Just came across a really nice video that was filmed in late June. It was part of the Luminato Festival in Toronto, which has become one of the largest arts festivals in North America since beginning 10 years ago.
The film shows an event organized by Choir!Choir!Choir! which is a Toronto based open choir. It requires no commitment and meets twice a week in the back of a local pub. Over the years it has performed publicly in many venues with an expanded choirs made up of folks who just want to get out and sing in a communal kind of way.
The song shown here is Hallelujah from Leonard Cohen, a magnificent song that has been interpreted by many artists–I think that the late Tim Buckley’s version is extraordinary. This particular version is filmed in a decommisoned power plant with an assembled choir of 1500 people with Rufus Wainwright singing the lead.
Just a lovely version of the song and not a bad way to kick off a Tuesday morning.
I am really swamped in the studio getting work ready for my upcoming show at the West End Gallery. Too much to d0 so I wasn’t going to write anything today except maybe mention the start this morning of this year’s Tour de France, one of the great spectacles of world sport. This great bicycling event starts at Mont Saint Michel, an old abbey on a tidal island off the of coast Normandy, France. As you can see in the photo above, it’s an amazing sight, one that always stirs some mysterious emotional response within me.
Sunday morning quiet…
There’s been a huge resurgence as of late in interest in the music and life of the great Nina Simone, who died in 2003 at the age of 70. You hear her music on all sorts of movie and television soundtracks and commercials. There has been a couple of documentaries made of her life ( this includes the highly acclaimed What Happened, Miss Simone? on Netflix) and there are a number of big screen biopics in the works.
I have always been a big fan of the movies. I’ve written here in the past how I will often paint while an old movie plays in the studio, especially some of the older classics that were often based on great ideas and great dialogue. They are not distracting in most cases and it’s easy to pull thought and emotion from these films that finds its way into my work. It’s hard to not want to inject more feeling into whatever I am at work on when I listen to some of the lines from The Grapes of Wrath or so many other great films.
I showed this short video here about six years back. It’s a compilation of morphing self portraits from Vincent Van Gogh put together by Phillip Scott Johnson that I found intriguing then and now.
I was listening this morning to the song 20th Century Man from The Kinks. Released in 1971 — don’t do the math, it’s a long time ago– it is a song of a man decrying his existence in a time in which he feels he doesn’t fit. Ray Davies may have felt that he would have been more at home in the 19th century but the odd thing is that the song’s words still fit very well for someone like myself whose life consists of mostly time spent in the 20th century.
He also introduces us to the word autotelic, taken from the book, 
Well, it’s time for Sunday morning music. I don’t keep up with music as closely as I once did. My mind is occupied in different ways these days and I tend to hold on to music and artists that I know, only stepping outside my comfort zone occasionally to seek something new– at least new for me. Sometimes I just stumble across it. Such is the case with Rhiannon Giddens.
Redtree Times 