Writing the Renaissance of Water Street feature. For a few blissful weeks last spring, I vividly remembered what it was like to be a 21-year-old Trent student living on her own in a loft apartment on my favorite street in downtown Peterborough.
Walking into a tattoo parlour (Mike’s Tattoo) for the first time ever to do a story for kawarthaNOW and, a few weeks later, getting inked.
December is a hectic month, but take a little time out to see some excellent live music. Here is a list of just some things to be excited about in Peterborough and area.
Paolo Fortin and Laura Tregenza continue to bless us with offerings from national and international contemporary artists in the beautiful salon-style setting of their 1907 Edwardian house on Pearl Avenue in Peterborough. The hardwood floors, elegant white walls, and beautiful lighting provided by bright chandeliers is both refined and inviting.
I met Paolo at the November 14th opening of Christopher Patch’s “SEA HAG!” and found him to be a charming, warm, and attentive host.
The setting proves to be a fitting contrast for Christopher’s rough-hewn but meticulously crafted works of woodblock-printed, stenciled, and hand-painted pictures.
Social justice and commercial entertainment have always made strange bedfellows. The truth is often too ugly to bear and the penchant for sentimentality is nearly all encompassing.
But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences love their triumphs of the Human Spirit; and the usual bid for Oscars delicately sashays around the more radical aspects in an attempt to blend into the populist multiplex mainstay.
Is publicly honouring works depicting past injustices meant to ease our sense of liberal guilt, by acknowledging that there was a problem in the first place and that this problem has now gone away?
Or are these works being placed on a pedestal as monuments for future generations to preserve and remember?
Christmas — what is it all about?
There are emotions all around when Christmas approaches. Some experience the spirit of the season, while others experience stress or loneliness. Christmas can be a time of excess when too much money is spent, too much food is eaten, and the thought of driving to yet another family event is daunting.
The Art School of Peterborough (ASOP) has been an important touchstone in the continuing development of the art scene in Peterborough for two decades.
The sequel is a dubious beast. Almost always inferior to whatever greatness preceded it and viewed as little more than a desperate cash grab, it’s largely an artistically hollow affair.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is one of the incredibly rare exceptions to this.
Like a phoenix from the ashes, this stunning anomaly is a complete and utter improvement on the original in every way. The emotions are more tangible, the design is more intricate and — most importantly — it finally does not shy away from depicting the vicious action that beats through its dark heart.
Ever since Harry Potter lumbered into holiday cinemas and became the all-conquering annual box-office cudgel that couldn’t be stopped, prospective young adult fiction authors (and studio executives) have frantically churned out franchise after franchise in the hopes of landing the next great white billion-dollar-deal.
But for every Twilight, there have been 10 Percy Jacksons and Golden Compasses.
The fact that Peterborough has a vibrant visual arts scene is stated so often it could almost go without saying. And everyone knows this is a great town for music lovers. But what may not be as widely known is that, for the last 20 years, a small but dedicated company has been bringing world-class performance artists from across Canada and the world to Peterborough’s stages, parks, streets, and theatres.
In the world of dance, Peterborough is on the map — thanks to Public Energy.
Public Energy is about the power of contemporary dance and “anything performancy” — as artistic producer and founder Bill Kimball puts it. The company brings together a lot of different elements, often more multi-disciplinary than one expects from something billed as “dance”.
The main floor of Pete Hewett and Karen Hjort-Jensen’s house looks like a war room. Large bristol board mockups of traffic routes are positioned throughout the hallway of their East City home. A large table normally used for dining is covered with pads of paper, brochures and handouts.
Rob Steinman, a retired teacher and the leader of a growing protest to stop construction of a Parkway extension bridge through Jackson Park, is sitting on the couch wearing cords and a t-shirt. A bright red “NO Parkway” button pinned to the front of his blue ski vest.
Exhausted from weeks of campaigning to stop the development and protect the urban-wooded park located in the heart of Peterborough, Rob says the $67 million bridge through Jackson Park will only solve 10% of traffic problems in the north end.
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