Here at 27th Street we’re big fans of Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. Sharon Jones died a year ago this week, but on November 17 one final album by Sharon and the Dap Kings – called Soul of a Woman – will be released. Can’t wait! Here’s a sample: It’s a Matter of Time:
Yesterday, with our friend Suzanne in town from Halifax, we trundled on up to the McMichael Canadian Collection, north of the city. Once again there was a great deal of very interesting work to see, and as a bonus, we bumped into two old friends we hadn’t seen in years.
Tuffy P at McMichael
I particularly enjoyed the large exhibition of Annie Pootoogook’s work, mostly drawings depicting her day to day life and experiences living in the Arctic. I had seen some of her work in the past, but it was quite a moving experience to see such a large collection together in the gallery. Pootoogook drew what she experienced and depicted it in a disarmingly matter-of-fact manner, even when the subect matter was disturbing and uncomfortable.
Passion over Reason pairs Joyce Wieland’s work with that of Tom Thomson. From the gallery website: Consider this exhibition to be a passionate love letter to Tom Thomson and Canada – two subjects at the core of this sesquicentennial year – and a conversation between masterworks by Thomson and by Canada’s feminist art pioneer Joyce Wieland. Going in I wasn’t sure what to make of the premise for this exhibition but though quirky, the mix of work held together just fine.
There was also a major retrospective of Alex Janvier’s work 100 paintings and drawings exploring a fantastic 65-year career. I was unfamiliar with much of Janvier’s work and was fascinated with how he used “western” contemporary approaches to express aspects of his Dene history including his residential school experience. Very powerful.
Our visit was a whirlwind one, as we had less than an hour and a half to see all the work before the gallery closed. There was a lot to take in in a short period of time. I continue to be impressed with consistent high quality exhibitions coming out of McMichael over the past couple years.
Time for a taste of the late great Jimmie Driftwood. If you don’t know Jimmie Driftwood’s music, here are a few of my faves. He wrote over 1,000 songs and played them on his home-made guitar.
Here’s one for all my friends at the post office…
And his “silly-riginal” version of Froggy…
There were “hits” too. Johnny Horton scored with Driftwood’s Battle of New Orleans. Here’s Jimmie Driftwood’s version…
Perhaps Tennessee Stud was his masterwork…
In our neighbourhood, which is being sliced and diced all over the place by builders and developers, it is unusual to see a tree crew that isn’t busy destroying mature trees. Today we had the guys from Towne Trees – but just to do some basic maintenance.
Up front we have a really nice honey locust, a tree which benefits from regular pruning. The guys took off all the dead wood and thinned out the canopy. It looks great, and our gardens up front will enjoy a little more light getting through the canopy too. When we first moved to Long Branch close to a decade ago, the locust had not been maintained in a long time and was loaded up with a dangerous amount of deadwood. We clean it up and thin in out every two or three years.
Along the south side of the house, we had a choke cherry cut back considerably. This shrub has grown considerably and was sprawling all over the place. Behind that in the back yard, we had the canopy of two Norway spruces gently raised. They did a really nice job of this. It doesn’t look like it’s been trimmed but now you can walk under the tree without getting a face-full of spruce.
There’s a fiddle tune called Rachel. In some places and by some players it’s also known as The Texas Quickstep, but everyone I know who plays it just calls it Rachel. I don’t know who Rachel was though. It’s just one of life’s mysteries. I learned a clawhammer arrangement from Cathy Barton Para at a Midwest Banjo Camp. She taught it in standard C tuning with a capo on the second fret for D. At some point along the way I started playing it in a tuning called double C, also with a capo on the second fret to make DD, a tuning in which I’m more comfortable.
Our cat Gracie was none-too-pleased with my banjo playing today, and decided to dramatically end the video.
In 2016, Sheila and her friend Nadia organized the first ever Long Branch by the Lake Garden Tour. It was a fun day, and it raised a good chunk of money for a local community health organization called LAMP. After a one year hiatus, garden tour will return in 2018 on Saturday June 23! This time, any gardeners living in Long Branch are invited to participate and the garden tour will be free. The plan is to have maps available at Long Branch businesses.
If you love gardens and gardening and you would like your fabulous Long Branch garden to be included, visit the Long Branch by the Lake Garden Tour site for details.
The organizing group would like to acknowledge the awesome Long Branch BIA for their generous help in getting the 2018 garden tour off the ground.
I read in the Etobicoke paper that my old high school, a place called Scarlett Heights, is closing. I’m betting developers will replace it with some kind of housing development. I guess it was a good high school. I mean, I think I got a good education there, or at least a good enough education to propel me into university. My older sister and brother went to school there too.
I don’t feel a lot of connection to the place though, unlike some folks who hang out to this day with the same group of friends with whom they went to high school. I’m in touch with a couple people from that time but mostly they are names and faces lost in my past.
What I mostly recall about those years is that I started going out to galleries and museums to look at art. This was of course pre-internet and my exposure to paintings was seeing works by our contemporary Canadian painters. I recall being fascinated by paintings I saw by John Meredith and Gordon Raynor and Ronald Bloore and Claude Breeze and Doug Morton and many more. I wanted to make paintings too. My high school art teacher, a wonderfully eccentric fellow, was very encouraging. My parents were encouraging too. They wanted me to get a university education and they were OK with me studying art, although I was reminded many times that a good job would be OK too.
We lived in central Etobicoke in a bungalow on a nice street. It was a safe and clean, mostly boring and not particularly diverse community. The high school was close to the middle school and I walked to both. There was a plaza across the street from the school, where some of the high school kids hung out. It was a dream of our parents to raise their kids in a community like this one in central Etobicoke.
I remember there was a Texaco station on the corner across from the school and late one night there was a murder there, an honest-to-God hit. It was one of two murders in the area that rocked the community. The other one was the killing of two young women who were followed home from an airport bar and murdered. We weren’t supposed to have serious crime in our neighbourhood. It was, after all, the suburbs.
I haven’t been back in the old neighbourhood in a long time. Obviously the demographics there have changed if there aren’t enough students to fill the school. Students currently attending Scarlett Heights will start attending a re-named Kipling Collegiate, quite a distance away. I hadn’t heard anything about my old high school for many years until our former mayor Rob Ford started his public meltdown. It turns out he and his brother attended the same school as me, a few years later. Apparently as mayor he still enjoyed visiting the place, and my old school made the news.
Do you feel connected to your old high school?
I haven’t traveled outside of North America a whole lot and I’ve never been to Asia at all, but Tuffy P and I are planning a trip to Vietnam in the not-to-distant future, so we both trundled off to a clinic to get whatever vaccinations we need to avoid getting ill on our trip. We ended up with a combination of an injection, a potion and some pills, which will hopefully help us ward off various nasty pathogens we might be exposed to along the way.
Another challenge for me will be the long travel time. I don’t mind shorter flights but a flight to Asia is a seriously long time in an airplane seat. If anyone has any wonderful strategies for dealing with long flights, I’m open for suggestions. Hopefully between sleeping, reading a novel or two and getting up every hour or so for a stretch, it won’t be as difficult as I imagine. The longest I’ve flown in the past has been 7 hours to Europe.
Tuffy P is organizing this trip and she has all kinds of adventures planned for us in a trip that will take us to various areas of the country – including some bicycling and some kayaking. As the trip gets closer, I’m looking forward to it more and more. We had planned to make this trip a couple years ago, but then I took a tumble on black ice on the front steps and messed up my right ankle very badly and that put the trip on hold. Fortunately, with the help of 14 screws, my surgeon cobbled me back together again and my ankle is in pretty good shape once again, with the screws still intact.
27th Street 