Issue: 2015-06-18
“Our Men’s Issue Honours Broga”
Dear Peter – My brain was obviously on hold when I read your email requesting an article for the Men’s Issue. Somehow, I got the impression you wanted a learned treatise on men’s issues. For two weeks, I Googled like a madman and slogged through mountains of books, magazines, and journals, chasing down every nuance …
I heard Theo Fleury speak at the Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre in Whitehorse last summer during the Adäka Cultural Festival, but hadn’t had a chance to read his autobiography, Playing With Fire, until recently. I finished it quickly. He writes forcefully about his addictions and the abuse and neglect that underpinned them. Much of the …
As we age do we revert to the simpler pleasures of youth? Perhaps all the way to the diaper? The symmetry of the baseball diamond and the unique strategy of this game-of-inches have inspired poets and hooligans alike. As middle age moves on, I find myself indulging more in the sport, recalling its obscure and …
It’s a cold morning. While I’m writing, the twin deer are in the yard — last year’s fawns, without their mother now. May was full of summer weather and I often had breakfast outside. Yet, a deer never walked up to me during those quiet morning times. However, on one lovely morning in May, suddenly, …
A camera obscura is an optical device, and is the prototype of the photographic camera we know today. It consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside, where it is reproduced and rotated 180 degrees. Camera obscuras …
Some people like to “hit” the gym, to “pump” iron for those “ripped” abs. See a theme, there? Yoga, on the other hand, is all about movement and breath. Fair or not, yoga has a reputation, in some circles, as an exercise for women. Jessica Read acknowledges this thinking, and then goes back to her …
Let’s talk Gurkha. No, it’s not a new language, but given all the variations it has, it very well could be. Gurkha is a brand that’s been making cigars since 1887. “Gurkha” refers to soldiers from Nepal. During British colonial occupation, the soldiers would make cigars when they weren’t engaged in battle. In recent years …
A Whitehorse friend recently told me about a useful book called The Gin and Tonic Gardener, by Janice Wells, a gardener and newspaper columnist in St. John’s, whose thesis is there is no gardening problem so large that it cannot be solved by a gin and tonic in a deck chair. Gardens, she posits, should …
This year is the 20th anniversary of the Mayo Midnight Marathon, hosted by the town’s Fly-by-Night Running Club. And potentially, it’s the end of the road for the event. There’s a joke in there somewhere, about how the marathon is on its “last legs”, or how it might be left “gasping for air”. One could …
With Father’s Day here, I’d love to get the special dads in my life some shiny trinkets as a token of my admiration. Not fishing lures, not a Leatherman, certainly not an iPhone, but something more sentimental — like jewellery. The problem is that most of the men I know don’t wear jewellery. Men who …
Paris Seymour, better known by her stage name Paris Vagabond Gypsy, is one of a kind. In the year-and-ahalf since the pirate-costumed, bass-playing, ukulele-strumming, singer-songwriter (and one-time burlesque dancer) arrived in the Yukon, she’s formed the Ukes of Hazard and is releasing her first full-length album, Mine to Creep. Born in Vancouver but raised in …
On the whole, there are two positive things about this year’s edition of NorthwesTel’s Northern British Columbia and Yukon Directory. The first is that the painting on the front cover, the dramatic “Blue Break Up” by Simon James Gilpin, is reproduced in a larger size than in previous directories. The second is that because the …
THEY DIDN’T EXPECT HIM TO WIN FIRST PRIZE BUT THEY WERE IN FOR A SURPRISE. HE CAME FOR THE BIG DOG RACE HE WASN’T EXPECTED TO GET FIRST PLACE. HE WASN’T RACING FOR THE RED LAMP THIS MUSHER WAS RACING TO BE THE CHAMP. PETER NORBERG CAME ALL THE WAY FROM TUK AND HE HAD …
I am no stranger to the all-night art festival rodeo. I’ve been to three of them, in two different cities — using all different methods of transportation. I’ve marvelled at and participated in hundreds of exhibits and meandered home in the early hours of the morning fitting in late night snacks and riverside coffees along …
In some dream world, working from home is easy. Get up early in the morning, park on the sofa, sip cup of coffee after cup of coffee, pound stories into the faithful laptop, wear wool socks and an afghan. The sun pours in the window so that it’s appreciated but not a hindrance to vision. …
Last Friday I met with David Skelton, the artistic director of Nakai Theatre, and DD Kugler, a renowned Canadian dramaturge. A dramaturge, which is an unpleasant word, functions as an advisor to a playwright. Such a person raises concerns, make suggestions, and sometimes draws thick red lines through vast swaths of dialogue. Both the above-mentioned …
