I’ve been learning ukulele for a few months now; when my good friend David gave a uke workshop at the festival this summer, and I was lucky enough to have the time to sit in.  Since then, both he and Lesley have lent us a pair of ukuleles, and when I finally picked it up again later this Fall, I found that, as promised, the uke is completely addictive.  After years of failed attempts at learning guitar and a slightly more successful go at the banjo (until my teacher, Lotus, moved away to become an old-timey superstar with his partner-in-crime, Sheesham), it was like a revelation to pick up the…

Ah Christmas; it’s easy to be snarky or soppy about it, and you don’t see much else.  I like Christmas, generally speaking, though I’m not religious.  There are plenty of things about it that trouble me, and I get the reasons behind what some people call ‘political correctness’ – which I consider to just be ‘correct’.  You can’t assume that everyone is celebrating the same thing; it’d be like assuming that everyone loves bubblegum icecream, which is clearly an insane assumption.  I don’t mind people saying ‘Merry Christmas’ to me; but then, I also don’t mind someone saying ‘Happy Hanukkah’ or ‘Happy Solstice.’  I like a lot of religions; if…

So the Peterborough Folk Festival pulled off beautifully; The opening Gala with Ian Tamblyn was perfect, standing-room-only.  The Saturday free festival was somewhat hampered by rain in the morning, and I think we had half our usual attendance (I also didn’t realize, I think, how many people come from out of town to PFF) due to the forecast sounding dire and miserable.  But it turned out to be a beautiful day, with people saying ‘best PFF ever.’  And the workshops at Sadleir House were well-attended (better-attended than I anticipated by half) and really, really good. I am continuing, as I had planned, as Artistic Director, and stepping down as Executive…

When I was a kid in the 80s in Ontario, the environmental movement took hold of the mainstream.  By that, I mean people start talking about it over the dinner table, on the nightly news, teaching about it in public school classrooms.  David Suzuki become a household name.   It became commodified; you could buy products that had slogans about saving the Earth silkscreened on them.  There was a burst of enthusiasm; composters became commonplace, and a recycling program began in my little village. There were two very clear messages I took with me from that time; the first and most solid was the white men in suits who said,…

On January 9, 2006, not long after I had put together my first rough design of Confessions of a Pop Culture Addict, I posted this sentence in my journal: Jordan Knight, of the New Kids on the Block, is playing The Red Dog in Peterborough on January 31. Tickets are $20. No, this isn’t a joke. I am so totally there. When I was 13 or so, miserable, the least-cool kid in the village where I grew up, I was a super-huge fan of Jordan Knight and the New Kids on the Block.  I had the requisite t-shirt, the wall covered with photos carefully ripped from the pages of Tiger…