BANISHING BOREDOM
Bloggery on music, books, films, travel, wildlife and dark matters.
Horsing Around with Cowboys at the Sasquatch Music and Arts Festival
Jim Algie talks about the most representative photo he has ever taken of his home province of Alberta, which he snapped at the Sasquatch Music and Arts Festival in Alberta’s Drayton Valley in 2007. We were walking towards the main music stage and had to pass by...
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The Tribulations of the Trial by Franz Kafka
The Trial by Franz Kafka is one of those books that continues to bewilder many readers even a century after it was written. As a student and critic of existential lit and philosophy, Jim Algie makes a case for the novel’s ongoing relevance. Among the dwindling...
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Riffing on the Buzzcocks and Modern English in Mexico City
Jim Algie extols the virtues of breaking free from his maximum security comfort zone for a rocking trip to Mexico City, the biggest megalopolis in the Americas, to see the Buzzcocks and Modern English. . When Rhishja and I were doing our wedding party/honeymoon at...
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Another Farewell to Another Fine Friend
For what would have been Melanie Klimchuk’s 60th birthday this year, which was commemorated by an event in Toronto, I wrote this appreciation of her and our four decades of friendship. In the early 1980s, I was hosting a music-comedy show on the University of...
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Time’s Arrow: The Death and Rebirth of Martin Amis
Upon the passing of the noteworthy author, Martin Amis, Jim Algie recalls his favourite novel by him, Time’s Arrow, which unfolds in reverse and leads back to the Nazi death camps. That period also inspired a more recent novel called “The Zone of...
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Bidding Adieu to Gordon Lightfoot, a True Troubadour
Jim Algie salutes Gordon Lightfoot, a true Canadian titan, who wrote some of the only good songs on AM radio when I was getting into music. In the early and mid-70s, Gordon Lightfoot was this lighthouse whose vision and voice were so powerful that they illuminated...
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