Love it #2: Bojana Stancic

If you live in Toronto, and you stroll down Ossington or Queen West on occasion, you may have glimpsed this glamorous creature. A millennial soul with a voice as smoky and mysterious as Nico, Bojana is an artist and set designer who frequently collaborates with playwright/director Alex Wolfson.

You can see her set design work in Wolfson's play "And so, the Animal Looked Back" at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), an installation running until March 12th, concluding with live performances on March 11th and 12th, each at 7:30 pm. For tickets and information call 416-736-5169.

Love it #1: Waffles

After a century of political disasters- mass movements that lead to murder and war at worst, or disappointment and disillusionment at least, the utopian impulse that lingers in the hearts of dreamers is lacking in the social fuel that turns spark to flame.

Lately, activists and academics seemed stalled in a phase of critique and deconstruction, rather than proposing and constructing, building and bettering. (There are valid reasons for this- but it's a topic for another time.)

In hopes of moving beyond the 'negative turn,' the BB blog is going to take some baby steps towards dreaming big again, by occasionally making post-it notes of pure positivity.

The first 'Love it' note, is this photo of an amazing breakfast. Yes, I confess, there are paper cups, cartons of questionable recycle-ability, but look beyond the clutter, and there is evidence of a big breakfast being shared. "Who will help me bake this bread?" Several people who passed through the kitchen in this photo would be happy to help you bake your bread. Those are veggie sausages, by the way, just in case your eyebrows were wiggling.

Don't Smash Your Teeth on the Punk Rock. We're Touring with Woodpigeon!

Woodpigeon, Mark Hamilton's prolific pop ensemble from Calgary, Alberta, have invited Betty Burke along as openers on their upcoming tour in Ontario and Quebec. Native speakers of Frenglish, we are focussing on improving our French, and polishing off new songs for the adventure.

Just add snow and trees to the photo above, and you will have a sense of what awaits us on the 401 Hwy, as we weave our way from Hamilton to Wakefield to deliver our ballads to your door. In case you are wondering about the dot in the right hand corner of the image, it's a beautiful green tractor. Oh glorious tractor, perhaps a ballad will be composed in your honour.

On February 14th, en lieu of a Betty/Woodpigeon show, I will be playing a gig with my old band The Barcelona Pavilion at the Wavelength 500 festival. This will be our first time playing together in many years, and I am pretty excited.

I broke two of my front teeth with The Barcelona Pavilion in 2003, jumping of a table with a microphone in my mouth. Don't ever do that. Smashing a guitar is a waste of money, but breaking your teeth might cost even more if you consider the price of periodic repairs over the course of your lifetime. That's not jamming econo!

The dates for the Woodpigeon and Betty Burke shows are as follows:

February 11th: Toronto, Drake Hotel
February 15th: Hamilton, The Casbah
February 16th: Sudbury, The Townhouse
February 17th: Toronto, Buddies in Bad Times (Betty only -see below)*
February 18th: Montreal, La Sala Rosa
February 19th: Quebec, Le Cercle
February 21st: Wakefield, Black Sheep Inn (near Ottawa, ON)

On the 17th Woodpigeon will be playing The Mansion in Kingston while Betty plays the opening of The Rhubarb Festival in Toronto. Woodpigeon has a few more Ontario dates lined up that Betty won't be at, but you should go see them if they hit your town.

Darger on the Battery, or "Radio Waves are Alive!"

The little girl daydreaming in this photo sits on a rock on 'The Rock,' Newfoundland. She spends her bleached days under a bakeapple tree in the Battery, overlooking The Narrows between the natural Harbour of St. John's, and the open Atlantic. Not far from her perch, Marconi received the first wireless Transatlantic signal, a repeating beep representing the letter 'S.' Marconi was told many times that it would be impossible, yet, on December 12th 1901, the signal sent from Poldhu, Cornwall in the UK reached Marconi's receiver on Signal Hill.

What strikes me about this little dreamer from the Battery is that she looks exactly like one of Henry Darger's gender defying Vivian Girls, the warrior innocents that populated his Realms of the Unreal, fighting dragons, insects, and adults in the paintings and novel found in Darger's Chicago apartment after he died. The little Vivian Girl from the Battery has left her fictional realm to guard The Narrows where the open, unknown, and undefined realm of the impossible meets the Harbour of what is known, accepted, safe, and predictable.

What we live with today is not all we will ever be stuck with. As my friend Chris Korte often says, quoting the late Zoe Lund, "That which is not yet, but which ought to be, is more real than that which merely is." Or as Herbert Marcuse put it in One Dimensional Man, "...the artistic universe is one of illusion, semblance, Schein. However, this semblance is resemblance to a reality which exists as the threat and promise of the established one." Like this Vivian Girl, and the radio signal that reached the hill behind her in 1901, the impossible things the dreamer sees eventually come to life, interrupting the course of the world we know.