Das Tagebuch Murnaus

Controversial artist plans blood donation to AGO reno

Last Updated Wed, 03 Aug 2005 09:47:32 EDT
CBC Arts

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An account of my first meeting with Istvan, in Montreal in the summer of 1987: http://www.livejournal.com/users/ltmurnau/29584.html

Friend dzherzhinski has been very good about clipping news stories and photos concerning Istvan Kantor's Governor-General's Award from the local um, paper (yes, I can call the Times-Colonist a "paper" without blinking because, well, it's made out of paper). The latest was a quarter page of sputtering from some retired Colonel Blimp about his tax monies being spent on putrefaction, or some such.

Apart from getting the facts about Kantor's past "misdeeds" wrong, he seems to make a hobby of writing letters to the government. Nothing wrong with that, but I think he needs to get a tiny sense of perspective:

Kantor got a $15,000 award (six others, who did not garner any adverse publicity or complaints, also got awards for a total of $105,000 "misspent taxpayer dollars"). In 1996 (the most recent number I could find in a quick Google search) there were about 20,806,000 tax returns filed. So let's call that 21 million taxpayers.

So, dividing one by the other gives us the simple-minded answer that each Canadian taxpayer gave Istvan Kantor seven-hundredths of one cent.

By extension, Kantor could get a $15,000 award every year for the next 690 years before Colonel Harrumph's personal contribution to "artistic putrefaction" personified by this artist equalled the cost of the 49 cent stamp he needed to mail that one letter to the editor. That's not including the cost of the paper, envelope and ink, and also assumes that the time he spent writing the letter is worth absolutely nothing!

Ooooh, everyone hates Istvan... at least everyone working at the the Ottawa Citizen (Daily Petfinder, as Frank magazine terms it) who can do joined-up writing:

( nasty yet entirely predictable anti-Istvan stories follow )

In other news, I want to say that I really like zucchini. It is my favourite member of the squash family. I have a good simple recipe for curried zucchini I will post up here some day.

Also, I neglected to mention that two weeks ago the coffee tree in my office had three blossoms on it! They are small, delicate, white and very difficult to see - they also wither quickly. I tried to cross-pollinate them with a swatch of gauze but I don't know if it will work. It could do - three years ago I did get one bean to grow! Enough for a hemi-demi-semi-tasse, I suppose.