It’s hard to make a living in the arts…

… and apparently it’s really hard in PEI, where the government is struggling to find ways to keep its artists at home. I’d love to live in PEI, but making it on $16,000 would be tough.

The province recently undertook a survey designed to drum up interest in building a new post-secondary arts program. The results of that survey put the situation in stark relief. The study, issued earlier this year by the Prince Edward Island Council of the Arts, states that the average yearly earnings of the 1,960 cultural workers on the island is $15,900. Additionally, of the 460 people who currently identify themselves as artists, 25% of that workforce is under 35 years old. That number, nationally, is 37%, and the statistics present an exodus of the province’s young talent.

“A magazine with a personality”

Open Book Toronto interviews Conan Tobias, the editor of Taddle Creek. TC is one of my favourite mags, and I’m delighted to be reading with the TC crew in Vancouver on Aug. 3. Details to follow.

Naked women reading

Something something naked women reading something something….

It has to be the most provocative literary series in the world with a title like “Naked Girls Reading,” but it’s exactly as advertised. Burlesque divas remove the pasties and G-strings – those time-honoured barriers to complete nudity – and grab a book.

And it’s an all-star international lineup of naked readers who kick off the five-day, third-annual Toronto Burlesque Festival at the Gladstone Hotel Wednesday night. NGR, in fact, is the newest phenomenon of the phenomenal burlesque revival.

Seth designs new cover for Canadian Notes & Queries

Lovely. See also the Seth CNQ comic.

“At first I wasn’t sure,” writes Seth in an e-mail to The Afterword. “It’s a lot of work to redesign a magazine and I was pretty busy. But it was really something that sounded like a challenge. And it couldn’t have been more ‘up my alley.’ I love Canadiana of all sorts and I particularly loved the absolutely stiffness and dullness of the magazine’s title – I mean, you just couldn’t have a more quintessentially Canadian masthead title than Canadian Notes and Queries. If you made it up, no one would believe it.  In a way, the name of the magazine hides the fact that it is a very smart and entertaining read – not stuffy at all. I figured I could do something amusing but elegant with the magazine to draw attention to that fact – perhaps  poke some fun at it’s purcieved stuffiness while at the same time pointing out what a marvelous magazine of criticism it is by giving the interior a look of class and austerity, but still showing off some charm and sense of humour about the whole thing. “

Heading north for a cultural gold rush

Kevin Chong profiles the “self-contained arts settlement” of Dawson City.

For an artist, Dawson presents a tantalizing alternative to the shopworn dream of moving to New York: the town’s 1,300 or so residents have come here not to make it, but to pursue their creative projects without critical interference, pocketing enough cash working in local industries to do so in some material comfort (Wiegers, for her part, works in tourism). Home to a visual arts school, the Berton House Writers’ Retreat, and likely more live music venues and art galleries per capita than any place in the country, Dawson is a self-contained arts settlement. It isn’t a place where artists strike gold with their art, but it does encourage experimentation and the headlong pursuit of creative visions, for better or worse.

Previously:

• “I’ll give you a bottle of whisky and an outhouse truck”

“I don’t feel the need to pull punches or spare companies or people”

Torontoist interviews George Murray, the deadly wit behind Bookninja. Of particular note: the performance aspect of Bookninja, for those who don’t seem to get it.

The character I play is a combination of a cynical bookseller, sassy publicist, beleaguered editor, and depressed author. It’s a caricature of the industry that hits all the stereotypes and neurotic high and low points in delivering the news as a sort of textual stand-up comedy. News item, sassy/funny comment, next news item. It’s been a pretty successful strategy so far. I’ve had some hate mail here and there from people who didn’t dig the vibe or were tone deaf enough to not get the jokes, but it’s a big internet, so I’ve politely (mostly) pointed them toward other venues.

Did Banksy tag Toronto?

Toronto websites were all abuzz today with the possibility that new street art in the city was created by famous graffiti artist Banksy. The Post and Torontoist both have stories and images. They may be the only places you see them, as at least one of them has apparently already been painted over. This one is my favourite.

RM Vaughan launches Globe column

RM Vaughan is writing about the visual arts for the Globe and Mail. Excellent. Now send him on the road to cover all the big Canadian cities.

Calgary—a cultural centre?

Man, I have to visit more.

With a budget of $3.75 million, Calgary Arts Development funds about 150 arts organizations annually and small wonder. A recent study put Calgary at the top among Canadian cities in per capita consumer spending on culture.

The city benefits as well from a newish provincial arts policy, Spirit of Alberta, reversing a western Canadian belt-tightening trend in provincial arts support that continues to affect the cities of neighbouring British Columbia.

“I need women who remind me I’m a woman”

Julie Wilson takes the Proust Questionnaire.

“I’m trying to write a book that would last forever”

The Globe and Mail checks in with super villain poet Christian Bok about his ongoing efforts to insert poetry into the genetic material of bacteria — and teach them to create their own poetry. Some of us blog, others create new forms of life whose very soul is poetry….

Bök’s original inspiration was an experiment in which U.S. scientists translated song lyrics into genetic code and implanted them in various bacteria, retrieving them intact after several generations of reproduction. An article by physicist Paul Davies speculating about the use of such bugs as space travellers sealed the deal.

“We could image a civilization encoding information in genetic sequences that could be incorporated into spores and viruses,” the poet says, describing Davies’s idea. “And these spores and viruses would be transmitted into the interstellar void and survive and adapt to the various environments they encounter. And just sit and wait for a smart enough civilization to build computers fast enough to discover these messages and decipher them.”

Eureka. “I thought, Why wait? Why not be that civilization?”

The baby is napping roundup

Ssssshhhhhhhh….

• Jessica Grant wins Amazon.ca First Novel Award
• rob mclennan interviews Brian Joseph Davis
• Some reflections on Peter Watts not going to jail from David Nickle and Madeline Ashby
• Toronto Poetry Vendors launch (warning: poetry is bad for your health bank account)

Douglas Coupland meets the Penguin

No, it’s not the latest superhero movie. It’s Coupland’s homage to Penguin book covers. Read the Post story and then go make your own cover!

B.C. government slashes the arts

But B.C. municipalities are increasingly getting behind the arts.

Do we need Canadian content regulations online?

The Heritage Committee meets with Google to address the question of whether the existing CanCon rules should be ported to the Internet. I’ve argued before that funding new media programs is a fine idea, but that it’s not necessary — and perhaps even senseless — to impose CanCon regulations onto the Internet, where there’s always room for Canadian artists. Just look at the success of Canadian musicians in using the web as a PR/distribution/social networking tool.

For decades, Canadian content rules have controlled what programs air on television during prime time and what songs are heard on the radio. Those rules no longer apply to Canadians who increasingly go the web for music and video.

Google’s point man for Canadian policy, Jacob Glick, told MPs that while those measures are needed, Ottawa should not attempt to “roll back the clock” by regulating Canadian content online.

Help Geist help culture

Geist Magazine is asking for donations to the Geist Writers and Artists Fund, which will help develop new works by Canadian writers and artists. The fund builds on Olympics-related grants that allowed Geist to commission works such as Land’s End and Memory and the Valley.

The Geist Writers and Artists Fund will give Geist the wherewithal to expand its commissioning program and to continue to develop major innovative work by writers and artists from all over the country. By providing them with enough time and money to undertake in-depth projects, we can enrich their new creative work as well as readers’ experience of fiction and non-fiction, made in Canada.

Here’s what you can do to help:

To boot up the Geist Writers and Artists Fund, we ask that you donate $20—one dollar for each year of Geist, or any amount you like—to the next generation of smart, accessible Canadian creative work. Our goal this year is to raise $10,000, which will go a long way toward commissioning three major works. Every cent of your donation will go directly to writers and artists, and if $20 doesn’t work for you, any amount is welcome.

On becoming a fledgling printer

Paul Vermeersch talks to Chris Banks about starting up a chapbook press. This is as much a labour of love as writing the poems!

PV: For the layperson, can you define some the things we’re talking about: letterpress, broadsides?

CB: Letterpress simply means the process and equipment used to print text from type. As for a broadside, a broadside is any sheet of paper printed on one side, or both sides and folded. I’m not sure if what I’m doing fits the traditional definition of letterpress since I’m printing digital type on photopolymer plates. I use a boxcar base which is a type-high piece of aluminum that locks up in the chase, or frame that usually holds the type, and the photopolymer plate then sticks to this base. I like photopolymer plates because they ink well and you are not restricted to what fonts or sizes of metal type you possess. To be honest, metal type needs a lot of storage which I do not have either. Photopolymer plates are cost-effective and eliminate the necessity of hand-setting. As for the rest of the printing process, it is strictly traditional methods.

Ken Babstock on reviewing

Ken Babstock is the latest writer to talk about the act/theory/practice/challenge of reviewing over at Lemon Hound.

At a basic, functional level, a review (referring here to Newspaper Books sections and the like) is meant to shine a light on the simple fact of a book’s existence. Saying to a reader, Look, this has arrived, it has A, B, C, and D, attributes and more or less steers clear of X, Y, and Z. But also and simultaneously, this functionalist’s goal can be achieved through more inventive, more aestheticized moves. Otherwise why have a human do the job? I’m sure there’s a program that could adequately categorize, slot, offer descriptives, quote, etc.

“We would not be able to buy Voice of Fire today”

The Walrus on the National Gallery’s controversial acquisition of Voice of Fire, and how it’s since become “as much a part of the crazy quilt of Canadian culture as the work of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven or Paul-émile Borduas and the Automatistes.”

At $1.76 million, it was the most expensive painting the National Gallery had ever bought. And while it had been on loan to the museum for nearly two years, the announcement of the purchase on March 7, 1990, set off the most intense and fractious debate over visual art the country had ever seen.

Unlike other art controversies of the period — Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in the United States the year before, or Jana Sterbak’s Flesh Dress in Ottawa the year after — this one wasn’t about the scabrous, the scatological, or the profane. Voice of Fire was simply three towering bands of colour: pure, extreme abstraction. And in Canada, anyway, Newman’s critical role in mid-twentieth-century art history was moot; for many Canadians, Voice of Fire was akin to curatorial snake oil. Something that simple, at that price, and by an American? Did it belong in our National Gallery?

Hard Core Logo 2 now filming

Arsenalia reports the show has begun in Saskatchewan.