Okay, I give up.  Both [[Oliver]] and my [[mother]] have expressed discontent with FD Helwoodica, so I’ve swapped it out in favour of a more traditional Helvetica — i.e. one not scanned from woodcut prints.

The other night I found myself on the couch with [[Oliver]] around bedtime needing something to read as a bedtime story (the heat and humidity sapped my ability to make up another original “Yarky the Yak” story). I found my iPod Touch within arm’s reach — and important criterion — and fired up the Stanza e-book application, poked around for a while and finally ended up downloading the Project Gutenberg version of Anne of Green Gables. Two minutes later we were learning about that busybody Mrs. Rachel Lynde.

Having lived in Prince Edward Island for 16 years, I’ve had a significant exposure to the Annedustry (a term I believe I have just coined).

It’s difficult to avoid. I live 500m from Anne’s nightly musical rampage.  I used to work for the Anne of Green Gables Store as a product developer (my great accomplishment was developing a line of Anne-themed jams and jellies). I wrote the original business plan for what later became Avonlea Village. I used to advise the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority on domain name issues. I’m the president of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust, which has a missing of preserving the heritage landscapes the inspired L.M. Montgomery in the first place. Heck, in grade 3 at Balaclava School in Ontario I was in the chorus of the school’s go at the musical.

Me and Anne, in other words, we’re pretty tight.

And yet, in all those years, I’d never actually sat down to read the book.  Until this week. And you know what? It’s pretty good.

Of course we’re only two chapters in — last night at 11:00 p.m. Oliver couldn’t sleep and so I pulled Matthew Cuthbert is surprised out of my pocked to calm him down — but Montgomery obviously has a way with the language, and Prince Edward Island does come off looking pretty good:

They had driven over the crest of a hill. Below them was a pond, looking almost like a river so long and winding was it. A bridge spanned it midway and from there to its lower end, where an amber-hued belt of sand-hills shut it in from the dark blue gulf beyond, the water was a glory of many shifting hues — the most spiritual shadings of crocus and rose and ethereal green, with other elusive tintings for which no name has ever been found. Above the bridge the pond ran up into fringing groves of fir and maple and lay all darkly translucent in their wavering shadows. Here and there a wild plum leaned out from the bank like a white-clad girl tip-toeing to her own reflection. From the marsh at the head of the pond came the clear, mournfully-sweet chorus of the frogs. There was a little gray house peering around a white apple orchard on a slope beyond and, although it was not yet quite dark, a light was shining from one of its windows.

It’s easy to be snide about Anne and the narrow lens through which an Anne-centred tourism industry casts Prince Edward Island. But it’s important, I’m learning, not to cast out everything Anne as kitsch either.

A tip from friend-of-the-blog and longtime reader Valerie: there’s an outfit in Morell called Kingfisher Outdoors, based in the Morell Welcome Centre, that rents kayaks for use on the Morell River.  You can park your car in Morell, they’ll shuttle you up-river, and you kayak back to Morell, which takes, they say, about 2 hours.

They charge $50 per trip for a double kayak, $30 for a single kayak, and there’s a $20 shuttle fee for parties smaller than four.  They suggest calling to make a reservation the day before you want to take your trip — you can reach them at (902) 961-2080 and they’re open from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

While we’re waiting for our canoe blocks to arrive, we might just take a run out to Morell and give them a try.

Alan Holman weighs in on the renaming of the Main Stage at Confederation Centre. He makes some excellent points.

If you watch this video by Tod Maffin about the CBC’s new “integrated newsroom” in Vancouver you’ll get a good overview of the corporation’s new view of “content” as something akin to generic slop that you ladle out of the universe, pass through a magic content-massaging machine, and then distribute on multiple “platforms.”  It looks something like this:

In this model radio, television and the web are reduced to lowly status as “content delivery vehicles” and the central notion is that content is content, no matter the “platform” and the old medium-specific model of the CBC is no longer relevant.

Here’s what I think the content model for the CBC should look like:

Central to my model is the notion that there is no such thing as content before you take real life and mix it with the unique characteristics of a particular medium.  The reporting process, in other words, and most importantly the medium-specific reporting process, is what conjures this thing called “content” into being.

The simple-minded notions of radio as “television without pictures” and the web as a “newspaper without printing presses” ignores the notion that, dare I say it, the medium is the message and that the storytelling capabilities of each medium each have unique qualities.

We’ve already seen the foibles of CBC’s new cross-platform-synergy here in Prince Edward Island where on some days we end up hearing two or three re-purposed television news stories from the previous night’s [[Compass]] replayed on [[Island Morning]] verbatim but for the “back to you Bruce” handover at the end.

When, as happened earlier this week, the television news story happens to contain narration that refers to things that you need to be able to see — this week’s example saw reporter Sally Pitt referring to “the man in the black shirt” — it’s simply a glaring demonstration of a larger underlying problem: radio isn’t just “television without pictures” and demands the care, experience and skills of a radio journalist to be used to its full potential.  Running television news stories on the radio makes no more sense than running radio news stories on television.

I’m afraid that, as CBC Prince Edward Island journalists are called to do more with less — operating a 90 minute newscast without a third-larger complement of reporters, for example — we’re only going to see more of this.  And that’s too bad, especially for CBC Radio.  Telling stories on the radio is one of the things the CBC has always excelled at, and the corporation has produced some of the world’s finest radio journalists.  

If radio is to be repositioned by the CBC as “television lite” and the web is to be simply another amorphous bucket for medium-neutral content, I’m afraid what we’re going to end up with is a gelatinous mass of poorly reported “content” that is capable of truly informing absolutely no one.

[[Oliver]] and I found ourselves in downtown South Rustico on Thursday night, so it seemed pre-destined that we would stop in at Gallant’s Clover Farm and purchase tickets for last night’s Lennie Gallant Songwriters Circle at Harmony House in Hunter River.

Wow. It was a fantastic evening.

Sharing the stage with Lennie were Meaghan Blanchard, Dennis Ellsworth and Gary Gallant, and while all were a joy to listen to, it was the other Gallant who was the real stand-out for me. With a day-job as a certified organic dairy farmer, Gary Gallant has an intriguing and infectious guitar style, sings with wit and passion, and tells a good story.  Alas he is unrecorded to this point, something he promised to rectify “before the decade is out.”  If you have a chance to see him in concert, do.

Harmony House itself just keeps getting better and better: this year’s addition is a bar and lounge in the basement, hand-crafted by the multi-talented pharmacist, musician and carpenter Kris Taylor.

I received the following note from an Island media luminary earlier this week:

Just a note, I wanted to tell you the new blog design is leaving me a bit cold. Just for your info, not meant as a personal attack… :)

The “new blog design” wasn’t really a design at all, but rather a rough superstructure that came with the migration to Drupal. More scaffolding than anything else. So it seemed like high time to add a little plaster and trim.  Still a work-in-progress and everything’s subject to evolution, but it’s already, I hope, a little warmer in here.

The Koloss Regular wordmark is gone – the 1930s German aesthetic was so last year. It’s been replaced by FD Helwoodica, by Brazilian designer Felipe Dário, a face that was “made through the woodblock printing of lowercase glyphs of the Helvetica font.” The hand-hewn Brazilian aesthetic is so this year.  I was fiddling around with various renderings of the three-letters ruk when it occurred to me to just drop them into their context, and that’s how I ended up with “peter rukavina blogs”.  I may continue to tweak this, but so far it’s working for me.  There’s a new favicon to go with the new wordmark.

The other typographic banishment is Georgia, which I’ve used for almost as long as I can recall for both the headlines and body copy here.  It’s been replaced by the classics: Helvetica for headlines and sidebar copy and Times New Roman for body copy.  I fell in love with Helvetica all over again after [[Oliver Baker]] kindly sent me a copy of the movie for my birthday this year and Times New Roman just seems so darned readable compared to anything else that I couldn’t resist.

A bump-up in the amount of whitespace and line-spacing, and that’s where the design is at this morning; here’s a snapshot for the archives, as things may have changed by a week from now:

Here was the call to action:

And here was the father and son iChat that resulted:

The amazing this is that it’s true: go to Google and search for “make your own” and you can make anything. I am a proud DIY father.

I’m never one to miss a federal government open house. Perhaps it’s due to my fond memories of open houses at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters where my father worked when I was a kid. So when the signs went up earlier this summer for the 100th anniversary open house at the Experimental Farm, I made sure to note the date and plan a day around it.

[[Catherine]] is still recovering from the GST Centre open house in Summerside a decade ago – somehow she wasn’t as entranced as I was by the amazing machines that could slit open envelopes – and so it was to be a father-and-son outing (as [[Oliver]] added later: what does Catherine need with a farm open house, having grown up on one).

The Experimental Farm, while founded in Charlottetown in 1909, has been shifting its research operations to Harrington, 30 minutes out of town toward the north shore, in recent years, so the focus of the open house was not in Charlottetown but out at the satellite operation.  Although you could drive out to Harrington, Agriculture Canada also chartered double-decker buses to take people from the farm in Charlottetown out to Harrington, a rare and brilliant move that let a lot of people without cars make a trip they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise (while the double-decker buses are intriguing, they are not perhaps the least-polluting people-carrying vehicles on Island roads and I hold out hopes for the 125th anniversary that we downtowners will be transported out on pollution-free hover-chariots).

Once we got to Harrington there were myriad things to see and do. There was a free barbeque (with uncommonly tasty 100th anniversary cake), kids activities, wagon rides, a hay maze, bugs and slugs to look at, and innumerable scientific posters on the various ills that can afflict Island crops.  There were even competing costumed giant potatoes wandering about battling for the affections of the young.

Along the way I actually ended up learning a lot about the history of the Experimental Farm, aided, in no small way, by a well-crafted introductory video that was shown in Charlottetown while we waited for the bus.

Although the 100th anniversary open house only comes around once, there was promise of an every-second-year open house on a smaller scale, so be sure to look out for the signs in 2011: highly recommended.

In a profile of Nora Ephron in a recent issue of The New Yorker, Ariel Levy wrote about the challenge of writing about people you know:

Ephron’s pieces were vivid and cunning and crackling with her personality; she began an eviscerating profile of Dorothy Schiff, the publisher of the New York Post, where she had worked for a time, with the words “I feel bad about what I’m going to do here.”

While I make no claim to words of vivid crackle, and while I’ve no plans to eviscerate anyone today, I do recognize the challenge of writing inside a closed system. Like the closed system that is Prince Edward Island.

Take Patrick Ledwell for example. Here is an incomplete list of the connections I have to Patrick Ledwell:

• His sister Jane took on the job of Executive Director of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust after I held it.
• I have a painting by Jane’s partner Stephen B. MacInnis hanging on the wall of my bedroom.
• Okeedokee, a company I co-founded, once employed Patrick’s cousin Andrea Ledwell.
• Patrick’s brother Thomas Ledwell used to work at CBC Montreal with my brother [[Steve]].
• We bought our current house from realtor Paula Willis.  At one point (and maybe to this day) there was a yearly tradition that say the Willis children play the Ledwell children in a basketball game over Christmas.
• Patrick and I are both contractors on the Island Lives project for UPEI.
• Patrick works in an office about 40 feet from my own office.
• I knew and respected Patrick’s late father Frank Ledwell.

All of which I relate simply to suggest that, evisceration or no, writing a review of The New Potato-Time Review, a comedy and music show by Patrick Ledwell (who I will somewhat awkwardly refer to as “Ledwell” in what’s to come) and Tanya Davis, has implications.

That all said, let me get to the punchline: there are some great moments of comedy in the Review, and Tanya Davis was an unexpected delight, and if you want a night of high-quality entertainment that will leave you feeling good about the world, you owe it to yourself to get out to Victoria-by-the-Sea before the show closes on August 2nd.

Which is not to suggest that the show is without its rough patches.

The central conceit — old-school stand-up comic sharing the stage with a singer of pithy insightful ballads about death and belonging — is somewhat precarious.  Mostly it works, but it falls apart when comic and singer work outside their comfort zones, when the comic sings or the singer tells jokes.  I think particularly of the last sketch, an extended singalong on Island name pronunciation (Dalziel, Gaudet, Doiron, etc.) that seems more like an obligatory hat-tip to the Wayne and Shuster review format than something either is particularly passionate about.  The opening duologue, a sort of poetic back-and-forth on Island themes, suffers from the same uncomfortable feeling, especially as the styles of the two performers is so different. Imagine something like George Carlin jamming with Victoria Williams.

So it’s fine — great even — that Ledwell and Davis share the stage. Just not, perhaps, at the same time.

When they’re on their own, each is at their best when the material is closest to their gut.

For Ledwell this comes during a monologue about the joys and frustrations of growing up in a large and chaotic Island family: his glassy eyes were a testament to the sincerity of the material, and it was only here that he really broke through the fourth wall and established a true sense of himself with the audience.  For Davis it came with a temporary costume change and a monologue cum song on growing up weird on PEI.  The air was thick with things that need to be expressed more often in this insular place, and with the pierce emerged the central theme of the show (such as there is a central theme): the Island is a strange, fitful and mysterious place that can enliven and destroy, entertain and confuse, and is perhaps, in its small, isolated, interconnected way, unique in the world.

Of course the show is mostly not so, um, serious.  Mostly it’s quite funny.  And sometimes it’s roll-on-the-floor funny.

The comedy of the show is built around Ledwell’s reactions to rear-projected slides: artworks, faux PowerPoint slides, Jay Leno-style clippings from local newspapers.  The visuals are well constructed, and Ledwell’s timing is crackerjack and takes material that would just be passing funny — “Diary Bar for Sale,” “House for Sale: 14 Dump Road” — and takes it to another level.  Some of the material comes from the standard Island comedian/storyteller playbook — “here” vs. “from away”, growing up in hand-me-downs, and the like — but the approach is more contemporary than the usual “I remember old Mrs. Gallant from the Horne Cross Road…” and while it would be a stretch to say there’s anything of an “urban sensibility,” Ledwell’s comedy is pleasantly absent of an “old timey” feel.

Tanya Davis, while treading into comedy from time to time, shoulders the responsibility for the mournful part of the bill.  Or perhaps mournful is not the right word.  She does sing songs that are considerably more packed with ideas that the usual balladeer, though.  From her song Gorgeous Morning, for example, a rumination on taking a different path in life, is the lyric:

and it makes for bad digestion when you are crying onto your toast
and if that’s how breakfast goes you know you’re in for it
but i had no intentions then, go to work and come back home
my feet heavy and slow every minute of it

In the same way the Ledwell freshens the comedy tradition, Davis sings songs that shed a new and valuable light on the Prince Edward Island experience.  She is a talented singer, a capable guitar player, and has an understated stage presence that she uses to good effect.

You wouldn’t think that the counterpoint of Ledwell’s “of course they’d never heard of seat belts when we were growing up” and Davis’ songs about graveyards would work, but, somehow, it does, and the audience, which included everyone from young rockers to community stalwarts, responded well to most of it.

When so much of Prince Edward Island’s summertime theatrical entertainment is tired remixes on the Anne theme, it’s exciting to see contemporary material presented by talented and thoughtful artists, and I expect great things from both Ledwell and Davis in years to come.

The New Potato-Time Review runs through August 2nd at the Victoria Playhouse in Victoria-by-the-Sea, Prince Edward Island. I highly recommend you sample the delights of Island Chocolates and The Landmark Café before the show.