Winnipeg, Canada

At Geez headquarters they’re once again dusting off the people’s pulpit with a contest of Biblical proportions.

Five years ago Geez called on readers to step up to the soapbox and deliver a sermon you’d never hear in church. Atheists, anarchists, students and farmers filled the pulpit, and their sermons were defiant, dysfunctional, ambiguous and insightful.

Now Geez is looking for the same and more… hoping to hear from closet agnostics and Bible school dropouts, uncertain intellectuals and open-minded evangelists, incendiary pacifists, unapologetic atheists and good old-fashioned preachers who have been holding back all these years.

“The Social Gospel needs a new voice, and the sermon as we know it has become cliché. So let the rappers and the ranters take the stage. Let the poets and the storytellers preach. Share your apocalyptic visions or soothe our weary souls. Teach us what scripture is really about, or why it doesn’t really matter at all. Defy our expectations, make us squirm or tell us what has been left unsaid for far too long.”

“This is the pulpit of determined impropriety, so cast out your assumptions, get up from your pew (if you haven’t left already) and lead the Geez congregation with a sermon of holy mischief in an age of fast faith.”

Deadline: September 1, 2013 | More contest details here. (Full disclosure: I’ve been an Advisor to Geez since the magazine’s formation in 2005).

Winnipeg Beach, Manitoba

So, yesterday evening Evelin and I were chatting, and we decided it would be a good time to go fishing (something neither of us has done for a few years). The local “Handi-Mart” sells fishing licenses and was still open, so within 20 minutes we were casting into the open waters of the harbor at Winnipeg Beach (strong winds had pushed lake-ice back against the western shores), so this was literally the only open water available. Well, the photos tell the rest of the story… Ev caught dinner, and we experienced a glorious spring evening in direct communion with our environment.

Photos: White Bass (yummy); happy Evelin-the-Angler; the iconic Winnipeg Beach water tower across the ice; and, a quartet of tuxedo’d Western Grebes that shared the patch of open water with us.

Winnipeg Beach, Manitoba

This is one of Ev’s recent ceramic sculptures…

“Others dream alone. This piece speaks to the greater power of collective visioning and the realization of communal imagination. Individual dreams come in many sizes—common dreams move well beyond measurement.”

—Bruce Cockburn

Vancouver, Canada

A funeral was held today on Mount Pleasant for my poet-cousin/friend Sam W. Reimer. He will not be forgotten…

Samuel Wayne Reimer was born in Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada on 26 May, 1949, the second son of John K. Reimer and Leona Ruth Reimer. Raised on “the Bible, hymns, porridge, borscht, home-baked bread, and prayer,” he discovered Shakespeare around the age of eight by means of a copy of Hamlet found in his grandmother’s basement. As he put it, “this confirmed my life-long passion for ‘the Word Over All,’ as the Beatles (John Lennon in particular) would do again a half dozen years later.”

In 1964 his family moved to Meade, Kansas, where Sam lived until 1968—“just long enough to be eligible for the Vietnam War and the draft”— an entitlement that caused him to “skip back home” to Winnipeg. Sundry jobs held him in Manitoba for a year or two (Winnipeg Supply & Fuel Company, & Canada Dry offices, etc.) before the happening zeitgeist of “tuning in, turning on, dropping out” swept him west to the BC coast (en route to San Francisco). In Vancouver, a ‘Jesus Rediscovered’ experience and a sojourn with Dave Milton at The House of Daniel would deeply influence his life-course.

Sam married Elizabeth St. John in 1970, a union that would bear a daughter, Jennifer, and a son, Dylan. A stint of writing for Maranatha Free Press in Vancouver predated a 1976 move with kids in tow to Mission, BC, then to the mountainous country of Robson Valley, with spells of work as railway section-crew and in a plywood-veneer plant. A short-lived teaching role in creative writing followed, via Fraser Valley College’s Community Education program— two complete semesters with students aged 18–80! Then it was back to the urban setting of Vancouver, a separation in 1981, and a divorce in 1984.

Since 1987, Sam lived on his own in the Ivanhoe Apartments in Vancouver, where he penned literally thousands of poems. In 2008, a collection of 200 of his works was published in the book Gray Matter Graffitti.

Sam passed away peacefully at Vancouver General Hospital in the early hours of 26 April, 2013, with family members by his side. He is survived by his daughter Jennifer (Kaleeg) Hainsworth; son Dylan (Tonya) Reimer; granddaughters Ella, Huelwen, and Bridget Hainsworth; father John K. Reimer; brothers David (Katy) Reimer and Rod (Deborah) Reimer; sisters Lucille (Jim) Pfeifer and Arvella (Mike) Lucas. Sam was predeceased by his mother Leona Reimer.

As far back as I can remember, this is the first April 20th that we’re not celebrating your birthday with you… R.I.P.

Winnipeg, Canada

Ev’s latest sculptural piece, Apertural Thaw, is part of a group show of eclectic works by Interlake artists currently on exhibit in the Winnipeg Art Gallery. The show is entitled Thaw.

We enjoyed participating in the well-attended vernisage last Friday evening. The Thaw exhibition can be viewed at the WAG until Sunday, 21 April…

EVELIN RICHTER
Apertural Thaw (framed ceramic wall piece)

apertural adverb
relating to an opening, as a hole, slit, etc.
usually circular, e.g. Optics, controlling a quantity of light

thaw verb
to abandon aloofness, reserve or hostility
to open up, become tender
to give forth warmth

“The eyes are the window to the soul.”
—Old English Proverb

Vancouver, Canada

My friend Jennifer Romita has been working on lips lately… really large lips. Jennifer is an Italian-Canadian visual artist living and on the West coast. Her work ranges from large scale paintings to digitally-created contemporary imagery, often with a focus on aspects of longing, the concept of “self,” and the human condition.

You can see more of Jennifer’s work on her website here or connect with her on Facebook here. I posted some earlier work by Jennifer back in 2011, here.

And, by the way, she takes commissions…

Eastern Ontario, Canada

Ex-pat Trinidadian landscape photographer Timothy Corbin recently captured some stunning photos of ice-laden trees on the shore of Lake Ontario (between Whitby and Oshawa)… see more on his Flickr stream here.

(source)

Winnipeg, Canada

Three years ago, the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, Manitoba Chapter held its first PechaKucha Night at the Park Theatre on Osborne Street. Thursday, 7 March 2013 will mark the 13th such event organized under the auspices of GDC — as these gigs have consistently been “standing room only” events, be sure to get there early…

For anyone not yet familiar with the concept, PechaKucha 20×20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images. Begun by several young architects 10 years ago in Tokyo, PechaKucha Nights now take place in over 500 cities around the world. Why the name PechaKucha (pronounce it Paw-Chalk‘-Ahh-Cha)? It derives from a Japanese term meaning “chatter.”

As I was perusing the PechaKucha/Winnipeg website, I saw that a talk I gave at PechaKucha Vol. 7 is featured online. Watch ‘Causes and Effects’ here. Another talk worth watching from the same night is by artist friend Diana Thorneycroft, ‘Various Bodies,’ here.

The great poster shown above is by GDC colleague Jeope Wolfe.