October 13, 2015
comments 2

The Twenty Seventh Street Podcast – Episode 5: foraging for wild mushrooms

Episode 5 of the Twenty Seventh Street podcast is now available here and at iTunes.

Episode Notes:

Host: that’s me, Eugene Knapik
Music: I played the music for this podcast on my Bart Reiter banjo. The intro is the first part of Sandy River Belle, which I played in Sandy River Belle tuning. The outro is Julianna Johnson, which I played in DD (that’s double C tuning, capo at the second fret to play in the key of D)

Episode 5 is all about foraging for wild mushrooms. Warning: be very careful about eating any mushroom you find outside of a grocery store. There are deadly mushrooms in Ontario, and others that will make you wish you were dead. Be careful and don’t guess.

Here are some links to further information about some of the mushrooms mentioned on this podcast:

Aspen oysters
Chanterelles
Lobster Mushrooms
Boletes
Scaber Stalks
Hedgehogs
Chicken of the Woods
Honey Mushrooms

If you have comments or questions about this podcast, if you have suggestions, if you think you should be a guest on a future episode, please leave me a comment or email me – my name dot my other name @ gmail.com

October 12, 2015
comment 0

Jamming in Uxbridge

We enjoyed a delicious Thanksgiving dinner in Uxbridge with Eric and Viv, John and Megan and Luke and Stephanie. After dinner, Luke and I sat down and jammed for a while. Tuffy P caught a bit of Cold Frosty Morning on video, so here it is….

It was great to get together for dinner.

Stephanie and Luke

Stephanie and Luke

Megan, John and Viv with all that wonderful food

Megan, John and Viv with all that wonderful food

October 12, 2015
comment 0

The Word Exchange

Today I finally finished reading The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon. It is a novel full of interesting ideas and I wanted to like it and I wanted to finish it, but it was a struggle. The problem is that this novel didn’t find its rhythm until well over half way along.

The Word Exchange is set sometime in the future, a time when our current obsessive use of mobile devices has morphed to a more serious addiction – to a new device, called a Meme, enabling people to interact more viscerally with their devices. Some people, we learn, by that time even have “implants”. Now imagine a virus, a word-flu, which spreads both through devices and through speaking – but which can be treated by silence, by reading and by writing. Imagine too, a corporation involved in stealing words from our vocabulary for profit.

It took me weeks to get through this book, but I did not abandon ship. This novel is based around so many, rich ideas, but the author does not spin a compelling enough yarn to propel the reader through. And so I would stop for a few days then go back and read another chapter. Stop again. Pick it up again. Well, I’ll say it – it was boring. I had difficulty empathizing with the characters and believing their relationships, until some point well past the middle of the book, when the cadence picked up, and the story began to encapsulate, rather than describe the ideas which spawned the novel.

There is another thing that bugged me about The Word Exchange. One of the word-flu symptoms is aphasia, and the author insists on reproducing that aphasia, over and over again. She wants us to read sentences like,

This morning, chivvist kind of sick, I laid my take to Jericho to see Bill.

I think the author was trying to be clever, but the cleverness wore off quickly and I found reading chapters like this to be merely irritating. Her challenge, once introducing the idea of people experiencing speech disorders, is to write about it without indulging in it.

In short, The Word Exchange was rich enough to get me through it, but just. Disappointing.

October 11, 2015
comment 0

Listen to the Mockingbird

Some music for a Sunday morning. YouTube has a number of the NPR Tiny Desk Concerts up. This one features a wonderful set by Anonymous 4 with Bruce Molsky. They released an album together early this year called 1865. So far, I think it is the best album I’ve heard in 2015. I bought it the day I attended banjo workshop this summer, given by Bruce Molsky here in Toronto. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew the Anonymous 4 were a cappella singers and known as medieval chanters, and here they were commemorating the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War in America.

The recording is unlike any others I have. It’s simply fantastic!

Anonymous 4 has decided end their run as a quartet this year. Now, I’m going to have to explore their music backwards, starting with their recent – and – last recording and working back in time.

October 9, 2015
comment 0

Tardis in my neighbourhood

I continue to go to physiotherapy twice each week for my injured ankle. Although I’ve come a long way, it continues to give me some grief and limit my activities. The good thing is I’m making progress with it, even if it is slow progress.

My physiotherapist is located in a weird mall not far from where I live. At one end of the mall there is a Sobeys grocery store. We call it “Bad Sobeys” to differentiate it from the fancy-pants Sobeys located a mile two to the east. It isn’t so much that it is bad. It is just small and bare-bones compared to the opulent Sobeys down the way. At the other end of the mall is one of the few remaining Zellers stores. In between, there is the physo place, a hair place, a Service Ontario place, maybe a hairdresser, a medical imaging joint and a few other things.

I try to get my physio appointments at 7:00 so that my treatments have the least possible impact on my job. At 7:00 AM, this mall is bathed in semi-darkness, but even this early there is music playing, usually music from some other era, the 50s or the 60s or the 70s most times. Walking into this place and hearing The Eagles play that most awful of tunes, Hotel California at 7:00 in the morning is almost too much to bear.

I park near the Zellers because my physio is just a few doors west of there. Here is what I saw when I got there this morning, on the mall floor, outside the Zellers….

IMG_4526Spectacular, and only $4.97 each. If only I had a selection of lime green shirts, I could buy up a dozen pair of these babies and start a new fashion trend.

My theory is that the entire mall is actually a Tardis. That’s right a Tardis. I think before the sun comes up, the entire mall travels through space and time and has adventures in places unknown. By 9:00 AM it’s back in place, and the salmon pants turn into blue jeans and nothing seems amiss.

October 9, 2015
comment 0

Deluge

IMG_4334

A few years ago, I made a few smallish paintings that involved paint and corrugated cardboard and collage. I did them at a time when I was not very prolific, and I was trying to forge my way into new territory in the studio. I started using acrylic paint instead of oils at that time, and I recall I painted with a brush in one hand and a spray bottle in the other, so I could create and erase imagery using those tools and also so I could let the acrylic paint drip as an additional mode of applying paint. You can see a few obvious drips in the painting pictured. I would add paint, add collage, add cardboard, and I would peel it back in layers exposing ideas from half an hour ago, from a day ago, from last week. The process of making these paintings was all about adding and subtracting imagery, and adding and subtracting material. The process seemed very natural to me, aligned with the way my mind thought about images.

Four of those paintings in partiular continued to resonate with me for one reason or another. One of them, I gave away to an old friend. Two are in storage here at 27th Street, and the one in the photo, Deluge, hangs in my office at work. Curiously, this is a painting I like to have close at hand.

Deluge is maybe 18 inches wide. The chunks of cardboard on it extend past the edges so it isn’t quite rectangular. Parts of the cardboard have been ripped back, exposing bits of collage and also the corrugated innards of the cardboard. Deluge is a tough, rough and ready painting. It’s awkward and it’s ugly and it doesn’t seem to pass the tests some people have for fine art. I’ve been told these paintings aren’t so appropriate for a gallery because of the materials I used. I guess the perceived problem is that cardboard isn’t archival or isn’t permanent or might yellow or become brittle, or maybe these paintings are just too raw.

One day, a colleague at work noticed Deluge hanging in my office. She seemed disturbed by the painting and asked me if it was done by a child. Oh how I wish I could paint with the freedom and joy of a child! I said, no this painting is genuine adult art. She looked at me incredulously, then she took another look at it and shook just shook her head. Well, at least the painting got noticed and didn’t blend in with motivational posters with words like TEAMWORK written across the bottom, which occupy most of the offices in the building.

I like Deluge because it is full of the unexpected. I like that there is simply nothing graceful about it. It uses materials and colour relationships and forms that don’t look like art, whatever art is supposed to look like. The collage elements add moments of surprise and recognition. I look at this painting all the time, and even though I made it, it still seems to have something to offer me over and over, and I kind of appreciate that it is difficult for me to put my finger on just why that is. I like that this painting still makes me smile.

Filed under: Art
October 7, 2015
comment 0

That time?

IMG_4499The combination of a fall chill in the air, and what seems to be my first cold of the season convinced me to get a couple fires going in the woodstove this week. Although it seems early to start burning, heat from the woodstove is lovely and comforting. I’ve already brought a couple weeks worth of wood upstairs and have more prepped in the deck boxes outside on the deck.

Although I like the fall, this year I’m not at all looking forward to winter. Having experienced a nasty accident slipping on ice on our stairs back in March, I’m a little nervous about slipping again.