Winnipeg, Canada

A few days ago, my colleague Adrian Shum sent me a link that is now up to a presentation I gave at Winnipeg’s first PechaKucha event, on 17 February 2010.

Organized by GDC Manitoba on a regular basis over the past three years, tonight (12 September 2013) will feature the 15th Winnipeg PechaKucha at The Park Theatre and Movie Cafe, 698 Osborne Street… doors open at 20:00 and the show begins (of course) at 20:20, seating limited to 250.

For anyone not yet familiar with the concept, PechaKucha 20×20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images. Begun by several young architects a decade ago in Tokyo, PechaKucha Nights now take place in over 500 cities around the world. Why the name PechaKucha (pronounce it Paw-Chalk‘-Ahh-Cha)? It derives from a Japanese term meaning “chatter.”

—Mahatma Gandhi

I designed this poster in 2005, as one of 24 individuals invited to contribute to Lest We Forget: Canadian Designers on War, an exhibit at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, Alberta. I first saw the ironic message on a photograph (shown below) of two women participating in a San Francisco peace rally in 2003 on the eve of the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

Today, in the lead-up to what appears likely to be another U.S.-led bombing campaign (on Syrians this time), I thought it appropriate to “unroll the poster” once again. The above poster (click on the image for a larger version) is “copyfree” so please use, share, or disseminate it however you wish…

—Mahatma Gandhi

—Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

—Martin Luther King Jr. (‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ / 16 April 1963)

—Dom Helder Camara (1909-1999)

Winnipeg, Canada

At Geez headquarters they’re once again dusting off the people’s pulpit with a contest of Biblical proportions.

Five years ago Geez called on readers to step up to the soapbox and deliver a sermon you’d never hear in church. Atheists, anarchists, students and farmers filled the pulpit, and their sermons were defiant, dysfunctional, ambiguous and insightful.

Now Geez is looking for the same and more… hoping to hear from closet agnostics and Bible school dropouts, uncertain intellectuals and open-minded evangelists, incendiary pacifists, unapologetic atheists and good old-fashioned preachers who have been holding back all these years.

“The Social Gospel needs a new voice, and the sermon as we know it has become cliché. So let the rappers and the ranters take the stage. Let the poets and the storytellers preach. Share your apocalyptic visions or soothe our weary souls. Teach us what scripture is really about, or why it doesn’t really matter at all. Defy our expectations, make us squirm or tell us what has been left unsaid for far too long.”

“This is the pulpit of determined impropriety, so cast out your assumptions, get up from your pew (if you haven’t left already) and lead the Geez congregation with a sermon of holy mischief in an age of fast faith.”

Deadline: September 1, 2013 | (Full disclosure: I’ve been an Advisor to Geez since the magazine’s formation in 2005).

Vancouver, Canada

A funeral was held today on Mount Pleasant for my poet-cousin/friend Sam W. Reimer. He will not be forgotten…

Samuel Wayne Reimer was born in Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada on 26 May, 1949, the second son of John K. Reimer and Leona Ruth Reimer. Raised on “the Bible, hymns, porridge, borscht, home-baked bread, and prayer,” he discovered Shakespeare around the age of eight by means of a copy of Hamlet found in his grandmother’s basement. As he put it, “this confirmed my life-long passion for ‘the Word Over All,’ as the Beatles (John Lennon in particular) would do again a half dozen years later.”

In 1964 his family moved to Meade, Kansas, where Sam lived until 1968—“just long enough to be eligible for the Vietnam War and the draft”— an entitlement that caused him to “skip back home” to Winnipeg. Sundry jobs held him in Manitoba for a year or two (Winnipeg Supply & Fuel Company, & Canada Dry offices, etc.) before the happening zeitgeist of “tuning in, turning on, dropping out” swept him west to the BC coast (en route to San Francisco). In Vancouver, a ‘Jesus Rediscovered’ experience and a sojourn with Dave Milton at The House of Daniel would deeply influence his life-course.

Sam married Elizabeth St. John in 1970, a union that would bear a daughter, Jennifer, and a son, Dylan. A stint of writing for Maranatha Free Press in Vancouver predated a 1976 move with kids in tow to Mission, BC, then to the mountainous country of Robson Valley, with spells of work as railway section-crew and in a plywood-veneer plant. A short-lived teaching role in creative writing followed, via Fraser Valley College’s Community Education program— two complete semesters with students aged 18–80! Then it was back to the urban setting of Vancouver, a separation in 1981, and a divorce in 1984.

Since 1987, Sam lived on his own in the Ivanhoe Apartments in Vancouver, where he penned literally thousands of poems. In 2008, a collection of 200 of his works was published in the book Gray Matter Graffitti.

Sam passed away peacefully at Vancouver General Hospital in the early hours of 26 April, 2013, with family members by his side. He is survived by his daughter Jennifer (Kaleeg) Hainsworth; son Dylan (Tonya) Reimer; granddaughters Ella, Huelwen, and Bridget Hainsworth; father John K. Reimer; brothers David (Katy) Reimer and Rod (Deborah) Reimer; sisters Lucille (Jim) Pfeifer and Arvella (Mike) Lucas. Sam was predeceased by his mother Leona Reimer.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007)