Wayne D's Blog

Last week I complained about CBC Radio taking down the website for Socket, the summer replacement series that showcased new, inovative visual and artists. They managed to remove almost all traces of the show but after some digging around I found an archive of the  publicity emails that they sent out weekly. It gives a tantalizing glimpse of what the show contained and in most cases also lists the artist's name. Perhaps I can shame CBC into resurrecting the Socket website or even putting up the audio archives of the show. I have included links to a number of the artists who I haven't linked to before.


July 5th
 

This week on Socket, the new show that plugs you into young Canadian artists:  go to the grocery store where pop-art cereal boxes mix in with sugar puffs and granola.  This week, Socket is all about wonder and awe.  Meet the guy who sculpted the Great Wall of China out of Rice Krispies.  The painter whose only subject is V-W bugs.  The brilliant animator who also makes ten-foot sock puppets. 
 

July 12th
 

Host Angela Antle puts privacy under scrutiny this week on Socket. Vancouver's Jessica Bushey snaps photos of women's feet in public bathrooms.  Garnet Hertz, a Canadian living in California, straps video cameras onto the backs of giant cockroaches.  Lisa Klapstock takes pictures of herself in the laneways of Toronto's Little Italy.  And Judy Bowyer of Kitchener, Ontario gets people to make their most secret worries public.
 

July 19th
 

Socket gets all homey this week, zeroing in on domestic art.  But there's nothing mundane about Edmonton performance artist Todd Janes ironing out in the middle of the street.  Or the Alberta artist who knits with paint. Or the Canadian who holds telekinetic picnics in Berlin. Those profiles and more on Socket, with Angela Antle.
 

July July 26th
 

It's interesting --but it is art? This week on Socket, Angela Antle takes you to meet some artists who are pushing back the boundaries. Jon Sasaki says a plain old guest book is. Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan mix perfume to make a political statement. Jillian McDonald inserts images of herself into Billy Bob Thornton movies anytime he's about to plant a kiss. And Women With Kitchen Appliances make wild noise using Mixmasters and wooden spoons. It's all fun. But is it art?
 

August 2nd
 

The focus is on what host Angela Antle calls "uber-artists" this week on Socket - people who make art in all kinds of forms, from painting and making videos to designing wallpaper.  Craig Le Blanc of Calgary even uses his own body as art.  He's just one of the uber-friendly uber-artists you'll meet on Socket.
 

August 9th
 

Love conquers all this week on Socket. Montreal artist Max Wyse talks about the hundred-year old painting that touches his heart.  And Calgary's Mark Clintberg goes out on the street to get people to declare their love for one another.  
 

August 16th
 

It's all about Do-It-Yourself art this week on Socket.  Host Angela Antle will take you to one of Paul Butler's Collage Parties.  And Mark Prier explains how he makes audio art by downloading freeware from the internet.
 

August 23rd
 

It's all about shelter this week on Socket  - from Halifax photographer Mike Boiduk, who likes to crawl into fireplaces and dryers, to Lex Vaughn, who takes refuge in old-time radio.  That's on Socket, with Angela Antle.
 

August 30th
 

This is the last week for Socket, the show that plugs you into young Canadian artists.  And today, host Angela Antle focuses on family.  The Sanchez brothers make videos and take photographs together in Montreal, while conceptual artist and new mom Jess Dobkin tries to get people to confront their hang-ups about breast milk.

It's time again for me to decide on my emusic.com picks for the month. It wasn't too hard this month. I downloaded the rest of the Norm Macdonald's Ridiculous album that I downloaded the first three tracks from last week, Aimee Mann's Christmas album, One More Drifter in the Snow and Hello Love by The Be Good Tanyas. I've been a big fan of Aimee Mann since I saw her cover James Taylor's song Shed a Little Light on The West wing back in 2002. She came through Toronto soon after that and I bought tickets to her show solely based on that performance. I wasn't disappointed, she played at an acoustic concert in Toronto back in February with Chuck Prophet and I regret that I didn't go but I did hear about it very close to show time.  I went over to youtube to see if there was any Aimme Mann stuff there. I came across a clip from when Aimee appeared on Buffy the Vampire Slayer which was a show I really liked. Aimee and Buffy together, that's a slam dunk, so here it is. Be warned, this clip contains both singing and vampires, viewer discretion is advised. I expect it won't last too long because I'm sure it wasn't posted with permission.

We  (the Argonotes) had originally planned on having our final tailgate party of the year yesterday at the Argonauts final regular season game. We decided the scrub the plan when the November in October weather we have been having recently made it look at if we would be eating our hamburgers in the rain. I decided that I would take down my Coleman stove and brew up some hot chocolate. My plan almost failed when my wife told me she had thrown out our kettle. Off to the dollar store i went, no suitable kettle available. Then it was off to Walmart. I decided to splurge and instead of buying the $7.50 painted kettle I went for the shiny metal kettle which I found more esthetically pleasing than the brushed metal look. I put a small table in the trunk of the car to put the stove on and at the last minute decided to fill our large stainless steel stock pot with water too. A quick aside, don't put a Coleman stove on top of a plastic table. A few weeks ago when we had a hotdog and corn roast/boil fundraiser for the Baden Powell scouting group where I am a leader and managed to have the stove sink an inch or two into the table top in the three hours we had it going, oops.

When we arrived at the parking lot where the Argonotes usually meet the lot was too full for us to park there. Not necessarily a bad thing as they had decided to charge $25 to park in that particular lot. We instead parked next door at Simcoe Place for $10. This meant that instead of opening the trunk, taking out the stuff and setting it up beside the car we had to schlep in all up the stairs and across the street. At least the $15 I saved for parking helped cover the cost of the naphtha fuel which now costs over $11 a can instead of the $8 it used to cost. For some reason parking was very tight and we ended up parking three levels down at the very bottom level of the lot. At least we found a spot near the stairs. It was a good thing that I had two of my sons with me for the game because by the time we had distributed everything among us we were pretty loaded down. The table was left in the trunk of the car. 

There was a convenient spot in the corner of the parking lot that was relatively protected from the gale force winds that were blowing by the metal newspaper boxes that were lined up at this particular corner. We set up the stove on a level spot on the pavement and got things going. I filled the cups and my sons did the stirring. Luckily there was a Toronto Sun box that had a flat top where we could line the filled up cups.  

The hot chocolate seemed to be appreciated, I think I'll do it again for the Eastern Semi-Final next Sunday.

I'm on the search committee, was supposed to run an ad in the local paper and forgot. Now a month has passed and our interim organist is only around until the end of December. Details athttp://www.stpaulslutheranchurch.com/organist.php. If you know anyone who would be interested please pass this on to them. The paper charged us $217 for a small ad that will run in three editions over a week, I thought that was a bit excessive. Does anyone have any suggestions on where else would be a good place to advertise?

On a completely different note, we updated the sitemap on our company website almost a month ago and Google has stubbornly refused to get it and replace the cached version it has from mid-September. Maybe if I throw a reference to it in here the inscrutable Google robot will be spurred to action.

Yikes, I was hoping to write something earlier today but between updating the Argonotes website and driving my youngest back and forth to Timberwolves I just ran out of time. I decided I dash off a quick entry before I headed off to bed.


I love CBC radio but they can be so infuriating sometimes. This summer they ran a show called Socket that showcased young, inovative Canadian artists. I didn't bother to bookmark any of the links on the website because I never dreamed that when the series ended the CBC would remove the webpage. Guess what, they did. I guess they decided the 100k or so of disk space it took up would be better utilized by a video clip. The three artists that were most memorable were the ones who:

1. Asked women about their panties.
2. Took pictures of herself sitting on discarded furniture.
3. Took pictures of the grafitti in bathroom stalls and juxtaposed the graffiti with pictures of women feet and shoes taken under the partition.

Of those three I could only find on the web again the last one, her name is Jessica Bushey and you can see samples of her work here.

I must be getting old, I can't remember what I was planning to make my next rant. I was goign to rant on Yahoo video because they had decided to use a player that required Flash version 8. This was going to be tied into a rant against Adobe for not supporting Flash 8 on Linux but then I found out that Adobe was releasing a Linux version of their next Flash version and were working hard to get it to beta test at the same time as the Windows version. They almost had them released simultaneously, I've got the beta running and it is working great so far.

I could rant about the driver who can't wait for traffic to clear and turn left onto the single lane that I have to turn right onto when I come home from work but I think I already complained about them before. Impatient buggers! A pox on them all.

Internet Explorer 7 is out. Yawn. Firefox has supported tabbed browsing for over two years. I hear that the next version of Firefox will do spellchecking in browser text entry boxes like the one I am using to write this posting. Finally I'll be able to spell check these things along with the email I write using Yahoo's new email client. I can't understand why Yahoo hasn't bothered to implement spell checking, their web based email client did it so the technology isn't new to them. I know I've mentioned it before but the lack of spell checking still bothers me.

I'd really like to be able to save this thing in draft mode so I can enter something more before I post it but Yahoo hasn't added support for that either so it goes it the way it is. I promise, no rants next time.

A word of advice, I went camping at Warsaw Caves two weekends ago and we found a broken, discarded hardwood chair in the dumpster that burned with a nice hot flame. No matter how cold it is you should keep your rubber soled shoes a safe distance from the fire. My feet were toasty warm even though my shoes were damp from tramping through the woods in the rain but when one shoe started smoking I realized that it might be a little too close to the fire. It's only slightly melted on the bottom. Good thing it was my old shoes and not the new ones. One of the hiking trails at Warsaw Caves crosses what they call  a limestone plain. It was amazing how the trees managed to take root in the cracks on what is really just a really, really big flat rock.

I generally don't watch a new TV show during it's first season. I have been disappointed in the past when I really got to like a new show only to have it cancelled. I warned my wife but she decided to show caution to the wind and watch Smith, it was cancelled after three episodes. This year I decided to break my rule decided to start watching Studio Sixty on the Sunset Strip. I really liked The West Wing and Studio Sixty if from Aaron Sorkin who also created The West Wing. I wasn't disappointed, it's a great show but I have been reading that the rating have dropped in each of the three weeks it's been on the air. Evidently NBC has ordered a firm thirteen episodes.


I watched CSI:Miami for a little while when it first started but soon tired of  David Caruso's  constant intensity. Kim Delany couldn't stand it either and bailed after 10 episodes. The final straw was when Emily Procter left the show at the end of the second season. I was a fan of hers when she was on The West Wing but even she couldn't moderate the glowering Caruso enough to make the show watchable for me.


I would like to urge you to give Studio Sixty a test watch. Try watching two episodes, it may take you a while to warm up to the characters. If you are Canada and have access to a U.S. proxy server you can download the previous episode and watch it at your leisure on your PC. If not learning how to use a peer to peer program might be worth your while. If you have no other reason to watch at least tune in to see how they hide Amanda Peets rapdily expanding midriff. The wardrobe gyrations remind me of Shelley Long and Rhea Perlman on Cheers hiding behind trays and the bar during their pregnancies.


On a side note, Sting was on this week's show performing music from his new album "Songs from the Labyrinth". Very nice, give it a listen if you get a chance. The NPR website has a interview and some song samples here.