Category: Social
Normalizing Celebrity ~ On the beauty of being vs. the glamour of fame.
A fellow film colleague posted a link to a set of celebrity images. Some of those images had been photoshopped by Danny Evans to give his “artist’s impression” of what these celebrities might have looked like without makeup, hair stylists, fashion stylists, diets, personal trainers, botox and a battery of cosmetic surgery or korean plastic…
War Prayers ~ Mark Twain and Lao Tse on the artlessness of war
Yesterday the people of The United States of America marked Memorial Day. It’s a day of baseball, hot dogs and apple pie, of families and communities gathering to celebrate the arrival of summer. It’s a day of flags and bunting and red, white & blue and national pride, and a day to memorialise the millions…
We’re too good to be this political ~ Be the change you want to see in the world
My first mistake today was climbing into the bathtub and picking up the May 31st, 2010 edition of Canada’s weekly news magazine, Macleans, rather than the copy of Stephen Mitchell’s The Second Book of the Tao, in which I’d thought to have a nice, long spiritual soak along with the hot water, and possibly bubbles.…
Teach Your Children Well ~ A Manifesto
A friend of mine teaches music from her home and said this about how she takes on the task: “I teach with all I have. It’s a promise I made to the little girl I used to be… that the children who come to my door would be protected, guided, loved, inspired, and given music.…
Courage
I started a post about courage, featuring this song, a couple or three weeks ago. It’s still sitting in the drafts folder. The Tragically Hip are a favourite Canadian band from the late ’80s and early ’90s, a time when I, and many other Canadians, considered them the best rock band on the planet. Fully…
Ingrid Karklins: A Passion to Race the Sky
A trip across Australia with Midnight Oil and Yothu Yindi in a Holden Gemini leads to passionate encounters with love and the extraordinary passion and beauty of Ingrid Karklins’ music.
To Kill a Mockingbird: the courage of Atticus Finch
It’s the 50th anniversary of the publishing of Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and I’ve got the film paused, just after the scene in which the verdict is handed down. Guilty. Both the film and the book resonate very deeply with me, in all the themes they touch upon. Family, community, love, goodness,…
Courage is…: Joannie Rochette & Petra Majdič
The greatest achievement of this 2010 Winter Olympic games wasn’t Canada’s first Gold medal, or its last, or any other Gold or Silver medal awarded in the Olympics. The two most courageous performances in the Olympics netted Bronze. One was a battle as much with emotional trauma as with any other competitor. The other was…
Peter Gabriel & Ken Follet: Fear, the mother of violence
A while ago I was reading Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth. Set amidst the brutality of the English middle ages, it’s interesting to see how all Follet’s characters experience fear, and more interesting how they respond to it and how, oftentimes, they are controlled by it, particularly the most violent of them, and…
