LONDON, ONTARIO – In this excerpt from Three Artists: Kurelek, Chambers & Curnoe (Elmwood Press, 2016) Herman Goodden recounts London artist Jack Chambers’ first encounter with the Old World.  As one of very few Canadian artists of his generation who undertook the full regimen of classical training, the 22 year-old Chambers was looking to Europe for nothing less than a total reorientation of his perceptual habits and skills. But before he was truly ready to commit to that process, the ever proud and gnarly artist had to find some way to make clear that while he was indeed submitting to the Old World’s authority in these matters, he would paradoxically do so under his own terms.

LONDON, ONTARIO – In a tip of the hat to the Forest City Film Festival which is underway (October 17 – 24, 2020) like so much else in this dispiriting year in virtual format only, I’ve gone rooting through the tickle trunk in search of two articles I wrote about the late, great London filmmaker, Chris Doty (1966–2006).

LONDON, ONTARIO – We’ve been allowed back into our churches – at one third of their old capacity – for the last three and a half months. This is almost precisely the same amount of time as we were locked out of those churches when our civic leaders determined back in mid-March that the best way to cope with the Chinese Batflu pandemic was to persuade everybody but grocery store personnel and truck drivers to hide under their beds until we ‘flattened the curve’. For a Church which is largely defined and animated by the multiform idea of “presence” (Christ came for us and it is our obligation and privilege to turn out for Him) being forced to sit out the holiest season of Easter this spring was a desolating experience. 

LONDON, ONTARIO – Chess is probably the only board game of sufficient pedigree and complexity to lend a kind of cachet to anyone who plays it well. “Oh, he’s a bright one,” people think for a few minutes when they perceive one’s mastery at a game whose appeal is so abstract that few are genuinely drawn to it. But then those same people pick up on the social obtuseness which chess masters so frequently exhibit and the lustre of that wizardry is lost on all but other similarly afflicted geeks. 
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