This week we bring you a new essay which was commissioned by the London-based online journal of visual art, Centred. You can visit them here: Like Father, Like Son | Featured Artist | Art Reviews for London and Southwestern Ontario, Canada (centred.ca)

LONDON, ONTARIO – Shortly before Christmas of 2016, the Westland Gallery in Wortley Village set up a table at the opening night of a group exhibition where I could discreetly flog copies of my just published book, Three Artists: Kurelek, Chambers & Curnoe. In the milling crowd of patrons and viewers that night, I would see artist Kevin Bice and his wife Daphne from time to time but they never came near my table. The Bices are close neighbours of mine in London West and Kevin is a great mixer and natural born leader with a real gift for activating all kinds of communal enterprise. He’d drawn me into 2008’s The River Project where I wrote up the nineteen artists’ profiles for that travelling exhibition’s catalogue and he also got me to join him in a successful campaign to persuade City Hall to impose certain measures to help conserve the architectural integrity of our neighbourhood.

LONDON, ONTARIO – The alert Hermaneutics reader will have detected that an occasional tendency to reflect in these posts on my chequered career as a high school student has spiked in a rather alarming way over the last few months. Let me explain what’s behind this “slight disturbance in my mind” as Roy Wood termed it in one of The Move’s finest hits. All of my academic reveries of late are owing to my participation once again with the committee which organizes periodic reunions for London South Collegiate Institute’s 1971 graduating class.

LONDON, ONTARIO – Incredulity laced with pity would best describe my reaction to the news earlier this month that Bill and Melinda Gates – respectively aged 65 and 56 – have decided to divorce. You've come this far together, you poor lugs. Why would you pack it in now? What with Bill being the second or third wealthiest human being on the planet, they knew that it wouldn’t be possible to quietly terminate this marriage and so the no-longer-affiliated entities  - now identifying themselves as "Melinda Gates and Bill Gates" - issued a bland joint announcement to the world press which they hoped might keep the baying jackals of gossip and innuendo at bay:

LONDON, ONTARIO – I was a little late twigging to the fact that I have been living all my life on richly storied and sacred ground. Like any child born into an even halfway decent home, I was suffused with that sense of enchantment that emanates from a loving mother and father (and, in my case, three usually goodhearted older brothers) and spills over into your first apprehensions of the larger world beyond the domestic realm. But by about the age of twelve, I started to feel that there were other kinds of nourishment and belonging that were inaccessible to me or any other denizen of the so-called ‘New World’ because our cultural roots just didn’t go deep enough. Canada just didn't have enough history.