Residential schools - In the name of the father
June 16, 2010 | Filed Under Black and White, General, Portraits | 2 Comments
From the 1870s to the 1970s, more than 150,000 children were taken from Aboriginal families and placed in residential schools – run by the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United churches and funded by the government of Canada. The purpose was to force the assimilation of native culture into white society by “killing the Indian in the child.” The children were deprived of their culture, educated in English and French and “converted” to Christianity. Many lived in substandard conditions and endured horrific mental, physical and sexual abuse by clergy, teachers and staff. Almost half died, some of disease, some of malnutrition, some medicated to death for resisting their captors. Others were murdered to dispose of unwanted infants and to prevent complaints by young women who were raped by their guardians. Thousands were buried in unmarked graves. The last residential school did not close until 1996. The Canadian government formally apologized in 2008. “The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the House of Commons. “The government of Canada sincerely apologizes and asks the forgiveness of the Aboriginal peoples of this country for failing them so profoundly.” Phil Fontaine, leader of the Assembly of First Nations and a survivor of the residential school system, accepted the apology on behalf of all victims. “Memories of residential schools cut like merciless knives at our souls,” Fontaine said. — Poetry - In the name of the father.
Tobie - 1996-2010
May 16, 2010 | Filed Under General, Portraits | Leave a Comment
‘Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.’ - Garrison Keillor.
A week before
May 2, 2010 | Filed Under Black and White, General, Portraits | Leave a Comment
“something careful is about to break
and it quivers like a thread … ” - Poetry: A Week Before
Angela Davis
February 2, 2010 | Filed Under General, Portraits | Leave a Comment
“Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other. “ – Angela Davis in Ottawa – 2 Feb. 2010 (Biography Wikipedia)
The Naked Cowboy of Times Square
October 19, 2009 | Filed Under Black and White, General, New York Photos, Portraits | Leave a Comment
“God, I want you to be the voice within my head…. You are the God who created every known and unknown scientist, inventor, carpenter, landscaper and doctor. You, God, are the architect of unlimited teachings. YOU God, I want so infused with me, that we are one.” – The Naked Cowboy Prayer Book.
Geoffrey Raymond, the Wall St. Artist
October 19, 2009 | Filed Under General, New York Photos, Portraits | Leave a Comment
Geoffrey Raymond has become known as “The Wall St. Artist” for painting some of the best-known villians of the global financial crisis and displaying his work on the street - outside the New York Stock Exchange. Not only does he put his work on display, he invites members of the public to vent their feelings about his subjects by writing a comment in the margins of each canvas. The result he calls “annotated art” and it seems to have caught on. Some of his works have sold for substantial amounts - up to $14,000, he says. A former public relations executive who takes the subway to Wall St. from his studio in Brooklyn, Raymond has painted figures such as Henry Paulson, former treasury secretary; Lloyd Blankfein, the grotesquely paid CEO of Goldman Sachs; Richard Fuld, disgraced head of Lehhman Brotothers and (seen here) Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve Board. “I like to give people who don’t have a voice in the process … a chance to have a voice, even if it’s 10 or 15 words on a painting,” Raymond says. He finds no shortage of subjects, and says his work will not end when the meltdown is past. “Painting heros, painting villans, you find them all on Wall St.,” he says.
John Brown - ‘the most American of us all’
August 16, 2009 | Filed Under General, Portraits | Leave a Comment
This is the statue commemorating John Brown and the legions of enslaved blacks whose cause he died for 150 years ago this year. Four million Americans – in a country of 30 million people, founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” – were slaves at the time. Brown was hanged for treason on Dec. 2, 1859, after storming the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His goal, and that of the brave men who stood with him, was to strike a blow, real and symbolic, against the sacrilege of slavery. He was deemed insane at the time but the raid is now widely seen as the spark that ignited the American Civil War. Henry David Thoreau, the great Transcendental writer who knew Brown, made an impassioned and futile plea for his life, calling him “the most American of us all.” Brown went unbowed to the gallows. His body was returned to his farm at North Elba, near Lake Placid, N.Y., and is buried there near the spot where this statue commemorates his life. The Civil War, which began to save the union and became a war against slavery, lasted from 1861 to 1865. More than 620,000 lives were lost – the bloodiest war in American history. The Emancipation Proclamation freeing all slaves was issued by President Abraham Lincoln on Jan. 1, 1863. — David Blaikie. John Brown (Abolitionist)
Remembering David Morrison Blaikie - 1909-1976
July 28, 2009 | Filed Under Black and White, General, Portraits | 1 Comment
On this day 100 years ago my father was born in Upper Stewiacke, Nova Scotia, a good man who lived a good life and died too soon at age 66. His name was David but everyone called him Morris. I remember him as he was in this photo at the family mill, his hand on the lever, the big saw shrieking through endless logs, his hat forever flecked with sawdust. He worked there 44 years and never got over its closing in 1968. He married my mother, Eva Gray, at 33 and raised four children in a house where twice that many often crowded round the dinner table, including mill hands and anyone else who happened to be there. He put two spoons of sugar in every cup of tea and went driving every Sunday, never forgetting the way sugar and gas were rationed in the war. He played the organ for the choir at church, and had a violin. Our house rang with hymn sings that I hated as child, yet would kill to hear again. He kept a weird blue apron in a box and took it with him to monthly meetings at the Masonic Hall. A Liberal, he voted Tory only once, when Bob Stanfield entered national politics in 1967, and no Liberal ran against him, and even then he did it grudgingly, mainly to portray himself in political arguments as “a man who changes his vote.” He played the stock market, rooted for Montreal, chafed at unions, wanted Sonny Liston to shut up Cassius Clay, and favoured Bob Winters over Pierre Trudeau. He hoped I’d go into the mill but wished me well in journalism and held his tongue when I cheered for the Leafs, voted NDP and helped organize The Canadian Press. He never drank and never smoked and was not overweight. He died of heart failure March 3, 1976, on a winter holiday in Bermuda. My oldest sister still lives in the house he built at the corner of the Otterbrook Road. Every time I’m home I visit his grave. I wish I was there today. (Photo by Al Eastman) — The Mill — The Village — The Ritual
Tim Hortons - the crossroads of Canada
July 26, 2009 | Filed Under General, Portraits | Leave a Comment
It is not the coffee, hot and black, that brings me back, nor the wisps of rising steam, nor the doughnuts, bagels or apple fritters. It is the comfort, or the idea of comfort, that always calls, a mirage that lurks in the crimson lights where all my country seems to pass and all its cultures flow — the lipstick women and unshaven men, the wide-eyed kids and soccer teams, John Deere hats lined up with burkas, jackets that say Coach and Leafs and Harley Davidson, a parade of all we are and all we are not in double-double time. Here on any given day we link our small and common moments in small and common acts, unaudited, unnamed. Here the clock ticks intermission, and we seek respite in the ticking. I am never quite alone at Tim Hortons, no matter how alone I am. But I do belong to a dwindling band. I knew Tim Horton. He lived long ago on Saturday nights in every town and village of Canada. I saw him wheel at the blueline, skates aglitter in black and white, and heard the voice of Foster Hewitt with him — ”He shoots, he scores!” And that too brings me back again. - David Blaikie. The Story of Tim Hortons
Jack Kerouac - ‘Only a jolly storyteller’
July 8, 2009 | Filed Under General, Portraits | Leave a Comment
Lowell, Mass. – I came to Edson Cemetery this morning, a brooding day of thunder skies, and trees dripping on the shining grass, and I found the grave of Jack Kerouac, flat beneath the shifting clouds, the place where Dylan sat with Ginsberg all those years ago, in 1975, when Rolling Thunder was rolling through New England, and I was young, and far away, and Ginsberg asked how Dylan knew Kerouac, and Dylan replied, “Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.” And ever since that time I have wanted to come here and look myself upon the stone that says Ti Jean, John L. Kerouac, Mar. 12, 1922 – Oct. 21, 1969, He Honored Life. This morning was that day, with traffic rustling past the Citgo station on Gorham Street, and workmen in orange clothes tearing up the asphalt beyond the iron cemetery fence, and there was a Budweiser can on one corner of the stone and a pair of wet shoes on the other, and the Third Step Prayer in wet blue ink (from Franse) that said, ”Relieve me of the bondage of self … take away my difficulties.” And the workmen moved on while I was there, and I breathed the freshness of the rain beads and said thank-you. “I have been writing my heart out all my life,” Kerouac said. “I am only a jolly storyteller and have nothing to do with politics or schemes, and my only plan is the old Chinese Way of the Tao: Avoid the Authorities.” And so he lived and so he died, and so his heart with all its aching is buried here. – David Blaikie - 8 July 2009. Writing