning & Policies / Publicity & Communications4 Comments

There’s a story on page B2 of the January 1 Enterprise Bulletin (not online yet*) that offers us three lessons. Two lessons on how the local media fails us, one on cringe-worthy political ineptitude. Those lessons are: How far the credibility of the paper has fallen; How little respect there is for real reporting and investigative journalism in the local media; How pusillanimous and dysfunctional council has become. Let’s start with number one. The article on page B2 is headlined “Business centre strategic board takes flight.” Now you might think you were reading a light piece about the development of the Clearview Aviation Business ……… click below for more ↓

Cowboy Noir

2015-12-27 2015-12-27 Culture / Film & ReviewsLeave a comment

I hadn’t previously considered western movies as film noir – I always thought of them as crime dramas – until I watched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance over the holidays, perhaps my third viewing of the 1962 movie. The gloomy shadows, the dark sets, the agony of the characters. And then it struck me: cowboy noir. But why not? Noir is, after all not a theme as much as an atmosphere. As one reviewer of cowboy noir put it, Noir is like a disease. Its symptoms are moodiness, despair, guilt, and paranoia… The tropes of the Western—sunlight, open spaces, nature—would seem to ……… click below for more ↓

Judas, a Biography

2015-12-27 2015-12-27 Arts / Behaviour & Psychology / Books & Reviews / Culture / Faith / Religion / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Long before Darth Vader, long before Lord Voldemort, long before Stephen Harper, Judas Iscariot reigned as the supreme icon of evil in Western mythology. Judas betrayed God. How much worse can you get?* For 2,000 years we’ve used the term Judas to refer to anyone who betrayed anything, any cause, any belief, any friendship. Yet, like all the icons of evil that came before, and who have followed, Judas holds a fascination for us that transcends his actions. Dante consigns him to the ninth circle of hell, one of three traitors forever chewed in the mouths of the three-headed Satan. Yet Brutus, ……… click below for more ↓

Myth and Meaning

2015-12-19 2015-12-19 Books & Reviews / Culture / Philosophy / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues help us find within ourselves. So says Joseph Campbell in an interview with Bill Moyers, 1987, published in the book, The Power of Myth. The book is based on ……… click below for more ↓

Why I Still Watch MAS*H

2015-12-18 2015-12-18 Culture / Personal Reminiscences / Pop Culture / TVOne Comment

The news of Harry Morgan’s death at 96, back in 2011, saddened me. I’m at the age when it seems far too many icons of my youth are dying off. Not from some misspent life or accident; from old age. And the process accelerates as I age. I now understand why my grandparents and then parents read the newspaper obituaries. I haven’t quite succumbed to that, but I’m sure the day will come. No, I’m not being morbid. Or maudlin. I have, I believe, a healthy attitude towards death. Death moves me, sometimes fascinates me (as our collective attitude towards it fascinates me), ……… click below for more ↓

Is This Your Bar of Soap?

2015-12-15 2015-12-15 Culture / Humour & Satire / Personal Reminiscences / Pop Culture2 Comments

This is side five. Follow in your book and repeat after me as we learn three new words in Turkish: Towel. Bath. Border. So begins Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, from the first album released by the Firesign Theater, in 1968 (on later albums spelled as Theatre). Everything in it is a misdirection, a sidestep, a pun, an unexpected segue, a joke-within-a-joke, an opening to another place you hadn’t expected to be led to. May I see your passport please? Yes, I have it right here. (sounds of busy airport terminal in background) Uhum. Uhum. Uhum. Look at ……… click below for more ↓