Archive for July 2008
I saw the image in the blog posting, positing the fate of one of the characters. Because we know that the story takes place at a post-apocalyptic time, and thinking this was a leaked shot from an upcoming episode, I imagined the wildflowers were those of British Columbia spring, depicting some time in the far-off post-catastrophe future. The camera would rotate about it, there’d be some slow motion fluttering of cloth, angelics and whatever.
Then I Google the file name and find this. Still, on yesterday’s walk, I thought about the wild flowers, the future, and the simplicity of the character’s supposed fate. And made the image my Desktop wallpaper.
Because of the context in which I first encountered it, the image has poetic resonance. But had I found it’s Photoshoped goodness in its original context, I wouldn’t have reason to think differently of wildflowers.
Colm Caesar (Empire, 2005)
Colm Trudeau (Trudeau, 2002)
Colm Adar (Battlestar Gallactica, 2006)
With the exception of the Tragically Hip, I have excluded Canadian musicians simply because they would exaggerate the list and because Canadian music for the most part is no more culturally specific than any other (accounting for its international success). The inclusion of the Hip here reflects their use of Canadian specific content throughout their songs. Leonard Cohen is included for his work as writer more than for his work as a musician.
This list merely tried to illustrate the groupings of artists by generation, to show the progression of cultural achievers over the last century. This illustrates that at the beginning of the 21st Century we have a legacy of artists to understand a heritage around, which wasn’t so much the case even fifty years ago. Also, any name not here is more of an oversight than a judgment (suggestions welcome).
Catharine Parr Traill 1802 – 1899
Susanna Moodie 1803 – 1885
Ozias Leduc 1864-1955
J.E.H. MacDonald 1873 – 1932 (G7)
Tom Thomson 1877-1917 (G7)
Fred Varley 1881-1969 (G7)
A.Y. Jackson 1882-1974 (G7)
Lawren Harris 1885-1970 (G7)
Arthus Lismer 1885-1969 (G7)
Frank Johnston 1888 – 1949 (G7)
Franklin Carmichael 1890 – 1945 (G7)
Harold Innis 1894-1952
Paul-Emile Borduas 1905-1960
Hugh MacLennan 1907-1990
Marshall McLuhan 1911 – 1980
Northrop Frye 1912-1991
Robertson Davies 1913-1995
George Grant 1918-1988
Pierre Trudeau 1919 – 2000
Jean-Paul Riopelle 1923-2002
Oscar Peterson 1925-2007
Margaret Laurence 1926-1987
Timothy Findley 1930 – 2002
Mordecai Richler 1931-2001
Alice Munro 1931 –
Glenn Gould 1932 – 1982
Robert Fulford 1932-
Leonard Cohen 1934 –
Garry Neil Kennedy 1935 –
Margaret Atwood 1939 –
Adrienne Clarkson 1939 –
Jorge Zontal 1944 – 1994 (General Idea)
Felix Partz 1945-1994
Jeff Wall 1946 –
AA Bronson 1946- (General Idea; Solo)
John Ralston Saul 1947 –
Rodney Graham 1949 –
David Gilmour 1949 –
George Elliott Clarke 1960 –
Douglas Coupland 1961 –
Gordon Downie 1964 – (Tragically Hip)
Paul Langlois (1964 – (Tragically Hip)
Rob Baker 1962 (Tragically Hip)
Gord Sinclair (Tragically Hip)
Johnny Fay 1966 – (Tragically Hip)
Mark Kingwell 1965-
Darren O’Donnell 1965 –
(From)
Alpha Beta Gamma
I recently decided that my current website is actually version 5.2, not 4.4. This needs some explaining.
I learned web design through books on the advice of a friend. My first book (Elizabeth Castro’s HTML 4) along with View Source cut-n-paste got me writing my first rudimentary website in 2000. It wasn’t until early 2002 (through Geocities) that I learned how to FTP. It was a proud moment when I was able for the first time to see one of my jpegs on someone else’s computer via the net.
During the summer of 2002, I built my first website. It was hosted on Geocities and later moved to Instant Coffee‘s server.
Version 1
This went through a number of body-colour variations (and upper-right hand graphics) before it ended up as it remains today.
The Way-Back Machine shows me a site on the Instant Coffee server from February 2003 which I called then Version 4, meaning it was the 4th design revision I’d gone through since the above # 1, before I scrapped all this alpha-draft code later that summer.
My site, Feb 2003
When, in August 2003, I tried to apply what I’d learned in the previous year by building my first complicated site, using Youngpup.net‘s ypSlideOutMenus code. This page (as was proper for the time) even had a splash page.
Version 2
In August 2004, I again worked on redesigning my site, to incorporate what I’d learned in the previous year. This site used CSS and my then basic understanding of PHP Switches and MySql.
Version 3
I left this site for two years, until August 2006, when I began working on another redesign. However, while I began the basic layout during August, I backburnered it until December, and made it public in January 2007, when I acquired my timothycomeau.com domain name and new server space (until this time, the previous websites had been sub-directories of my host. The 2002-2003 sites had been found at tim.instantcoffee.org or instantcoffee.org/timothy and then the 2004-2006 site had been at goodreads.ca/timothy). For this reason, I sometimes refer to this design as ‘the 2006 one’ or ‘the 2007 one’. I’ve pretty much decided from here on to think of it as ‘the 2006 one’ since that’s how I’ve come to consistently remember it.
Version 4
Last December I began to redesign the site, to once again update it according to my expanded know-how. Because I felt I’d simply redesigned the menu and updated the logo, I felt that it was a version of #4 (most recently 4.4) and hence, until recently, I’d considered it such. But, I’ve come to think of the present site as a different ‘2008 version’ and figured I should just consider it a #5. Since the .dot numbers come somewhat arbitrarily via whatever small improvements I make here in there, I figured it’s present state is about two modifications away from where it was at in January (when I considered 4.2) hence, version 5.2.
Version 5
Sometime within the next thirty years, the area of Yonge St incorporating Sam the Record Man, Dundas Square, up to Bloor, will be preserved in all its classless glory as a heritage district of late 20th Century.
