Enter the Holidays

We'll continue to be in and out of the office - so if you're looking for a gift subscription, don't despair! - people are still dropping by for magazines, cards, calendars - but this blog will go on hiatus now until we resume full time January 7th. Peace on Earth, Good Will to All Hands.

(Image: flickr.)

The Modern Creche: Lobsters Required

One of the many nice touches in Love Actually are the references to today's school Nativity play. You may remember that Emma Thompson's daughter is assigned to play a lobster, while a lovestruck Hugh Grant later helps escort a child in an octopus costume to the same theatrical event. When my daughter was in the primary school Christmas play, she was a space alien. The standard roles have truly evolved.

(Image: a flower Nativity from go.mexico.com.)

It's a Christmas moment - cue the snow!

Yesterday evening I was lucky enough to attend a party that was not only fun in itself, but was set on a perfect mid-December night of no wind, delicate falls of snow, and street after street of gorgeously decorated houses. Which reminds me - gotta get that perfect tree...

(Image: jonlasich.info.)

Bearing stress we wander afar

The no. 1 wish on many people's gift list is - less stress. By which they often mean less pressure, less rush, less expectations - even less gifts (given & received). Next time you find yourself in a long line-up pushing a cart loaded with canapes or doodads, thinking, why am I doing this? well, that might be a sign to really ask: Why are you doing this? Because you always have? Because you feel you should? Or because you really want to? Dial it back, keep it simple, keep (or create) the rituals that are meaningful to you. (And don't stress about not being able to de-stress! Just stop for a minute, have a nice latte, make at least a small pocket of peace.)

(Image: flickr.com.)

Festive Dos

Not being much of a shopper, I lucked into a nice Little Black Dress a while back - roughly 900 years back, in fashion time. The V-neck has a slight ruffle; the skirt has an extra skim of sheer material. I've worn it about a million times. it is my one and only go-to party frock. You may be more daring, or at least less boring, so here's a site chockablock with fashion advice for the Season.

(Image: littleblackdress.magzine.com)

Vintage Christmas

Christmas rituals carmelize in childhood - this would explain why I have such a hankering for a pink artificial tree, circa the '70s. One person's travesty is another's tradition I guess. Perhaps this vintage card (image: typed.com.) is something we can all consider fairly tasteful.

City of Christmas Lights

Paris being the City of Lights (they actually have a team of people who work fulltime designing and illuminating various Paris landmarks, which must be in the Top 10 coolest jobs ever) so a Paris of the Christmas Lights must be spectacular. Try these tips if you'd like to bring a little je ne sais quoi into the season.

(Image: expat-blog.com.)

Christmas Dos 'n Don'ts

There are lots of etiquette lists out there - do be polite, don't tank up on rum and eggnog and decide to tell your boss exactly what you think of him or her - but here's something you definitely shouldn't try.

(Image: imagebuilders.com.)

Walking in the Air

Here's a gorgeous piece of music, beautifully attuned to the season without being a traditional carol. And, unlike Bad Santa (which I still stand by as an appropriate and even necessary film under very specific conditions), this clip, and the film as a whole, is a classic for all.

(Image: allelectricproductions.)

Christmas Carols: some love 'em, some wish they would -

...while some people really love Christmas carols, I mean they truly really do, others find a seemingly endless loop of "Frosty" and "Silver Bells" intercut with "Blue Christmas" is enough to, well, get them in a sadly un-Christmasy frame of mind. And the thing about feeling this way is it's a social gaffe, and practically against the law, to admit that you're less then Ho-Ho-Happy this time of year. If you are feeling a bit stressed, or even just a bit blah, here's a great advice column (this runs at salon.com and is usually quite excellent).

(Image: from blogspot, a still from Bad Santa. If you're in the mood for it, it's a classic.)

NQs Delivered

We've just finished our retail run, dropping off packages of magazines all over town - Afterwords Bookstore, Auntie Crae's (the last issue sold out there!), Sweet Relic, The Rooms. It's a two-person job, with Circulation Manager Linda Jackman at the wheel, and myself hopping over snowbanks and running in and out of stores. Kind of like a series of stick-ups, only in reverse as we leave stuff.

(Image: blogspot.com.)

Heist Films

After running around like a fool on Saturday (made a batch of truffles, hit the gym, took some notes at the new exhibition at Christina Parker - you should see the new Janice Udell!) I did the best Saturday afternoon thing ever, which is watch a matinee. I saw Armored, which was not half bad at all, and may I now personally state that my admiration for Matt Dillon remains firm. One reason the film succeeds is that is a compact and competent heist film, a most enjoyable genre. Here's a take on the heist's Top 10.

(Image: wordpress.com.)

102.3 Mailout

Almost a go...

(Image: fiddlers.green.net.)

Magi, Stars

Some people have had their Christmas trees up for three weeks. When did this start? Maybe it was all those icicle lights that were all the rage about ten years ago...in any case it's pointless to argue over the rising tide of Christmas decore and they do brighten the early winter. I myself have been scouting for stars of Bethlehem, those sweet white flowers named for the resemblance to the bright star that guided the Magi. And speaking of which, for a classic take on the approaching fete, here's the O. Henry tale:

...But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

(Image: allthingschristmas.com.)

Abraham's Diary

If you missed this beautifully calibrated radio feature, which aired Monday and Tuesday on Ideas, Battery Radio aka Chris Brookes has a great site, lots of listening, lots of info.

(Image: batteryradio.com.)

New show @ CPG

The Christina Parker Gallery opens From the Studio III this Saturday, art from the gallery stable including Tom Hammick, whose work has an intriguing sweet depth, along with Grant Boland's lucent still lifes, what looks like some gorgeous nightscapes from NQ blog fav Laurie Leehane, and more. (The painting is by Tom Hammick, courtesy reeselliott.co.uk.)

Newhart's Christmas Take

One of the pleasures of the movie Elf (which stars Will Ferrell and includes a scene of James Caan earning his place on Santa's 'naughty' list because he repossesses children's books from nuns and orphans) is Bob Newhart's take on being Santa's Helper, his flawless delivery intact. Watch the film, by all means, and here's a short clip of Newhart discussing the finale of his second series.

(Image: sharetv.)

Let's (World) Par-tay

With the issue finally proofs I mean proofed it's time to party, or at least

World Party- yes, that band is on my mind, sailing their ship of fools and making it all come true.

(image: uulyrics.com.)

Tripping over my own feet

Being so intent on launching 102.3, I accidentally deleted yesterday's post, which referenced that great film All The President's Men. And you would not believe the number of typos I had to correct in that one sentence. I'm writing like Colin Firth's character talks in Love, Actually, at the end when he's trying to speak Portuguese and asking for Aurelia's hands be in a marriages. We're just so close to filing, a spellcheck here, an amended caption there...

(Image: smh.com.)

1 Month to Panic

The proper Christmas spirit today seems to require a good shot of Christmas List Frenzy (as Ray Guy instructed in one of his columns, "Buy it! We'll find out what it is when we get home.") But there is an alternative to razing superstores for the latest geegaws and whatnots. A friend told me a couple of years ago she was taking a stand against buying 'stuff' - she would no longer give anyone anything they couldn't eat or use. In this vein, lots of people like to make their gifts. (Yes, Neil, if you're reading this, please, please make sure I'm on the list for "Christmas crackles.") I often make truffles, somehow losing the recipe from one year to the next, but here's a simple one I found. When it comes to making truffles, it truly is really hard to go astray.

(Image: ehow.com.)

Goodbye Solo

Rented this film on the weekend and must recommend it. Check out the trailer if you need more persuasion!

(Image: thoughtsonfilms.files.)

Judging by Covers

We are out of the office again for a couple of days - this time to sit with the designers (fantabulous Granite Studios) and block and proof the Winter NQ. The cover is crucial, of course, and we've been leaning away from placing text there and going with a full page, sumptuous image (Michele Stamp's Irises, Clare Rice's frontispiece, and wait 'til you see what we're playing with for the new issue). Cover art is in a constant style-shift, but you may argue that it reached its zenith in a now defunct art form - the record album cover. Here are Rolling Stone's Top 100 picks - and here's song from #16New Order's, Power, Corruption and Lies, featured above.

Nothing Says Christmas Like 2 Weeks at the Craft Fair

It's planet Christmas. No, it's space station Christmas, a place of coloured lights and shiny sparkly bebobs and several different versions of Silver Bells going 24/7. Gets a bit intense - you start to even dream of the Craft Fair, it's that hard to disengage - but we had fun. Now comes the time to design #434, our Winter Issue. Cover should be going to press tomorrow, very exciting.

(Image: macys.com.)

We've Moved to the Fair

Starting tomorrow the NQ will be personing a booth at the NLCDA Christmas Craft Fair - this year it's just across the Parkway at the Arts and Culture Centre. We'll have subs, calendars and our 'Christmas bundles' on offer, the whole gear. So I'll be away from this blog until that wraps - wraps up in shiny silver paper - November 17. If you visit the fair - and who doesn't? - come and chat.

(Image: wordpress.com.)

Might As Well Be On Mars

This blog is all about the videos lately, but that can't be helped. There's just so much cool stuff out there. Like this Pukka Orchestra song, which I've always thought one of the sweetest pieces of music I ever heard on the radio - and the video, which I just now today saw for the first time, isn't half bad either. Remember, this was the era when it was expected that any decent video had to have at least one tousled-haired vixen writhing atop a sports car. Having three guys sit at a table and sing, while two other guys move furniture around behind them - that was so crazy it just might work.

(Image: wordpress.com.)

Float On - Or, On Second Thought...

Here's another video I saw at the gym - early AM MuchMoreMusic can be one kickin' soundtrack. Normally I would not be near cool enough to know who or what Modest Mouse even is, but this inventive, distressing piece sure caught my eye.

(Image: atlantamusicguide.com.)

Fashion Inspiration From the 1950s

A theatre project has me thinking of the 1950s, especially the fashions - car coats, Grace Kelly's charm bracelet and Mark Cross overnight case in Rear Window, A-lines and sack dresses, structured handbags and elbow length gloves. All stunningly worn by Suzy Parker.

(Image: bdbphotos.com.)

Betcha Never Saw Musicians With Balloon-Heads Roller Skating Before

Neither did I. Saw this arresting video this morning - the band is The Gossip, the lead singer's voice is enthralling, and the balloon heads are I guess their own artistic take on the situation.

We Have to Praise Spike Jonze Like We Should

Lucked into a matinee of Where The Wild Things Are on Sunday; I was fascinated. But then who isn't beguiled by Spike Jonze's work? Starting from that first entrancing, is-it-verite-or-is-it-something-else? video.

(Image: theinspirationroom.com)

PS - I will be working away from the office tomorrow, but should be back in this space on Wed.

Protocol - not just a Goldie Hawn movie

The Prince of Wales and Lady Cornwall will be here in two weeks, so you may want to brush up on your etiquette. Protocol for socializing with Royalty is often ancient and quite specific; lots of tips here and remember: if Royalty invites you, you must go; details of Her Majesty's or the Princess Royal's dress are never released in advance, so you'll have to chance showing up in the same rig; "Ma'am" rhymes with "jam."

(Image: rootsweb.)

A Total Eclipse of the Pathological Heart

Leonard Cohen recently pleaded with fellow musicians and fans to stop covering Hallelujah. It's hard to know what attracts an artist or group to make a cover; according to this list, it might just have to be something by The Beatles. A friend mentioned this excellent cover, the Pathological Lovers absolutely owning Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart. I don't know what's more fun - the fab band, the fact that it's apparently shot on someone's cellphone, or buddy at the end going 'Best song ever!'

(Image: facebook.)

Weather Patterns

I attended a philosophy colloquium yesterday, and before it started some audience members were attempting to explain to the visiting scholar (Dr. John Ashton, a biblical historian and "expert on Heaven", what a great job! - he's speaking tomorrow night at the INCO Centre, 7pm as well) the meaning of the term "weather bomb", aka the system that blasted us last Wednesday. He quickly grasped the concept - no doubt some Old Testament imagery came handy. Such was its force that the provincial government has been moved to back up the installation of studded tires by two weeks. Maybe we'll need to add a new saying to our weather lore: studded tires early, winter be hurlyburly.

(Image: www.sailingbreezes.com.)

A new bio-pic of Amelia Earhart opens this weekend. No doubt it will be fabulous, and let us not forget that the gallant aviatrix was in Newfoundland, not once but twice, embarking from Trepassey as the first female Trans-Atlantic passenger, and from Harbour Grace as the first woman to fly solo across the pond. Hey, I bet this means we're mentioned in the film and everything! We should all go see the film and then go to Harbour Grace. There are still people there who met and remember her.

(Image: www.heritage.nf.ca.)

Goya's Black Dog

I've posted about this painting, considered among the most beautiful in the world, but just re-encountered it while reading David Lodge's Deaf Sentence - which is hilarious and poignant, etc. The protagonist, a retired linguist*, is going deaf. Trying to deal, he studies some artists who completed some of their greatest work after they suffered profound or total deafness: Beethoven and Goya. Some see this art work, one of his Black Paintings, as Goya's response to his condition.

(Image: www.owlnet.rice.edu.)

*and there I was fresh from my semiotics course and totally up on my Austen.

Future blocking

A couple of issues ago, I managed to miss my own deadline. I knew the NQ copy had to be edited, designed and proofed by a certain time, but for some reason the calendar date never meshed with whatever time span my head was in - result; one mad rush to the printers. Which could have been avoided by a) at least getting the cover in on time, as it is the most complicated to run, or b) taking the printer's time needs into account as well as the writers', advertisers' etc. With that in mind we are now, this very day, setting the deadlines for next year. And I'm marking them out in different, theme-coded colours, one of the many useful tips found in Mark MacGuiness's right on Time Management for Creative People.

(Image: New Yorker.)

A Dogberry by Another Name Still Means a Heck of a Winter

Dogberry trees, aka rowan trees, aka the mountain ash, have a much cited role in Newfoundland weather lore: big bunches of dogberries herald a hard winter. (Dogberries also keep witches from hanging around your garden.) Who knows the truth of that, but the dogberries are just wild this season, and, after yesterday's storm, they seem to pebble much of the city sidewalks in orange-red. And - just because you can never know enough about dogberries - Quickbeam, the "hasty" Ent in Lord of the Rings, was a dogberry tree.

(Image: www.heritage.nf.ca.)

Where The Wild Things Are

Yes - it's confirmed. It opens here this weekend, the film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's wonderful novel, only three hundred-odd words long and first published in 1963 (same as me!). Great soundtrack too, with works from the likes of Arcade Fire, Dashboard Confessional.

(Image: blog.spout.com.)

The trick of writing is often to simply trick yourself into writing. Two things that can work well: 1. Tell yourself you'll try for 10 minutes, and if it's not working, you'll stop. 2. Leave the desk, take the laptop, and head to a cafe. Hava Java being the prime spot around here. No time limits (handy even if you start out believing you'll just need 10 minutes), great music, cool staff. (Also a good spot to hang out if you need your passport photo verified, as you are guaranteed to see some lawyers you know. Also works well for casting plays, short films.)

(Image: farm4static.flickr.)

Jane Campion's film Bright Star is sparkling on silver screens. It's about John Keats, considered to have published three volumes of remarkable poetry in his short life (he was only 26 when he died).

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

(Image: englishhistory.net)

A Well Respected Premier

Some time ago, CBC Radio's Ted Blades tagged a story about our fine Premier Williams with this song. For some reason it's stayed in my mind...so now I'm sharing.

(Image: www.raw-tcsd.com.)

A Recipe for Good Health

Had a low energy day last week and wondered if I might be coming down with a touch of whatever. Someone reminded me of the first step towards recovering good health - no, not a flu shot (whichever one we're supposed to get?), but the real essentials for autumn well-being: tea and ginger cookies.

(Image: www.allcookierecipes.com)

Surreal is a word that tends to get misused - "man, it was so foggy last night the city looked surreal" - but it means something quite specific. Had this in mind after previewing some works by Michael Pittman and Rhonda Pelley, whose exhibit opens at the Leyton Gallery this Friday evening. You might be tempted to call Pittman's abstract forms and arrangements surreal, but that's not quite right; it's kind of dreamy stuff, like Pelley's (they show well together); like the city in the fog, a gray dream of itself.

(Image: www.linesandcolors.com.)

Came across this Entertainment Weekly interview with actress Juliette Lewis, who appears in the very fine Whip It, which a) is Drew Barrymore's debut as a director b) has a fabulous cast c) and who doesn't wish they had spent part of their youth hip-checking a rival over a guardrail in an Austin, Texas arena? Nobody, that's who. Anyway, Ms. Lewis as always is pretty engaging, as we can see by these inspiring words:

Q: So you had to practice skating for the audition?

A: Yeah. You know, I can pick up anything really if you give me enough time and good teaching. I hadn’t put on skates in eight years. But I have the ability to fear not (emphasis added). So that was what I pushed forward.

(Image: filmofilia.)

I'm out of the office much of tomorrow - off doing research. So here's an early tip for some weekend fun.

(Image: pixages.com.)

supercook.com

Here's a site I just read about today - quite fun and really useful. If you're standing in your kitchen wondering how to create a supper from two or three seemingly disparate ingredients, you plug them in here - and following a discreet query as to whether you also have such-and-such on hand - voila!, a tasty recipe, mealtime salvaged.

(Image: ediet.com.)

What are these penguins doing? Going about their penguin business, obviously, but they could be said to be voting with their feet, making choices via movement. In this roundabout way (for some reason I just wanted to see some pictures of penguins) the NQ reminds any NL readers that today is municipal election day.

(Image: www.telegraph.co.uk.)

"Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." we know what that means. Captain Jean-Luc Picard has just placed his favourite order with the Enterprise whats-it, and is headed for a little me time. Earl Grey has a long and noble history and its distinctive flavour has even been added to ice cream. Not for everyone, perhaps, but you could always try a London Fog Latte.

(Image: breweddaily.com.)

Harbour

A new show by John Hartman opens tomorrow at the Christina Parker Gallery of Fine Art. Called Harbour, it features oil paintings, pastels and drypoint prints, in vivid colours and impasto layers, views of Salvage and New York and St. John's Harbour. If you're on the go you should check it out, and then maybe treat yourself to this, what you might call your basic 'sight for sore eyes', as well.

(Image: wikipedia.)

Curriculum Night

aka Parent's Night, aka Meet The Teacher. Wherein parents roam the school halls like gazelles, child's schedule in hand, searching helplessly for biology class as the bells ring off another missed ten-minute interval. We might not learn much about the school programs but we definitely experience what it is like to be the new kid on the scene - perhaps the most valuable lesson.

(Image: toocoolforschool.com.)

American Pie

For some reason, and for some days, I have been craving lemon meringue pie. According to food historians, people started eating lemon desserts in the Middle Ages, but the meringue defied perfection until the 17th century, while the pie we all know and love comes to us from 19th century America. If the foregoing has whetted your appetite you can try this recipe.
(And, yes, I have seen the movies of the same name; took my daughter actually and, well, we learned lots and lots of new words that day.)