Halifax Regional Municipality has retreated, tail between legs, from its unconstitutional war on music festival posters. The lawyer who faced them down wants to make sure the tail stays put. just as the issue was going to trial, municipal prosecutors dropped charges against Evolve Festival organizer Jonas Colter, whom HRM police had  pursued with unseemly vigor for advertising the alternative music event on sidewalk utility poles. That's a relief for Colter, who was facing $4500 in fines, but a disappointment for lawyer Gordon Allen, who believed his bro bono had a strong case on free speech grounds. Allen hoped a court judgment would deter...

22 May, 2011

New Waterford filmmaker Ashley McKenzie (erroneously identified by the CBC as a Halifax filmmaker) looking pensive Wednesday night at a taping of CBC-TV's Short Film Faceoff with host Steve Patterson (center). The show's semi-final episode pitted McKenzie's award-winning Rhonda's Party against two other good shorts, Down to the Wood by Newfoundlander Kelly Davis, and In Between by Montrealer-turned-Torontonian Nadine Valcin. The episode taped last night will air June 25, after which Internet voting will determine an over-all winner of $50,000 in cash and equipment rentals toward their next production....

19 May, 2011

Take a break from the election with this new video from NPR's Radiolab: H/T: Silas...

25 April, 2011

(L to R) Damian Moynihan (drums), Larry Björnson (bass), Scott Macmillan (guitar), and Damian Moynihan (drums), and Rob Crowell (saxophone)  played the Economy Shoe Shops's Monday Night Jazz session to a an appreciative but subdued crowd. The bar's co-founder, David Henry, a Halifax fixture, died of cancer Saturday after a brief illness....

29 March, 2011

Lawrence Boothby doesn’t think much of sculptor Jamie McCartney’s plaster vulvas: Pale, monochrome, rigid, dry, repeated - it was interesting to me how the medium of plaster, the context of the exhibit, the isolation of one part of a woman's body from the rest of her body (and emotions), and repetition, alters a viewers' perception. For artistic purposes, the 400 tiles could have been of almost any set of objects that were similar yet unique. Four hundred color photographs of the same size would have better captured the beauty of vulva including their hair, but he wouldn't have been able to...

26 March, 2011

A dystopic environmental fable in 10 minutes written and directed by Chris Perry, and produced as part of the collaborative animation program at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. If the animation does't appear, please click here. Original score composed and adapted for guitar by Evan Viera, and performed by Nathaniel Brookman....

23 March, 2011

English sculptor and prop maker Jamie McCartney arranged 400 plaster casts of vulvas into a nine-meter polyptych, to be displayed at the Brighton Festival Fringe in May. The project took five years and a quarter ton of plaster. Subjects ranged in age from 18 to 76, and included mothers, daughters, identical twins, transgendered men and women, one woman before and after giving birth, and another before and after labiaplasty (a practice McCartney hopes his exhibition will discourage). For many women their genital appearance is a source of anxiety and I was in a unique position to do something about that. Vulvas...

19 March, 2011

Installation artist and urban activist Candy Chang turned the side of an abandoned house at the corner of Marigny and Burgundy in New Orleans into a giant chalkboard where residents can record what’s important to them. She provided chalk: Chang explains: It’s also about turning a neglected space into a constructive one where we can learn the hopes and aspirations of the people around us… [T]his entire process (including official approval from many entities) has been a great lesson, experience, and project in itself….I believe the design of our public spaces can better reflect what’s important to us. The responses and stories from...

12 March, 2011

I've never been to Rome and never seen the Sistine Chapel. If you're in the same boat, check out this interactive, 360-degree, wrap-around representation of the chapel interior produced for the Vatican last year by Villanova University. Pretty neat. (The image below is just a screenshot. Click here for the full 3D effect.) H/T: Roland McCaffrey...

02 March, 2011

If your supercomputer is going on jeopardy, how do you give it an interesting voice and an appealing face? That's the problem that confronted the Automata Studio and technology artist Joshua Davis, hired by IMB to give Watson personality. If you can't see this video, try here. H/T: Nathan Yau....

15 February, 2011
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