Footnotes to a Conversation, March 1, 2021
Local News
The Saskatoon Heritage Society is hosting an online auction. You have until March 7 to place your bids on items ranging from books and ornaments to heritage items.
Persephone Theatre is hosting an online performance of 1 Hour Photo, “the story of Mas Yamamoto, a man whose life was swept up by the major currents of the 20th century. From growing up in a fishing village on the banks of the Fraser River, to being confined at a Japanese Canadian internment camp during World War II, to helping build the Distant Early Warning Line in the Canadian Arctic during the height of the Cold War.”
Art & Architecture
I love bright colours and am intrigued by innovative architecture, but when is it too much of a good thing? Do we really want a football stadium in the shape of a giant lotus flower? How much bright paint would you want in your home? I’m not sure I could handle Tamsin Chislett’s home: “She is standing in her kitchen, beneath a canary yellow steel beam that leaps across a pistachio-coloured ceiling towards a pale pink seating alcove, framing a deep blue sofa. Across the room, a row of pink bannisters topped with a yellow handrail cascades down a teal staircase towards a glossy cobalt blue radiator, meeting the newel post with a bright red dot.” On the other hand, I’d quite like a giant wall mural with palm trees and tropical birds.
There is so much detail in these gardens of intricately-cut white paper flowers. “My current work celebrates themes of growth and renewal,” Tara Lee Bennett explains. “I wanted to bring a breath of freshness—of life and light—not just to myself, but in my art. A reminder that lush times await us all.”
Oh, wouldn’t it be fun to stay in the former home of Agatha Christie overlooking the River Dart in Devon or Sir John Betjeman’s apartment near Smithfield Market in London!
Food
Sugar has a positive popular image (the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker Suite, Mary Poppins’ A Spoonful of Sugar), but there’s a dark side to sugar of slave labour and empire-building: “Cane is sweet sweat slain; cane is labour, unrecognised, lost and unrecovered; sugar is the sweet swollen pain of the years; sugar is slavery's immovable strain. Cane is a slaver; cane is bitter, very bitter, in the sweet blood of life.” (Faustin Charles)
Footnotes to a Conversation is a weekly Monday feature covering an assortment of topics that I’ve come across in the preceding week – books, art, travel, food, and whatever else strikes my fancy. If you share my love of nature, I suggest you also read EcoFriendly Sask that I publish in collaboration with my brother, Andrew.
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