In no way is this something the author would like to have on his face. He is not at all envious, he swears.

Friends, Romans, people who responded to my pamphlet’s promise of free pizza: I stand before you today, on this soap box, to tell you that now is the time for us to rise up. It is time for us to throw off the hairy chains of our face’s oppression. Let us break these most hirsute of shackles, and say once and for all: Movember’s reign of terror must end now. I know you must agree with me that it is a foolish idea borne out of idiocy, a show of strength that is discriminatory and divisive, and I can hear it from the sound of your growing cheers–oh, I see the pizza has arrived. That’s good.

This might also be an ideal time to remind the gathering throng of hairless revolutionaries here that my railing against this monstrous month is entirely irrelevant to the fact that if I were to, say, try to grow a moustache over a monthlong period, I would look like the drawings of every single pedophile still on the loose, and that this hypothetically made for a terrible childhood that got me very well-acquainted with my local police force.

In fact, I can say with great certainty that my intents are noble and pure, and indeed irrelevant to the few scraggly hairs you see on my upper lip and chin, the three of which I have amassed over the last decade. This purity of intent is, however, untrue of the dastardly prostate cancer lobby, the cruel-minded, hunchbacked peoples who have produced this unproductive product (my alliteration spits at them, exposing my distaste for them). Did you know that 70 Canadian men die of prostate cancer every day? SO WHAT! I shout back; after all, many more die of death every day! Where’s death’s parade? I have also heard very convincing arguments that the prostate does not in fact exist, that it is a giant conspiracy from the fruits and vegetable lobby in an unabashed strike against my friends in the trans fat-loving community, and I trust these reports–from sterling sources as the law firm “Lire, Lire, Pantson & Fyre” as well as the respected Nebraska think tank ”Notarealthinktank”–with a great deal of blind, delicious faith.

A moustachioed horse. Clearly, this is an enemy with a lot to hate.

It also has, in no way, nothing at all to do with the fact that I cannot grow a moustache or any facial hair.

I must also take umbrage, fellow soldiers-in-hairs, to the entire project’s desultory name. Nary a soul pronounces it Mo-stache, so why, in Mo-vember’s appropriation of an entire twelfth of the Roman calendar, must they insist on placing its round peg into a square hole? Why not Mo-bruary? Why not Mo-pril? Mo-y actually seems like the most logical choice.

And on behalf of all cultures everywhere, the kind of cultures that make our society so rich, let me say how culturally ignorant it is for Movember to appropriate November, a month which belongs to no one, all to their own selfish cause? Where do they get off, telling Poland that it cannot celebrate its independence day, or telling Slovenians it would be wrong to fete Rudolf Maister on his eponymous day, or telling me that I cannot watch, without moustaches dancing like sugar plums around the hairless inside of my skull, the classic 2004 drama thriller “November” starring Oscar-attendee Courtney Cox?

I wish I could grow a moustache, so badly.

What? No, I didn’t just whisper anything about wishing I had facial hair growth potential. Obviously, some of you don’t believe in the change we are purveying here. We must say no to Movember–No-vember, even! (I’ll have to write that down somewhere, for later.) Not convinced still? Well, here’s perhaps the most damning evidence I have against Movember: the word “fascism” begins with the same five letters as “fascial hair”. BOOM ROASTED. Hm? So what if I’m mispelling it, comrades? I am delivering a speech! Just take my word for it, for those Movember heathens must pay! WE WITHOUT FACIAL HAIR ARE THE 99%! LET US NOT OCCUPY UPPER LIP! SOLIDARITY!

WHY CAN’T I HAVE FACIAL HAIR AUGH I WOULD LOOK SO COOL AND–I mean, ¡Viva la revolución!

Seven years ago, I knew my future included finishing high school. Four years ago, it was making friends in an entirely unknown place, and learning at a level I wasn’t sure I could. Last year, it was to graduate from university, to keep on track in journalistic pursuits. And now, suddenly just another adrift post-grad no special from anyone else who relied on the moral high ground of set-and-attained goals, I don’t know what my future holds next week, next month, next year.

If this seems like a roundabout way to try to figure out the question I’ve been asked more than any other in the last month–”what are you still doing here?”, here being in Halifax, Nova Scotia–that’s because it is. It’s tough to explain. There are jobs in journalism in Toronto, and in some ways I know I put the carriage before the horse by signing a lease here. I had friends here, I convinced myself, and that was enough–the other option was to live at home. Those are some of the reasons, sure.

But for whatever reason, the blithe question of why I’m in Halifax is tied surprisingly into the situation with the city itself.

Halifax is vibrating in a way that it hasn’t in at least four years, maybe longer, if my understanding of its recent history is accurate. Real change is on its way–albeit almost begrudgingly–because the stakes are starting to loom large. For the first time in two decades, we have to envision a provincial economy that cannot rely on a literal bedrock of offshore oil and natural gas. Even our proposed new answers, like a tech company that was supposed to be Canada’s sweet berry answer to the Apple of the world’s eye, have shown signs of preemptive ripeness. Good thing the province never trumpeted a victory getting a customer service office to operate in Nova Scotia, and good thing that the country never invested in two million shares of the pension plan fund into it–oh, wait.

Even our arts community, an impressive but occasionally insular treasure, is putting itself out there. Local sketch comedy stars Picnicface are doing their thing on TV, and while the show is edgy, daring, unique and hilarious, it’s also, well, edgy, daring, and unique, and the reviews won’t be as unconditionally glowing as they would be in Halifax. As of this writing, the show has a 5.3 rating on IMDB; they’re hoping to woo people who couldn’t, despite the viral video success, truly care less about them in the midst of the ghosts of Kids in the Hall and SCTV. Its more surreal sketches can lag against its breakneck speed, and the problem with being so boldly cutting-edge–like those aforementioned shows were for its time–is that the razor might cut at juuuust the wrong time, so you might not succeed simply because of circumstance. And yet, the bold group wears Halifax on its collective sleeve and so we cheer them on almost blindly because in conquering our hearts, they’ve earned the heavy burden of representing us to the world. A potentially scary thought, for them and us.

So we’re at the razor’s edge, between all that, and in the competition for a federal shipbuilding contract that promises to create jobs in an industry that the province has dominated historically (and an extended deadline for a bid from land-of-milk-and-honey Ontario makes me pessimistic). If Halifax isn’t successful, then the signs will be unavoidable: the time to take comfort in things that have worked, in reliable frameworks and past glories, are over. Things are about to get uncomfortable–and that’s a good thing.

There is something safe and coy about gazing at goals and expectations, but there is derring-do in doing something when those goals, and the goals after that, have to be achieved. Addressing the future is a matter of term and perspective; change is a matter of term and stakes. And with any luck, Halifax’s future is just a matter of time. It’s been too easy for Halifax to feel comfortable in itself and do nothing with any decisiveness, any brazenness. These days, there’s a sense of anxiety that, here’s hoping, produces that ass-kicking we need, and it’s stakes we need, stakes to turn navel-gazing into very real talk about stadiums and convention centres and all-night art festivals and a real downtown and the kind of things that make a city real. For too long, Halifax hasn’t been sure of what it is–a big-feeling small town, or a small-feeling big-town–and whether it likes it or not, the time has come to decide one way or the other. If Picnicface means that Halifax’s arts community will get a closer look, regardless of whether the show succeeds, it’s only a good thing. If the city is going to be forced to really re-examine itself if shipbuilding and Blackberries both fall disastrously short, maybe that’s a good thing too–maybe it’s time for the largest city in Canada east of Montreal to figure out what it wants to be and what kind of other things it can be good at, because it’s frankly been avoiding that for too long.

And having just graduated, suddenly without the reliable things I’ve grown accustomed to for the past decade of my life–friends in an understandable context, school’s structure to lean on, something to define myself against–I’m there too. The stakes are suddenly high. I’ve felt like along the way I’ve done the right things, and yet yesterday I worked my second day back at Banana Republic–a retail job that I had already worked when I was in school. It’s not exactly the life I had dreamt for myself, or had even expected for myself, after graduation. But this is reality. And now it’s sink-or-swim, do-or-die, hyphenate-or-don’t time. It’s not easy, and it’s impossibly frightening. But something’s going to have to happen.

So yes, this is just a roundabout way of saying this: I’m here in Halifax because change is going to need to, and is about to, happen here. For both the city and me.

And it sucks.

Sure, there’s the inherent glitz and glamour of being a poet—fame, fortune, fantastically-endowed women—the same sort of perks that has marked the careers of T.S. Eliot, Homer, and Chely Wright.

And yes, I think my hatred’s partly stemmed from the fact I’m trying to make my own way as a writer. How am I supposed to match up to him? And besides, all my best poems—“Crocodile Pastry”, “Caiman Cake”, and “Lizard Soufflé”—have done nothing but earn me derisive laughs and my own endangered species cooking show.

But it didn’t help that my dad was a method writer either, a poet who took to heart the creed of “write what you know”. You know that part in Alligator Pie, “give away my furry hat, give away my shoe”? That was the coldest winter I’ve ever experienced. And see what you think of a “Garbage Delight” when you find out your father’s converted your room into a landfill while you were at a birthday party (my ninth). And then there was this little passive-aggressive number:

Not only was this the worst way to teach a five-year-old not to put string up his nose, he also took to calling me William Lyon Mackenzie King for about sixteen months. Plus, it was an omen—although I didn’t catch it at the time—for the nickname he eventually settled on for me, “Boy Who Loves His Mother Too Much And Not Me Enough”.

You’d think, too, that he’d be a great father to have around, reading the perfect bedtime stories. But instead, he read selections of Stephen King novels and early rough drafts of prospective poems that sometimes served double lives as moralizing lessons (after walking in on my parents “engaged in the act”, my father read me his latest poem, about a boy who fell into a tank of piranhas, entitled “This Is Why You Should Always Knock”). And while Uncle Stephen was a good friend of dad’s, he was always dour when he came over for dinner parties, brought boxes of chocolates he had clearly been keeping for years, and stank up the washroom.

And now, after years of being subjected to his nonsensical children’s drudgery, I am just so sick about hearing about Alligator Pie. “It’s such a big part of my childhood,” squeals one of my friends after I make the mistake of telling her that the guy who wrote it was the same guy who poetically told me to keep my elbows off the table, who taught me about the birds and the bees in iambic pentameter. It’s stuff like that, the weird cultish adoration for him, that I hate the most. Because you know what wasn’t a big part of my childhood? Dennis Lee.

His rampant drug use really impacted my life. Don’t act like you’re surprised: I mean, what kind of person follows up the serious sonnet compilation “Kingdom of Absence” with “Wiggle to the Laundromat” without being on some sort of hallucinogen? And believe you me—there wasn’t anything my dad didn’t take. Crack cocaine, heroin, saltines—if he could crush it into a fine powder and snort it, he was there. (I lost my favourite teddy bear that way.)

And on Father’s Day—that bane of my prepubescent existence—I would be instructed by my elementary school to write a poem for my dad. This would be fine, until he edited it for style and structure, and then recommended it for revision; I remember in particular him asking for a rewrite of the line “I love U Dad”, because it was both clichéd and incompatible with the poem’s greater motif of alienation, loss, and colonialism.

And for all his so-called creativity, all he did was name his characters after people in his family. By and large, I’ve managed to keep my name out of his works, though I have had to sneak into his office and rip up eleven different drafts of a poem about a boy named Adrian who consistently disappointed his parents with his choices (a selection from one: “Adrian lived, and Adrian slept/And when he couldn’t get a job, Adrian wept/But he didn’t make his bed, so his career chances dimmed/The moral of the story, kids, is don’t be like him”). But after he co-wrote the 1986 film Labyrinth, my brother Jareth the Goblin King Lee wouldn’t talk to my dad for months.

Oh well. Things could be worse, I guess. I could have Chinese parents.

Author’s Note: The author’s father, Dennis Lee, has actually worked in the Information Technologies department at Toronto Dominion Bank for the past decade. The Chinese, beardless Dennis Lee has no relation to the white, bearded poet Dennis Lee, except that both likely enjoy pie. The TD Bank-employed Dennis Lee also did not do any of the aforementioned things to his son, although he give his son a rent-one-get-one-free coupon for Blockbuster Video for his sixteenth birthday.

When Mr. Frederick C. Little’s second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse. The truth of the matter was, the baby looked very much like a mouse in every way.

And all at once, in a single moment of absolute, immediate understanding, a chill shuddered across the family members in the room—from the nervous first son George to the infertile Aunt Jill, from the mustachioed racist Uncle Edgar to the eldest of the Little clan, the matronly grandmother Steve—and they looked at each other, and then at Mr. Frederick C. Little, then back at each other, and then back at the mouse, swaddled in blanket and an umbilical cord so small that the doctor who managed to snip it off was given an immediate promotion to Minister of Health.

The heat of his family’s stares on the back of his neck, and the growing realization that wait-a-minute-he-wasn’t-a-mouse—that’s when he first started doubting that bitch Ms. Francine Little’s commitment to the marriage.

No—bitch is a strong term. He regretted thinking it immediately. His doctors had told him not to. Impossible, they all said, with the firmness of the gendarmes that had pulled a scratchy straightjacket over him in the London Asylum for the Insane; one simply cannot have become pregnant through sex with a mouse. Now get off that chair.

But nestled snugly in that pillowed five-by-five box, he considered the time nine months before Stuart’s birth when he walked into the basement den and found her wearing lingerie made of day-old Gouda.

Or that time he found her on all fours shouting at the family cat, Snowball, as she clutched what appeared to be a broken fingernail-sized condom.

Thinking back, he probably shouldn’t have just chalked that up to her menopause.

No one believed him. His friends tolerated it at first, but he started turning every conversation to the sexual potency of a mouse—“How are ya, Fred?” to which he’d retort, “I’d better if my wife’s egg didn’t accept that mouse’s sperm!”; or “What did you think of Mission Impossible, Fred?”, eliciting the reply, “It wasn’t accurate. There are less possible missions, like the physics of sex with a mouse”. So his friends abandoned him. He had to take action. So he’d win his little fights. A master carpenter, he decided that he would spite the new child. He’d earn his small victories with little indignities, he decided. Appropriate, he thought, satisfied. His favourite joke was that as Stuart aged, the family was missing an opportunity to mail him anywhere else in the world for just three cents. I’d even spend extra for first class!, he’d laugh, then hiss. He was a master carpenter, and had built a fantastic, intricate, beautiful oak crib for the new baby, but smashed it up in front of his mouse child, and supplied only four clothespins and a cigarette box to sleep in. He took in a cat as a pet in a statement so obvious and petulant that even if it was being written in a poorly premised short story, he would have trouble believing it could happen.

But it all backfired. He lost a fortune through postage catching Stuart in an envelope only to have the letter returned to sender, as he kept writing the address as “JUST ANYWHERE, MAN”. The endearing image of young Stuart in his hand-sized bed earned him a book deal and a franchise of 3-D films. And he was banned for life from Disney World after a blackout-rage beating of a man dressed in a foam Mickey Mouse costume.

But Frederick Little recovered, slowly. It took years of rehab and hours of birds-and-bees talk but doctors finally managed to convince him that his son was his own, not a basement-dwelling rodent.

So he returned home. And Stuart, to his credit, welcomed him with open arms. Stuart had grown—not physically, because he was a mouse, of course, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that yet—and had gotten himself married.

To his friend, the bird Margalo.

Frederick gritted his teeth. He was straining to maintain what he’d learned from hours of rehabilitation. But he accepted the coffee and birdseed she laid out at the table as they all caught up what had happened in the last fourteen years.

Then suddenly, Frederick lit up, with the kind of glow you get when you realize: hey, I’m a grandfather.

“Ryan!” shouted Stuart. “Come downstairs and say hello to your Pop Pop!”

Frederick was just thinking that Pop Pop might be a name he could get used to when the fluently bilingual half-octopus-half-bear slithered into the room.

ADRIAN LEE, GLOBE AND MAIL UPDATE

Published: Tuesday, April 19, 2011

The Canada Council for the Arts calls it this country’s Nobel Prize. And today, the Killam Prize recognized five more of Canada’s finest academics for their devoted work to scientific and scholastic research over their lifetime, from an oft-quoted social psychologist to a humanitarian doctor.

Winners of the $100,000 prize, rewarded for research in health sciences, engineering, humanities, natural sciences, andsocial sciences, were announced Wednesday. The prize is one of the country’s most distinguished, its limited number reserving it only for the best minds in Canada.

Past winners say the prestige of the award speaks for itself. “It’s not simply an academic prize. It recognizes work of a broad perspective, and people who’ve done that on multiple occasions,” said Dr. Philippe Gros, who won in 2009 for his work in identifying a gene that causes a common birth defect.

“It is something that researchers look up to because they just don’t give out too many. It carries this prestige that provides instant recognition amongst your peers.”

The first Killam Prizes were awarded in 1981, created by Dorothy Johnston Killam in memory of her husband, Izaak Walton Killam, one of Canada’s richest men, to “increase the scientific and scholastic attainments of Canadians”. But more than simply rewarding pure achievement, the awards mandate that winners “should not be one-sided and a sound character should complement their intellect.”

His estate was largely donated towards the Killam Trusts, held by five Canadian universities. That estate has also funded a children’s hospital and the establishment of the Canada Council for the Arts, and over 4500 fellowships and scholarships across the country.

Ever since 2002, when the number of winners were expanded from three to five, the Killam Prizes have recognized at least one past winner of the Killam research fellowship, a two-year annual commitment of $70,000 towards research in the five aforementioned fields.

This year’s winners are:

Gilles Brassard
Quantum physics isn’t exactly the stuff of gripping dinnertime conversation. But the work of the Université de Montréal’s Gilles Brassard – described as “one of Canada’s science superstars” by British astronomer David Darling – tries to bring it into practical terms. Specifically, the BB84 protocol, which MIT listed as one of the ten emerging technologies that would change the world in 2003, is a way to ensure no one can eavesdrop when qubits of data are being transferred. Going against traditional thinking of creating a foolproof lock for sensitive data – there is no such thing – the protocol safeguards the key and lets both parties compare the results to see if any qubits are missing. A Killam research fellowship winner in 1997, Brassard has asserted that in the land of the secretive, the quantum cryptologist is king.

Michael Hayden
Scientific philosopher Thomas Browne once said that “No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.” Michael Hayden certainly does not, with a compassionate approach to science. The South Africa native had just graduated from the University of Cape Town, when he found a patient who had Huntington’s disease where he was working at. It touched off a lifetime’s research project that led scientists to now be able to identify the genes responsible for Huntington disease, Lou Gehrig disease, type 2 diabetes, and more. When he was named Canada’s researcher of the year by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research in 2008, he donated all the prize money–half a million dollars–to a charity that trains aspiring doctors. Because of his donation, that organization, Ripples of Hope, can bring international students to train at the University of British Columbia as post doctoral fellows.

Keren Rice
The work of the University of Toronto’s Keren Rice is literally defining to the field of linguistics. A Killam research fellowship winner in 1992, she has spent three decades working to write the grammar rules and dictionary of the Slavey language, an Aboriginal dialect spoken in Canada’s Northwest Territories. She has served on a committee to standardize the language’s writing system, and is the founding director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives at the University of Toronto.

Lotfollah Shafai
We live in a world where our communications are driven by antennas and satellites. And as a distinguished professor at the University of Manitoba, and the Canada Research Chair in Applied Electromagnetics, Dr. Lotfollah Shafai’s work has helped connect us better. His early work has found his projects in space, helping produce the first picoterminals on the Canadian satellite Hermes; his later work finds him focussed on Earth, specifically its bodies of water and the electromagnetic mapping of global warming’s possible effect on Arctic ice.

Mark P. Zanna
Mark Zanna, a professor of psychology at the Universityof Waterloo, is considered one of the most cited social psychologists in the world. His work is focussed on issues of the explicit and the implicit: of people who show implicit prejudices rather than explicit ones, of the implicit ways smoking in movies influences us to smoke, of whether or not Canada’s new warning labels on cigarette boxes are explicit enough.

ADRIAN LEE, FOR METRO HALIFAX

Published: June 18, 2010 12:53 a.m., Last modified: June 18, 2010 12:56 a.m.

The largest health authority in Nova Scotia has fired one employee and put another on leave after an internal probe alleges both were taking funds from Capital Health.

After a recent internal investigation, an employee in Capital Health’s business office was fired with cause for what the authority deems a financial “discrepancy” of less than $170,000. In a separate incident May 31, police were made aware of a discrepancy of less than $5,000, and a female employee in the accounts payable office was placed on administrative leave.

The funds less than $5,000 have since been recovered, and Halifax Regional Police are now investigating both cases.

“Fraud exists in all organizations,” Amanda Whitewood, Capital Health’s chief financial officer, said Thursday. “And it’s our duty and obligation to share this information and to ensure that we all appreciate the level of diligence that we need to have so that we can address these things as quickly as possible.”

Capital Health, which has upwards of 11,000 employees, spends almost $800 million annually. The amount of funds lost, however, will not affect day-to-day operations, according to Whitewood. “There’s absolutely no impact to direct patient care, today or tomorrow.”

The two employees were subject to criminal record checks, and Whitewood said they will consider using credit checks when hiring for financial operations in the future.

She also said they will try to more actively promote their checks and balances. “Part of the equation on internal discrepancies is to ensure people know that you’re watching, that the organization expects ethical, accountable behaviour,” said Whitewood.

This is the second alleged defrauding of a Nova Scotian health authority in the last year. In November 2009, an Annapolis Valley Health Authority employee was fired after he was charged with stealing more than $400,000 from the joint account of the Annapolis Valley, South Shore, and South West Nova health authorities.

‘We have a little bit more balls than them,’ Dykes team says//Eighth annual baseball game kicks off Halifax Pride Week 

ADRIAN LEE, METRO HALIFAX

Published: July 18, 2011 1:19 a.m., Last modified: July 18, 2011 1:25 a.m.

In this softball game, everyone was out to begin with.

But a big inning lifted the Dykes to a 13-10 victory in yesterday’s eighth annual Dykes vs. Divas game, which kicked off Halifax’s Pride Week.

Despite late-game heroics by a team boasting towering wigs and scraps of clothing, the wily Divas couldn’t overcome the softball experience of the underdog Dykes. The Dykes have won only once before, and are now enjoying a two-year winning streak.

With a crowd of about 500 behind them, the Divas burst out of the bullpen to take an early lead — “like an easy prom date,” cracked Diva MC Boom Boom Lubalicious — and defended it with timely fielding and questionable tackles on Dyke baserunners.

The Divas also had the benefit of an array of footwear — wedges for running, heels for walking to the plate — and performance-enhancing substances in the form of vodka coolers.

But the Dykes’ six-run seventh inning proved too much, keyed by a spectacular run by Oz, who deked away from three Divas who lost their wigs trying to prevent her from reaching home plate.

“We’re dykes. We’re used to sports, we’re used to getting dirty,” said Kelly McNeil, rubbing dirt from the diamond on her ripped jeans. She’s played softball for 20 years.

“We know how to turn a double … we know how to hit a ball.”

To their credit, the Dykes congratulated the other team after their win.

“Got to say, Divas put on an amazing game,” McNeil said. “But in the end, skills are going to dominate beauty.”

Nevertheless, in true diva form, Boom Boom is already confident the Divas will win next year.

“They have to win, you know. Eventually they have to win.”

The supergroup’s debut album comes all-dressed with hip-hop gems

ADRIAN LEE, THE COAST

Published: Sept. 1, 2011

It’s game day at Ridgemont High School. The campus buzzes as jacketed jocks hit on leggy cheerleaders; severe history teachers patrol the halls as stoners slink around the bleachers. But just when you’re getting settled in for a throwback coming-of-age classic, a funk bassline and turntable scratches twist up the familiar scene.

This is the world of Teenburger, a hip-hop supergroup featuring Halifax MC Ghettosocks, Timbuktu out of London, Ontario and local DJ Jorun Bombay. Their album Burgertime, out September 6, is a boom-bap brouhaha that takes place in the dimension where varsity football is king, where gaggles of girls-next-door giggle teasingly, those golden lawless days where the worst punishment for breaking a rule was getting detention.

“It’s not necessarily a reflection of our own experience,” says Ghettosocks, AKA Darren Pyper. “Eighties movies, they refer back to that formula: jocks and geeks, everyone’s partying, struggling with the opposite sex.”

“High school…it was just a continuous comedy of errors, really,” says Timbuktu, AKA Tim Wallace. “A lot of what we do is whatever makes us laugh, we just try to crack each other up—it’s a pretty easy process, really.”

The two share unmistakable chemistry, ignited when a DJ friend introduced them (“It was like putting two wild animals in a cage to see if they’ll co-habitate,” says Pyper). Since then, they’ve collaborated on solo albums, from Ghettosocks’ Juno-nominated Treat of the Day to Timbuktu’s Stranger Danger. And though their styles diverge, they describe themselves as lyricists first. On one track from Burgertime, they rattle off raps, finishing each other’s sentences, while maintaining the same rhyme scheme—over 24 bars.

“We sat down and wrote the whole album in a week or something, at my house,” said Pyper. “It’s effortless.”

But if the smooth-talking Socks plays Reggie to Timbuktu’s hyperactive Jughead, it’s all under the watchful eye of their own Principal Weatherbee, Jorun, an icon who has blessed the careers of Classified and Buck 65.

“He’s a mad genius,” says Wallace. “The album, the flow and the way it works, he really took what we had and ran with it. It’s my favourite thing that I’ve ever been a part of.”

Burgertime, Teenburger album release Tuesday, September 6 teenburger.bandcamp.com |droppinscience.bandcamp.com

The Sobey Art Award is one of Canada’s most important contemporary art prizes, bringing together six talented artists in the shortlist exhibition. Adrian Lee talks to three hopefuls about what the nomination means to them.

ADRIAN LEE, THE COAST

Published: Sept. 29, 2011

Halifax’s rich and diverse arts community makes it a logical host to the downright kaleidoscopic Sobey Art Award, one of Canada’s most prestigious contemporary art prizes. The shortlist features six artists under the age of 40 from five different regions, and until January, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia will show an exhibit of their works. It’s a beautifully curated show that tells a coherent narrative about where Canadian art is right now, a remarkable achievement considering the spectrum of works: from stark projected photograms to a video showcase of Toronto’s staid urban design to a port-a-potty cast in brilliant chrome steel. But this year, Halifax plays more than just host; three of the shortlisted have studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

MANON DE PAUW (Quebec): I was at home, I remember—I was doing my taxes, and my accountant was there, and when I told him, he said, “Oh, that’s great, because it’s an award, so you don’t have to declare it as an income.”

CHRISTIAN GIROUX (Ontario): That’s funny—I can’t remember what I was doing. But I dropped whatever it was and took a nice long walk to calm myself down.

ZEKE MOORES (Atlantic/Newfoundland): Even being on the list for the Sobey does impact your career very quickly. The day the longlist was announced, I got about five calls from galleries asking me if I was interested in representation.

DE PAUW: I’ve got more studio business, more people acquiring my work for private collections.

GIROUX: It does change things. It puts you in the eye of the Canadian art world, in a way like no other in our Canadian system, so that’s quite a rush.

DE PAUW: When I was doing my undergrad at Concordia sixteen years ago, I came for a summer term to study at NSCAD.

GIROUX: I graduated in the spring of ’95…I did my graduate work there.

MOORES: Did my undergrad there.

DE PAUW: I actually took my first technical video class at NSCAD, so for me to go back now to show some of my video work, it’s very important.

GIROUX: Halifax is a perfect city to be a grad student in, and I have a lot of fantastic memories, so it’s been a very lovely homecoming for me, to come back for the show.

MOORES: It shows the huge influence that NSCAD as a school has had on the contemporary arts scene. When I go somewhere to show, people automatically know I’m from NSCAD, even if they haven’t read my bio. They look at my work, and they say, “NSCAD, right?” And I say, “You got me.” I think I have that very specific NSCAD aesthetic…for me, in sculpture, that aesthetic is a sense of Canadian realism in an object-based work.

DE PAUW: Of course, everybody wants to win, but even if I don’t get the prize, it’s still an extremely positive experience, you know?

GIROUX: Just being on the Sobey shortlist constitutes a profound sense of recognition.

MOORES: The day I found out I made the longlist, I already felt like I won the award. And then when I found out I made the shortlist, I was flabbergasted. It’s…reaffirming that what I’m doing as an artist is successful, that people are responding.

Sobey Art Award exhibition, To January 8, 2012, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 1723 Hollis Street

Halifax-born, Toronto-based daydream believers return for homecoming show

ADRIAN LEE, THE COAST

Published: Sept. 21, 2011

We see the pinecone, science tells us, in seasons of change. And over the last five years, The Pinecones— the pop band formed in Halifax but now based in Toronto—have changed, too. They’ve got a new home, a new name (formerly Brent Randall & His Pinecones), and even a new band (it’s on its third lineup—Randall and Toronto’s Paul Linklater and Marshall Bureau).

So it’s not a stretch to suggest The Pinecones are appropriately named. But don’t tell that to Randall, 28, who grew up in Halifax and is the only remaining member of the original band.

“We talked about changing our name at one point, because it’s a shitty name,” he laughs. “It was either come up with a new band name and start fresh, or change it to The Pinecones…it just seemed easier.”

So while change has marked the band’s past, yearning for happy ease defines them. You can hear it in their brand of vintage psychedelia, which unapologetically pays homage to ’60s-era Brit-pop right down to the lo-fi crack of slow-spinning vinyl. It’s a labour of love, and catchy to boot. “It’s what I like to do,” says Randall. “It’s what drives me, what excites me. We don’t feel we should hide that.”

Randall says the band only changed lineups because the other option was to split up. And though the musicians are different, the spirit is the same: “I don’t have any delusions of making it big. I just want to record albums I’m happy with,” he says.

So while The Pinecones’ Thursday show at Gus’ Pub is a kind of homecoming—Randall cut his teeth on “late shows and funny nights” at Gus’ and the old Marquee—he’s not nostalgic about where he’s been. He only wants to be comfortable as he is, right now.

In St. John’s last week, he ran into an uncle he hadn’t seen since he was three years old. He told Randall he hadn’t changed: “He commented, ‘Last time I saw you, you were making up songs and singing all day.’

“So maybe that’s just who I am. I don’t know if I’ll do it forever.” A pause. “Or maybe I’ll do it forever, I guess.”