It was September 27, 1903 when the mail train en route from Monroe Virginia to Spencer jumped the tracks in Danville. The train was behind time and the engineer, Joseph A. “Steve” Broady was under orders to get back on schedule. It became one of the most famous train wrecks in American history. 11 were killed when the train left the tracks on the Stillhouse Trestle and crashed into the ravine below.
Hank Snow’s version of the song commemorating this disaster is one of the earliest songs embedded in my memory. I know all the lyrics and I don’t remember a time when I didn’t. My dad used to say, son there are only two Hanks, and Hank Snow is the good one.
There are more blueberries in these scones than there should be. I used some blueberries I had frozen and if I followed the recipe it left me with about half a cup of berries in the bag, so I used them all. The result is some over-concentration of blueberry goodness in places, but you get over that pretty quickly once you try them. They’re super-tasty.
This is a Food Wishes recipe I’ve made before. It uses spelt flour. I didn’t have the buttermilk called for but I had some plain yogurt and substituted. Seems to have worked out pretty well.
This is one of those individually wrapped processed fake cheese slices. They’re excellent if you need to get your dog to ingest a pill. Just rip off a piece, wrap it around the pill and squeeze the edges together. Our dogs will eat anything wrapped in this stuff.
I have an exhibition of new work coming up, called Shapeworks, at yumart gallery.
Earthbound, oil on masonite – 2017
yumart gallery is located at 401 Richmond here in Toronto. The gallery is on the lower concourse – enter from the NE door near Peter St and the gallery is right there. The show will be on October 7-28. Due to the Thanksgiving weekend, the opening reception will be Saturday October 14, 2:00 – 4:00 pm.
At some point after my last exhibition, I began to feel I had reached a kind of cul-de-sac in the studio. That vague feeling of restlessness about my painting did not come with a blueprint for the future, just a desire to change my way of thinking about image-making. One day I came across a wooden 5 in a junk store which quickly became the work called Slant 5. I enjoyed its boldness and starkness, and the way it broke out of the expected picture plane. Slant 5 stopped me in my tracks and prompted me to question all sorts of assumptions I had about image making. The work in this exhibition is the result of that questioning.
I occasionally read biographies of people who fascinate me for one reason or another. I picked up this one because I heard an interview with the author on the radio and I thought it had an interesting angle. And of course, Johnny Cash was a huge musical figure for me when I was growing up. The book tells the story of the 13-year business relationship between Johnny Cash and his unlikely manager, London Ontario based clothing salesman and burger joint operator, Saul Holiff.
It’s an unusual story about an unusual and often troubled – but ultimately very successful – relationship. The book doesn’t gloss over the flaws of both Cash and Holiff. Reading about a time in Johnny Cash’s career during which he was downing fistfulls of pills, and failing to show up at gigs all over the place leaving Holiff to clean up the mess – was nothing short of frightening. How do you manage the career of someone who is spiraling downward?
For some reason lots of people are attracted to the bad behaviour of drug-addicted entertainers. This book goes into Cash’s troubled times in some detail. I had no idea just how out of control he was at the time. It was far more sad than cool. The remarkable story is how he got his act together and went on to new career highs. The other thing I didn’t know was the degree to which Cash rebounded into religion. This book recounts a trip to Israel in which Johnny Cash made a movie about the life of Jesus (with June Carter Cash playing Mary Magdeleine complete with southern drawl).
I think telling the story of the two parallel lives, with a detailed focus on the lesser known Saul Holiff, created an interesting angle for the book and also allowed the author to focus on a 13 year period in Cash’s life, rather than attempt a broader biography. The two men needed one another but they had so many conflicts. We learn what it can be like to manage a huge ego prone to wretched excess. Holiff had to endure a lot of crap over the years. On the other hand, he also benefited greatly from Johnny Cash’s huge success. We also see how his work in the background helped grow Cash’s career.
Holiff was ambitious and he wanted to elevate his client beyond the country music world and onto the pop charts. It was fascinating to read from Holiff’s point of view how this happened with the shows at Folsom Prison and San Quentin, with A Boy Named Sue and Ring of Fire, and with a nationally televised television show.
At this point, the Johnny Cash story is pretty well-known, but the book looks at it through an unusual lens offering up additional insight by looking at a chunk of Cash’s career through the eyes of his manager. The book also gives the reader a behind the scene’s look at the music business, which is something we often don’t get to see.
I was out to the Etobicoke Creek leash free area with The Partners today, so they could enjoy a good swim and some hijinx with other dogs. In the flowery meadow area there were dozens and dozens of monarchs. This is a special time to see lots of butterflies as they are migrating. I shot a brief video with my phone (apologies for the poor quality)
The other night at the Fair Grounds open mic, there was a trivia question for a prize – who performed in lieu of Bob Dylan at the Nobel presentation Easy-peasy – I shouted out Patti Smith. My prize for this wee nugget of knowledge was a DVD: Klute, the 1971 Alan J. Pakula flick, starring Jane Fonda as a call girl being stalked by one of her customers and Donald Sutherland as a private detective after the bad guy. We watched it last night.
The plot was nothing to write home about, but it was pretty well-written and very well-acted (with the exception of the junkie couple, neither of whom were very believable). The pace seemed a wee be slow for our 2017 tastes but what we think is slow today may well have come across as suspenseful at the time. Hard to say.
We’ve got a few more old movies around to watch. Next up: the 1966 flick about a crew of miniaturized scientists (including Rachel Welch) driving around inside some guy’s body to fix a blood clot and save the scientist-patient’s important secrets. I remember enjoying this one as a little tyke. We’ll see if it holds up.
When I was stranded in central Pennsylvania, waiting for a new radiator, I stayed in a motel that featured a tv station which appeared to specialize in bad western serials. The television set itself came from the era these shows were made and so I had the idea the shows were trapped inside the set. I felt it was my duty to free them. The evening would start off with a double shot of Bonanza, including a feature they called Bonanza: the lost episodes.
Then there was Gunsmoke….
The Virginian…
…and The Big Valley, featuring Barbara Stanwyck
I hadn’t seen most of these shows in decades. Then came the worst television show of my mechanical sabbatical – Walker Texas Ranger, starring Chuck Norris with a spray-on beard-mustache combo. I don’t know which was worse, the writing or the acting. It was spectacular.
27th Street 