Tomato/Tomato’s John McLaggan wants to be invisible. It’s an unexpected sentiment to find in a showman, certainly from one of the forerunners in the 2014 Galaxie Rising Star competition; but it’s something that his love of music has inevitably overcome. “I’m a bit of an introvert. I guess I should have prefaced it with that. See, any other super power and people are going to want stuff from you; if you’re super-strong it’s like people are, ‘Hey, come pick up this thing for me’. If you’re super-fast it’s like ‘Hey, can you run over here and get this?’ Now invisibility…” But that was the Old John, and I’m told he has improved significantly with age, even if invisibility still has its appeal. Continue reading Tomato/Tomato Confirm That It Is Pronounced ‘Tomato’
The Saint John Stone Sculpture Symposium
The Saint John Stone Sculpting Symposium began with fire and brimstone, and massive flows of lava moving across great scathes of our fair province. Fortunately for everyone involved the last 390 million years has given things plenty of time to cool down; bystanders and artists alike have little more to be concerned about than the lingering clouds of Devonian by-product that have come to replace the usual harbour-front fog each morning. It was on the far side of one of these that I found Alison Gayton, a returning intern, finishing her lunch inside of the site’s many small tents. She offered me a cherry tomato, but the twenty seconds it had taken me to cross the lot had already filled my mouth my with a fine dust. Continue reading The Saint John Stone Sculpture Symposium
Tom Smith, Kayleigh Kristiansen & The No Fun Zone
It is July, and the annual Picaroon’s Brewer’s Bash in Fredericton is a hipster’s paradise; a sea of humanity awash in sunshine, plaid, beards, and beer, punctuated with islands of live music and performance art. No fewer than sixty-three different craft brewers from across Canada had gathered around Officer’s Square this year, each dispensing a continuous deluge of fermented malt beverage in tiny half-serving mugs. I came prepared for a marathon, but others had come expecting a mad sprint, determined to sample everything the festival had to offer. By late afternoon there were already examples of previously upright citizens staring off into the middle distance, concentrating huge efforts of will into simply placing one foot in front of the other in something like a straight line towards their next drink. Mating rituals had begun in wild and ridiculous displays. The sea had the potential to get choppy.
I had noticed the painting earlier; the artist working away across a brightly coloured canvas under the shade of a tree. It made for a pleasant enough addition to the festival atmosphere in its unobtrusive way, people were milling about it, commenting on it and I occasionally marked its progress throughout the day. But that had been during the relative innocence of daylight hours, and now that the light of the sun was fading from the day the anarchistic mentality of a Thunderdome mob was setting in. Dead-eyed drunks were everywhere, Continue reading Tom Smith, Kayleigh Kristiansen & The No Fun Zone
Phil Savage Stands Still Long Enough To Talk
Phil Savage and I are standing in a parking lot on a Tuesday evening. There’s a strong wind blowing, making it hard to hear, but I’m glad that for once this season it’s come without rain. This is the only time all summer that I’ve been able to get Phil to stand still long enough to talk, not that he’s stopped working entirely; his car is loaded down with fresh produce off his farm, and we’re occasionally interrupted by families filing in to collect their weekly veggie packs.
I’ve known Phil for years, he’s been one of my best friends for over a decade; a fact that I sometimes like to drop at parties, because Phil is honestly one of the coolest guys I know, and I like to think it makes me just that much cooler by extension. He’s also one of the hardest working people I know (which has had a negligible effect on my own work ethic, by extension); he is rarely without a healthy patina of soil, and his hands are a dull copper-brown from routinely beating the earth into submission. His days start at dawn, and often stretch on until midnight, and that’s just his summer job. Continue reading Phil Savage Stands Still Long Enough To Talk
John England Swears He’s Not a Photographer
John England is lying on my living room sofa with his feet up. He is not wearing socks, which isn’t unusual for John; I’ve only ever seen him wearing socks once, on a day I had bought him a pair. He tells me it’s a ‘Californian thing’, but I suspect it’s a ‘John thing’. The occasion, for which I’ve forewarned him is intended to be an interview, feels much more like a therapy session, but he responds to it well.
John grew up in California, and I suppose it shows; his hair is unkempt, he is nearly always sporting a five o’clock shadow, not only has he disavowed his socks, but nearly done away with shoes entirely (I have regularly seen him wearing sandals in sub-zero temperatures), he takes a laissez-faire approach to business, and not that these are in anyway a stereotype of all Californians, but it would be no stretch of the imagination to see him living in some beach-side commune. For all that his talent and skill are undeniable. Continue reading John England Swears He’s Not a Photographer