The most unusual Steve Jobs obituary this week might be the one that appeared in PDN Pulse, the blog of Photo District News. Jobs, it seems, was a legendarily truculent photo subject. PDN Pulse recounted some of the legends. “It was the joke among photographers. He was like the nightmare subject,” said San Francisco photographer William Mercer McLeod, who photographed Jobs five times. In 1986, Fortune magazine hired Doug Menuez to shoot a portrait of Jobs for the magazine's cover. Menuez wanted to photograph him in the NeXT offices, on a staircase Jobs had commissioned from architect I.M Pei. Jobs arrived, looked...

08 October, 2011

An anonymous cartoonist strikes a blow for virtuous punctuation: When will newspaper style guides wake up to its obvious superiority? H/T Lee Amme Gillan via David Rodenhiser. This has been cropping up on the net since mid-September. If anyone can devine the artist's identity, I'll update....

06 October, 2011

Halifax spoken word artist Shauntay Grant reads a series of poems inspired by North River iron artist Gordon Kennedy at the opening gala of this weekend's Cabot Trail Writers' Festivall in St. Anne's Bay. The festival continues through Sunday at North River....

30 September, 2011

[See update below.] Don't miss the Cabot Trail Writers' Festival in Tarbot and St. Anne's. The creators of this annual event, now in its third year, have put together a fantastic program this year. On Friday night, last year’s Halifax Poet Laureate, Shauntay Grant, will premiere five spoken word pieces, commissioned for the festival and inspired by five sculptures by North River blacksmith Gordon Kennedy. Several of the festival participants will present workshops Saturday, and the evening program includes readings by Nova Scotia native and Giller-prize winner Johanna Skibsrud, Inverness-born short story writer Alexander MacLeod, and music by the jazz quartet The Synchronics. A...

28 September, 2011

A lo-tech texter has been leaving messages in the Lawrence Street area of in West End Halifax.  From simple labels...

19 September, 2011

Country rock artist Steve Earle (center, in spotlight) played Dalhousie University's Rebecca Cohn Auditorium last night with his current band, The Dukes (and Duchesses), featuring Allison Moorer. She is Earle's sixth wife out of a total of seven marriages. The evening's highlight was Moorer's unusual rendition of the great Sam Cooke civil rights anthem, A Change is Gonna Come. The ensemble plays tonight at Membertou Trade and Convention Centre, Sydney....

08 September, 2011

The International Symbol of Accessibility (ISA), more widely but less correctly known as the handicapped sign, is evolving. The original symbol (far left), designed by Susanne Koefoed in 1968, was pretty much just a stylized wheelchair. The International Commission on Technology and Accessibility (ICTA), a committee of Rehabilitation International, humanized the it by adding a head (second from left). This is the icon we are most familiar with. Critics complain that its static nature stigmatizes the wheelchairs as instruments of helplessness and passivity.  In 2005, VSA, an international organization on arts and disability, produced a more active icon implying self-propulsion (third from left). At least one store,...

05 September, 2011

(l to r) Producer Nelson MacDonald, Director Ashley McKenzie, and screenwriter Christine Comeau celebrate the underdog victory of their short film RHONDA'S PARTY in CBC'-TV's Short Film Faceoff at a gathering of friends, crew, and admirers in Darrel's Sport Bar, Halifax, Saturday night, as the TV monitor shows McKenzie being interviewed on the program. The room exploded in cheers and whoops when CBC host Steve Patterson announced that McKenzie and MacDonald, both of New Waterford, had beaten out films from Vancouver and Montreal in viewer voting. The victory brings the young filmmakers $40,000 cash and $10,000 in equipment and supplies toward...

09 July, 2011

[caption id="attachment_8330" align="alignright" width="301" caption="Director Ashey McKenzie confers with cast member"][/caption] A few years ago, two Dal SMU students from New Waterford showed up at one of my movies and offered to help. Within a few weeks, they were organizing film selections for the following season, and doing a better job of it than I ever had. In their spare time, Ashley McKenzie and Nelson MacDonald organized the Coastal Arts Initiative which borrowed a basement room in former convent, transformed it into a cool exhibition space, and put on a series of innovative shows by a bunch of young New Waterford...

02 July, 2011
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