How did we manage to sink so low that we accept the late Miss Whitney Houston to be called the "greatest singer of the 20th century"? How did we manage to lose our way to have CTV open its National News several times with Miss Houston's death and subsequent funeral becoming the lead-in story as if this singer had contributed great works to mankind?

     Of course, for her fans it is a loss, though I believe she hasn't come out with a highly rated CD in ages. Which makes one question just how great this loss actually is and how much is media-driven hysteria. Nor have we heard her mentioned as having been active in alleviating the poverty of people in the United States or anywhere else in the world. What we have heard about are the sordid details of her involvement with drugs, of the sorry tale of the break-up of her marriage, and about the decline of her career.

     Just as we were given the obscene details of Michael Jackson's life by the media, which allowed the sale of his CDs to shoot up, so no doubt now Miss Houston's CD sales will also enrich her estate. Both funerals were tasteless to the extreme and not worthy of the news attention given to them. Where are our values now? Where are composer/ song writer David Foster's values? He is one of those who over-praised Houston. Is he thinking of the royalties that will come his way now that the singer has died?

     It is time we start to look at ourselves so we can see whom we elevate to lofty heights. Are entertainers really the kind of examples we want our youngsters to emulate? Surely there are more worthy individuals that should make the headlines instead of entertainers who have done little for society, but managed to get attention by constantly grabbing the headlines with drug overdoses, and drunken driving charges, bad behaviour and other obnoxious behaviours. Think Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears, Charley Sheen, Paris Hilton  etc. We have made bad behaviour a virtue, while we ignore good behaviour as being too dull for the news and not worthy of our attention.

     2011 is a year most of us will say to: "good riddance." The turmoil in the Middle East, the problems in the Euro zone and the slow recovery of the US economy, not to mention that country's nutty political situation, have all contributed to worldwide uncertainties. As far as Canadians are concerned, we have been lucky because we have a stable banking system, our economy hasn't tanked and has been rated the second best among the G7 nations.

     On a personal basis, we here at Lancette Arts Journal have had to come to terms with the loss of a valuable and most necessary member of our "family". We have not yet found a replacement for our editor, who died last July after a short, but fierce, bout with cancer . As we are a magazine that offers ad-free reviews, and so do not pay for services - the CamKohl staff excluded - rendered by writers etc. we have found an unwillingness by volunteers to take on the task. Yet, we are keeping a positive note for 2012 and are certain that by spring a replacement will have been found for Joe Camilleri.

     On the arts side, we have decided to give some space here to stories we haven't uploaded yet to the website, but which have in one form or another been covered in columns in Seniors Review.

     We liked the new Burlington Performing Arts Centre, although we have so far found that the line-up of shows is geared to shows and concerts that are of  little interest to any of us here at Lancette. This might account for the less than stellar ticket sales. Only three shows sold out completely. Since there are only just a little over 700 seats in the main theater that appears to us as being a sad record considering that Burlington has in excess of 170,000 inhabitants. We think that management had better rethink its strategy

     Our J.M. Smith has written two reviews of books of some vintage that will be posted shortly. J.M. likes mysteries and related genre and so has given us reviews that go back in time. Alidë has discovered two new authors she enjoys greatly for their entertainment as well as for their indirect informative nature. These are mystery writer Louise Penny and  Patrick Taylor, who has given us fine stories about an Irish country doctor very much in the vein of A. J. Cronin, who wrote for a different generation about a Scottish country doctor.

     Books that will also be reviewed, albeit late, are the excellent novel The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaaje, and such books as Only Time Will Tell, Half-Blood Blues, Lorna Goodison's short story collection By Love Possessed, and many more.

     There will be reviews of such audio books as The History of English Poetry, Alexander Dumas' The Black Tulip, Arthur Conan Doyle's Brigadier Gerard tales and many more. Naxos has excelled itself in the kind of audio books it has released in 2011.

     We have been amiss in uploading reviews of music CDs and of DVDs of various types. We promise that there will be plenty to read in the upcoming months.

     Out of necessity we have had to stop posting news about upcoming arts events, and we have eliminated the reviewing of children's books. Time and lack of volunteer writers has made it a must that we stick to the main groups that are now listed on our site.

     With all good wishes for a much better your to come, we say adieu to 2011 and look forward to seeing you read our website and this blog in 2012.

     It shocked to hear that the Roger Prize was handed out to The Sisters Brothers. I can think of far more deserving books to receive this prize, including the short-listed The Quiet Twin. Where were the judges here? It staggers the mind that this book was overlooked. It even more hurt to see that the same book received the Governor General's Award for Literature. If The Sisters Brothers is literature, I am flabbergasted.

     A supposed satire of the "wild" West of the USA and set in Oregon country, it is an in- your-face, cliche-ridden, crude, illogical, error-filled, badly written book that might at best be slapstick, but without the funny pauses and unexpected moments that slapstick implies. Satire it is not.

     The narrator, one of the Sisters brothers (yes, the family name is Sisters) speaks with words a backwoods, semi-illiterate hick would never know. As for research, if the painkilling drug being used in this story had existed in the 1850s, the soldiers wounded in the 1860s American Civil War would have been much happier, and so would their doctors. The sex scenes, as in even more literate works, are at best crude, at worst misogynistic.

     Slapstick might be one way to describe this book, but slapstick implies pauses and unexpected moments that lead to laughter. Satire has meaning, this book has none. Call me ignorant, if you want, but this book did not deserve any prizes, maybe even deserve to failing being picked up by a publisher. Just where, the heck, were the judges coming from to give this book so much attention?

As for the Giller Prize, Half-Blood Blues is a deserving choice. This book has everything a winner should have. Of course, I had a personal favor here, The Cat's Table, but I can't say the Half-Blood Blues is undeserving. Congratulation to the winner.

A.K.

Note: this blog entry should have been uploaded long ago. Apologies for the delay.

     Following the death of a loved-one it is normal to grieve. What one doesn't expect is how grief changes the perspective about things that appeared important before loss occurred, or maybe how grief strengthens opinions that were previously tempered by reason.

     Take this writer's view of current theater, especially director-driven theater or opera. What is being done to many works by ambitious directors and production companies stinks to high heaven. Is there really an excuse for the American Repertory Theatre's director Diane Paulus to produce a rewritten Porky and Bess? What makes the her and her writers (dialog and music) think it's alright to take a masterpiece and change it into mush? Of course, the re-write may well be driven by greed on the part of the Gershwin and Heyward estates that have authorized this new version. It's supposed to be more accessible to 21st century audiences. How sad that writing down, adding a happy ending and changing that beloved song, Summertime to a different key is better than the original. Is I have plenty of nothin' really racist and so needs a new set-up for it to be suitable for today's audience.

     Let's go back a few years to the terrible re-write of Showboat by Garth Drabinsky in Toronto before taking it south to Broadway. By giving in to local, mostly Jamaican, pressure groups he homogenized it to appease those coming from the Caribbean who had no direct connection to the history of the Broadway musical. Blacks living along the Mississippi in years preceding World War II were not the middle class that paraded along the pier in Toronto's show. Blacks then were dirt poor, just as they were in the period in which Porky and Bess is set.

     One is truly tired of directors talking down to audiences, from claiming that anyone from Shakespeare to Gershwin has to be clarified to the audience. What's wrong with the audience using its noggin to understand what the original revealed about its time and how it relates to our own?

     When it comes to art, much of what is being created by today's generation is not really art. It is propaganda in which artists claim to know better than their audience.. What gives them the right to inflict installations onto the public that cost huge sums but that are not permanent and have nothing to say to generations that will follow? While there is no opposition to self-expression or freedom of speech, one is disgusted by what is touted as art. Is a light show projected  onto a building or wall entertainment, art or is it propaganda? What makes artists think that the general public is stupid? What are the life experiences of these artists to allow them to make social commentary disguised as poor art? Since many artists are young, one has to say: "None."

     But, let's not blame the so-called artists alone. Let's blame art institutions and funding groups that want to be with it and so foster this kind of art. The same applies to those who fund bad theater, opera and music. For example, hip hop and rap are not music; their attached cultural phenomena are exploitations of a young audience that doesn't know better. Fye on so-called sociology profs who call rap art. It stinks and has fostered destructive behaviour. We only need to look at the way the young and their parents fail to know when to dress up and when to dress down. We have lost decorum and civility. Being nice is no longer an asset. Well, this writer herewith has stopped being nice - at least for the moment.

A.K.

     Death, where is thy sting? , is a phrase set firmly in our minds through biblical text as well as one of John Donne's poems. It has special meaning to this writer. Lancette Arts Journal has lost an important member of its group of workers dedicated to bringing you reviews of the arts. Well, death doth have a very potent sting, especially when we lost not only someone with whom we toiled,  but who was also my beloved husband.

     Joe was one of those rare men who loved the arts, yet worked in a very different field. He was most at home in the investment field, advising clients about stocks and bonds, and how to wisely invest hard earned money. He was not a gambler and never took chances with his clients' investments.

     By nature he was shy, yet also capable of being full of hijinks. When we met we knew very soon that we had kindred spirits. We loved opera, concert music, theater, art, and shared a never-ending love of books. While our tastes at times diverged this never caused any conflict. If anything, it enhanced our relationship because it offered us a chance to discuss the whys and wherefores of our differing tastes.

     Death's sting is particularly potent when it contains incurable cancer and robs a seemingly healthy man of life within five months of diagnosis. Joe was not a careless man. He always had his health check-ups, including the all-important PSA, yet somehow cancer bloomed somewhere within him without being seen. When it was discovered, it was too late. So, while we can do everything right, we have to admit that medicine is still as inexact a science as it was in my father's time. I can still hear him tell me over and over again that his powers as a doctor were limited by a multitude of circumstances. That hasn't changed and so I do not ask why fate chose to let the loving, kind, inquisitive, witty, determined Joe be cut down by death. But I do wish it had not been that way.

    Joe was born in Malta and came to Canada in 1957. He never looked back, returning to Malta for visits only four times, the last one in 1991. At that time he said it would be his last as he felt a stranger on that lovely island nation. Instead, he connected deeply with the Canadian spirit, infused in him by his grandfather and parents, who had lived in Canada for decades prior to WWII. In Malta, Joe grew up always knowing that the day would come when he made the return journey for his family to Canada. And so it was. Soon other members of the clan returned here, including his mother. But it was Joe's spirit of adventure, his determination that made it possible.

     Death's sting is lessened somewhat by knowing that he left behind an indomitable spirit that inspires me to carry on, and by the knowledge that he had a very positive impact in the lives of many around him. Joe, you will not be forgotten. You will live on in not only my mind, but in that of many others who knew you to be a very special man. Yet, I have to say: Your are sorely missed.