Still in Toronto for another day, but soon I'll be back at work. In the mean time though....
After the con, i was able to finally catch Ronley Teper & co preforming @the Tranzac in Toronto Live. This is a band/performer i've been following for a little while now, found her via myspace, my cousin plays with her sometimes. you can check her out here.
Also lots of links on youtube with the vid, check them ALL out. :)
The great thing was that i wanted to see this show but forgot the day of about it, lost in Kensington market reminiscing w old friends. Made some new ones too. Then me and john walked up to Bloor on Brunswick to get some sushi, and lo there we were passing the Tranzac! Ronley was out side and we said hello, got the stage time and grabbed a great din before the show. Nice night.
quote: theglobeandmail Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs, dirty words and the demise of humanity, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday. He was 71.
Remember my dad or someone going on about how cool this dude was, first time i became aware of him when i was a toddler. I loved listening to him and Cheech and Chong, trying to inmate them, though it was a long time till i was allowed to hear the most infamous of his routines.
Always thought he was insanely funny even before i had a clue about how 'blue' he was.
from -
to -
well done you cranky old dude.
Laughs are cathardic, and i had other reasons to need cheering, a good Carlin Jag can be had surfin' youtube.
I was waiting for the rain to let up a bit so I could go to the D&Q book store opening, but the roof drain was blocked and it all started coming in through the ceiling!
Landlord had to come over, fist we drilled holes to control where it was coming in - it was pouring out of light fixtures and all over. With the holes it was possible to get it to all drain out in one place. But it came down in torrents! it would fill the bins in about 5 min. So the landlord went up to the roof, saw that the drain was blocked, and that was almost it. Mostly it's stopped now, except one slow dripper in my bed room, that's keeping me up......grumble....
did it good, on the stairs to the bathroom. Top and left of left foot and lower calf are sore, very. ice, rest and stretches are paying off, but it looks damn ugly. I lurch like a zombie well right now.
Well, I didn't end up taking too many photos at TCAF, planed to but on Saturday I twisted my ankle and it kind of slipped my mind. So I just got a few good ones at the Awards on Friday.
Had a blast at the show, and the launch went well. Not really in the mood to talk more about it all right now but I'll try to find some time to go on latter.
Got word from my grandmother today that her brother died. She sent me this link to a very nice write up about him, here's the copy by Rebecca Goodman...
Harry Rudney furthered medicine Chaired biochemistry department at UC
HYDE PARK - The life of Harry Rudney is a Horatio Alger story.
From humble beginnings, Dr. Rudney's talent and inquisitiveness landed him a job and an education provided by an appreciative benefactor.
He later made an important contribution to humanity through his research on cholesterol, which laid the foundation for the later development of cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins.
Dr. Rudney, chairman emeritus of the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, died May 30 at Hospice of Cincinnati in Blue Ash. The Hyde Park resident was 89.
Born in Toronto on April 14, 1918, Dr. Rudney was a member of a struggling Jewish immigrant family, according to his son, Joel Rudney of St. Paul, Minn. With no money for college, Dr. Rudney was tracked into Central Technical High School even though he was interested in biology.
The school recognized his gift for science and hired him after graduation to set up chemistry experiments for students.
Although he couldn't afford college, he attended public lectures offered by the University of Toronto. Among the lectures he heard was one given by Dr. Bruno Mendel, a Jewish refugee who worked at the Banting Institute. Sir Frederick Banting, who had discovered insulin, conducted research there.
"My father was so excited by what he heard that he wrote to Dr. Mendel and suggested an experiment that he could do and Dr. Mendel was so impressed that he contacted my father and offered him a job in his lab," Joel Rudney said.
But Dr. Rudney felt he couldn't break the contract he had with the high school.
Mendel asked Banting to intervene. He arranged for Dr. Rudney to be released from the contract. Dr. Rudney went to work for Mendel, who paid his way through the University of Toronto.
"By the time my father had finished his undergrad degree, he had published seven papers," Joel Rudney said.
Dr. Rudney went on to receive a master's degree from the university in 1948 and a Ph.D. from Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1952. He joined the faculty at Western Reserve before being recruited by the University of Cincinnati to be the chairman of the department of biochemistry and molecular biology.
He was the Andrew Carnegie Professor of Biological Chemistry from 1967 until 1989. After his retirement, he returned to serve as interim chairman of the department of pharmacology for three years. He later served as chairman of the institutional review board. He retired for good at age 87.
Dr. Rudney was elected to the Fellows of the Graduate School at the University of Cincinnati in 1976 and received the George Rieveschl Jr. Award for distinguished research. He served as president of the Association of Medical School Chairmen of Biochemistry and was on the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
While in college in Toronto, Dr. Rudney met his wife, Bernice. The meeting was arranged through friends. He came to her home and chatted with her in the breakfast room.
A week later he called to invite her to a movie. "We just hit it off," his wife said. He was a "sweetheart."
"My mother cautioned me that he was a poor boy. I said that didn't matter. I thought he had prospects." And she was right. "He went on to do really important things," she said. "It was a lovely marriage. We would have been married 61 years on June 25. And they were very good years."
In addition to his wife and son Joel, survivors include another son, Robert Rudney, of Mount Washington; and two sisters, Libby Grant and Pearl Shore, both of Toronto.
Services have been held. Burial was at United Jewish Cemetery in Montgomery.
Lots a big brains in the family, but i didn't know about his work before now, cool to read about.
It's been a long time since i last saw Harry, but i recall him being a very warm and good hearted man.
I did a quick google look on him after to see what came up and found this sweet photo of Harry & Bernice from 2005 by Jason D. Geil of The Cincinnati Post.
very cool! channel4.com is hosting streaming video of an early David Cronenberg short film titled The Italian Machine[ED:Sadly the film is no longer on the site :P].
You can watch it there, I Grabbed a copy for myself from the site while it was up. If you like to see it there's a rare DVD collection of early Cronenberg shorts that includes it, i'll have to get my hand on a copy of that some day. I found a bit of background on the production from this site, The Italian Machine was actually meant to be a 60 minute long TV film for CBC before the head of CBC Drama removed Cronenberg from the editing of the final cut to create her own 30 minute long version, or so the story goes.
It's central character is based loosely on real 'legendary acid and pot dealer', general trouble maker, writer and photographer, Lionel Douglas [played in the film by Gary McKeehan], who was killed in a freak motorcycle accident in 1979. It features an array characters all to familiar to me, and displays Cronenberg's classic off beat approach to his subjects.
"When motorbike fanatic Lionel learns that a rare and prized Ducati has been bought by a rich art collector purely for the purpose of display, he enlists the help of his friends to liberate the motorbike."
Now while I am a Cronenberg fan, my reasons for being hyped about tracking this down are a tad more personal. The real Lionel was my father. This version is an exaggerated caricature, but I recognise the source material.
I'm told that the premise may have been influenced by a true story about a bike being displayed as art and Lionel's reaction to the idea "how can they not want to make it go!!". The other guys in the film with him are loosely based on people who shared a garage with my father in behind his house. I remember bikes in parts, being worked on all the time, made to go a bit faster and bit smother, tuning till they hummed like instruments. Always lots of talk and laughter. And the smells of metal, oil, cleaners and gas. That garage, and him talking with other people around the kitchen table about all sorts of crap, astrology to philosophy, these are probably the most common icons in my memory of my father.
He and Cronenberg were close friends I'm told, they went to university together and rode bikes out at mosport speedway a bit one summer. My grandmother says there was a time when the two were inseparable. This film was meant as a little tribute to him. Lionel was a larger than life kind a guy; he left his mark on a lot of people. Every once in a while someone comes along whom knew him, and when they find out that I'm his son their behaviour towards me tends to change, suddenly I get these wired reverent looks. When Ron Mann made his short documentary about Rochdale College called Dream Tower (1994) he contacted us about looking through my fathers photos for stills to use [a number of which ended up in the film]. In researching the film he told us, every one he talked to told him look up Lionel Douglas, he's the guy you should talk to, until he found someone who told him Lionel had died. So then he tracked us down to get permission to use his photos.
He had watched some film of my dad giving speeches at the collage found with the reels of old film he dug up on Rochdale, and he showed up in some early CityTV footage apparently. And even with that, not having met him in person, Ron talked to me about him with the same kind of mythic aw as everyone else did. I've never seem much of that footage Ron told us about, except a short bit that appeared in the film [He explains for the camera how they conducted security checks at the door of the building after Yorkville imploded].
For a long time this was all very strange and odd for me. Sadly I hardly remember the living Lionel now. I was 8 when he died, it knocked me for a loop as you would expect. When I came out of that emotional coma 10 years later I barely remembered him any more. I have his photos, a trunk full I'm planning to make a book from some day. And there is a small chap book sampling his poetry, text and photos his friends put together after he died.
My two copies are both raged and dogged. One, that I've had since I was a kid, is marked with tabs so that I can flip right to my favorite poems. Over the years I've tried to tease more of him out of my head by digging up more of him out there, so I'm always happy to find another bit of him floating around.
In the middle of the book is a piece between the poetry and the photos simply titled 'Prose'. It was a bit of a philosophical guide through some parts of my life, my teens for sure. I made an audio file of my laptop reading it, you can grab that here.
Sort of continuing with the sentiment of my recent post about The Italian Machine, a short Cronenberg made for TV film that features a fictionalised version of my father in one of the central roles - here is some more of Lionel online.
From the mid 60's to the mid 70's Lionel was a central player in the experiment in anarchist education called Rochdale [links to media on the CBC archive about the school]. It was many things to many people, and in the 90's as I mentioned in the last post, Ron Mann made a short documentary called Dream Tower about the place. A very large portion of that film appears inter-cut with an interview with a Rochdale survivor here on POT TV's web site .
A very young Lionel has a brief appearance in the Doc [time index reads about 9:27:00 on pot tv's video]. This was filmed back then for a log documentary about the project that was never finished, but in the end provided a greater deal of raw footage for Ron's film. Lionel was at the time of the interview, helping to coordinate the newly instituted building security along with several of his biker friends, in an effort to stem the tide of Yorkville junkies that invaded the place after the cops cleared out Yorkville [paving the way for a major gentrification of that neighborhood - its now a luxury condo and shopping district for the very very rich]
When Dream Tower was made, I had not seen any footage of Lionel or heard his voice for 10 or so years. Ron gave me a dub of the film when it was done, I recall rewinding and watching this very short bit of footage of my father several times over that night.
And I have a tape of Lionel anonymously interviewed on the CBC maybe before he had me I think, or just after, anonymously as a Drug Dealer, it's pretty strange and interesting! I have them on my site here, two sides.
I used them in this little bit of video art i made low-fi back in 98 or so i think.
Lionel was a complicated guy as far as i can tell. The whole dealer thing was just one side of the guy. He wore many masks. I'll talk more about them next time.
I was about 10 years old, and we went to what was called the semi Annual Waifs and Foundlings.
A party by any other name. It was a tradition amongst my parents circle of friends, who were for the most part, either estranged from their families ("get out of my house you freak!") or so far away from home as to make returning for holidays hard ("I'm a free spirit man! Just give me a stretch of road and a pair of wheels and i'm gone....").
So several times a year, they would all gather at one of their homes, and insanity would ensue. On this particular occasion the excuse was Thanksgiving, or Halloween, or something. It was a very mild autumn, and the hosts were the parents of a girl, three years my elder, who i had a massive crush on.
Oh, and she was a redhead. A deep rich natural red like arterial blood, blue eyes, a perfect smile, stunning, curvy tall and stunning.
ahem
So anywho, being a couple of wild children out of control, and with parents on the sauce and a variety of other intoxicants, we were left to our own devices.
Messing around with dry ice in the upside-down plexiglas skylight full of cold water and bear, poking stuff in the bonfire in back behind the house, watching a whole lamb turn on a spit, following her older brother, a tall mohawk sporting punk rocker six years older than I, and watching him chop up watermelons gleefully with a machete. Generally running around and screaming like mad banshees - something she did particularly well.
Eventually we found the helium her dad had used to fill thousands of balloons that decorated the party. We started off filling a balloon and taking hits of it to mess with our voices, and eventually just took shots of helium off the tank itself, the giddy feeling was probably oxygen deprecation. After a while we staggered through the house like a couple of drunken Disney characters, imitating with little effort a drunken sailor impression one of my father's old friends was doing quite well in the front room at the time.
I found myself bouncing down the hall like a ping pong ball towards a screen door, pushing the door open, veering towards the steps to sit down....and dirt!
I woke moments later light headed, that feeling you get when you stand up too fast...
...found myself face down in a flower patch by the front walk...about three feet from the steps of the house.
I got up, dusted myself off and checked for all my parts.
Nothing missing.
I walked back into the house and found myself faced with a wild head of Red. Did i mention it was curly and down to her waist? Her back was turned to me, she was backing towards me in a stumbly staggering way.
She 'whoops'ed and the next thing i knew i had a face full of soft sweet smelling hair and a unconscious girl in my arms....
.... she woke up moments later like i did in the flowers, all fogy and fuzzy, and we learned nothing from our youthful folly at the time, in fact we went right back to the helium and got all light headed and giddy again, and to this day i have a massive sweet spot for red heads.
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Got word from my grandmother today that her brother died. She sent me this link to 
He and Cronenberg were close friends I'm told, they went to university together and rode bikes out at 
a small chap book 
