Weekend Arts Magazine
with Mack Furlong

She says it's the only thing she's good at.  Well, if you're as good at that one thing as Mary Pratt is, one thing may be just enough.  Last night at the Excellence in Visual Arts Awards at the Rooms, the Society of Canadian Artists reinforced to Mary Pratt just how good they think she is.  They recognized Pratt with an honourary life Membership  into the SCA.  Whether it's her cod fillets on tin foil, a poppyseed cake or a plastic container of peaches.... She transforms simple domestic objects into a piece of work that can only be described as A Mary Pratt.  Last night, Margaret Walsh best, of the Society of Canadian Artists presented Mary Pratt with her award.

A group of grade 9 students from the York School in Toronto spent last week in St. John’s creating a documentary about Newfoundland culture and how it is shaped by our history … and vice versa.

It’s all a part of the schools ICE program - the Integrated Canadian Experience. The whole idea of ICE is for students to have an authentic experience with the people and the country.

While here, the young people spoke to artists and teachers and politicians and Dave the musician… and to me.

Toby Sparwasser-Siroka, Julie Jenkins, Hannah Kahn, Gillian Kiessling and Ben Feldman are the students. They joined me in the studio along with Sean Mitchell, director of Student Life at York, and began by asking Sean to better describe ICE for us.

On the Weekend Arts Magazine with host Chris O’Neill-Yates: Ruth Lawrence is organizing a film festival to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the cod collapse and they’re calling for entries; The Niagara Youth Orchestra is in St. John’s for a musical exchange with the Newfoundland Symphony Youth Orchestra; Newfoundland music icon Bud Davidge just received an honourary doctorate at Grenfell, Memorial Campus. He will be by to talk about his life and his music. Pasadena writer, Nellie Strowbridge, will take us inside her latest book, Maiden from the Sea, the story of a 17th century French girl whose relationship with a Beothuk Indian leads to potentially tragic consequences; The Atlantic Book Awards are in St. John’s this week and we will have the local winners. On Liner Notes, Matthew Hare will chat about his new CD, This Time Last Year. Weekend AM comes your way from 6:00-9:30 Saturday and Sunday on CBC Radio One.

The federal budget brought down by the Conservative government in Ottawa has resulted in more cutbacks to CBC’s funding and the dominoes have been falling across the country.

A couple of those dominoes flipped here in Newfoundland and Labrador. CBC has announced the decommissioning of both our inhouse recording facility, Studio F, and the mobile unit, used for remote recordings at concerts and festivals across the province.

Many groups are also upset by this turn of events, and arts organizations have come together to issue statements about their concerns.

David Chafe is the chair of MusicNL and he joins me in the studio this morning.

The burg of Corner Brook shivers in fear … of the Tentacle’s Claw! Deep beneath the surface of Bonne Bay lurks the creature so fearsome, so blood thirsty, so devious, that a movie must be made about it.

Enter Tara Manuel and her band of enthusiastic monsters and victims to film a script about the mortal danger in which Corner Brook quakes.

Tara and her husband Michael Rigler had a dream … or maybe a nightmare! … to produce a B-movie, no-budget, creature feature, schlock horror show in Corner Brook. Be careful what you wish for! I spoke with Tara a couple years ago about her fascination with b-movies. You may recall Shadowy Souls, a puppet show she took around the province, so this week I rang her up in Corner Brook and began by asking her how low-budget is this new no-budget film.