Third Newsletter for NTCI Class of 1968 50th Anniversary Reunion, Friday May 4 and Saturday May 5, 2018
Our NTCI 50 year reunion is less than 3 months away. We hope to have a good turnout as some classmates who did not go to the last reunion will be attending this time; however, we still have not heard from enough of you.
We need to know for planning and booking purposes ASAP WHO is coming to WHAT events ( we do not need to know how many are going to Maytime Melodies or the Saturday night dinners), AND we need to know promptly as we may have to cancel the Saturday afternoon at the Safari Room. They require a minimum number at least one month in advance.
Even Friday Night at the school is in jeopardy without enough responses soon. We are NOT cancelling the party at Bill and Cathy Humber’s. SO PLEASE e -mail me SOON with
-what events you are, or are not coming to
- whether you are bringing a significant other. For the few people who have responded and are posted on the database, please advise if there is a significant other coming.
Schedule of events for the 2018 Reunion
*Memory Mingle – Friday May 4th from 5:00 to 7:00 at the school room 215.
The main event at the School, a chance to catch up with classmates. There will be pizza and soft drinks. It will cost $15 a person payable at the door.
Maytime Melodies – Friday May 4th from 7:30 to 9:30.
If you wish to attend, make arrangements with the School music department directly.
*Bill and Cathy Humber House Party - Friday May 4th from 7:00 onward at 30 Maxwell Avenue (four blocks from the school).
For those attending Maytime Melodies come on over after the concert. There will be food and entertainment but BYOB.
*Saturday morning walk - Saturday May 5th from 10:30 (meet at south-west corner of Eglinton Park)
Our own Doug Campbell, who conducts tours for Heritage Toronto, has volunteered to lead a walk starting at 10:30 am Saturday morning at the south-west corner of Eglinton Park. Some of the participants at the last reunion went out for lunch afterwards.
*Safari Bar and Grill (1749 Avenue Rd.) - Saturday May 5th from 12:00 to 4:30
We will munch on appetizers and keep the conversations going until supper time. The cost of the Safari room (reserved just for our group) is only $20 a person which will get you a lot of appetizers. If we get the 40 people required, we will be asking you to send the money in advance either by e-transfer or cheque
Dinners at local restaurants - Saturday May 4th at 6:30.
For those who still want to keep talking we will continue to local restaurants for dinner.
MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENTS BY CLASSMATES
With the recent appointment of Liz Ingram we now have to my knowledge two appointments to “ The Order of Canada “, as Bill Schabas was appointed in 2009 . I do not know if many years can boast that. Also recently it was announced our own Bill Humber will be inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame ( as a historian not a player). I am pretty sure no other class can boast that. Major congrats to Liz and Bill on these recent major honours.
If you have received a major award such as the Nobel Prize (for any area, does not have to be the Peace Prize) or know of a classmate who has, please advise. Honorary doctorates count (Bill Schabas has a few of those too) but I would not count accomplishments like my winning my neighbourhood adult baseball league’s Team Contribution Award in 1992 as a major accomplishment even though they gave me a trophy. I ended my baseball career a few years later when I knocked myself unconscious pedalling backwards to catch a fly ball (ambulance and everything). Who knows if that had not happened I might be with Bill Humber in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.
Writing a novel like David Coombs did is also a major accomplishment. To remind you information about purchasing it as well as good reviews about the book can be found at http://www.lulu.com/ca/en/shop/david-coombs/the-beckoning-land/paperback/product-22195518.html .
REQUEST FOR FINDING PEOPLE
Please see all previous newsletters where I have begged for people to help me find people as well as database on our blog http://ntci68.blogspot.ca/?zx=bbbb5ceb75851e64 in the lower right hand column. Download the database. There are tabs at the bottom with the separate databases including a section naming classmates we have not found and what I have done to look for them as well. In my last newsletter I wrote about how to look for people. Finding people is now more important than ever so to get our numbers up to have a successful reunion.
REMINDERS
We have a special hotel rate at the Best Western Hotel near the school. See last newsletter for details
I am still looking for updates to bios and news bios .
BIOS, OBITUARIES and UPDATES
Jeff Plewman
Jeff Plewman, the Toronto electric violinist and experimental musician who performed as Nash the Slash with his face enveloped in surgical bandages, has died. He was 66.
His death was announced on Facebook by friend and collaborator Robert Vanderhorst, who wrote that Plewman passed away over the weekend. Vanderhorst also confirmed the death in an interview with the Toronto Star.
Plewman co-founded the progressive-rock band FM, who issued their debut Black Noise in 1977, and quickly established a long career as an eccentric solo artist whose compositions were nominally new wave but really, impossible to classify in a tidy fashion.
He was secretive about his identity, performing with a tuxedo, top hat and sunglasses as well as the rags on his face, and he was evasive when asked in interviews for his real name.
Film and TV producer and director Colin Brunton knew Plewman for more than 40 years, and remembered his friend as a music pioneer only fitfully recognized for his innovations.
"He was so far ahead of his time," Brunton said Monday in a telephone interview.
"When he performed … you couldn't even grasp how he was doing it. He would play a couple riffs on his electric mandolin and he would create a loop for it – and people back then didn't even know what a loop was.
"It sounded like this huge band and it was this guy sitting there in a tuxedo and a top hat, you know?"
Plewman first gained prominence when he formed FM with keyboardist and singer Cameron Hawkins and eventually drummer Martin Deller in 1976 and released the cold, menacing gold-certified Black Noise a year later.
He would soon become only an intermittent presence in the band as he focused on his atmospheric solo work. In 1979, he put out the moody Dreams and Nightmares, which was intended as a soundtrack for the 1928 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou– a piece he had been performing live in Toronto for years.
A more accessible work arrived with 1982's And You Thought You Were Normal, which featured production from Daniel Lanois and actual vocal work from Plewman. He fetched a Juno nomination in 1984 for most promising male vocalist of the year, though much of his work was instrumental.
He rejoined with FM for a long stretch in the mid-1980s (and again in the 1990s), contributing to 1985's Con-Test – which featured the popular single Just Like You – and 1987's Tonight, though he harshly criticized the production of the former record in its liner notes.
All the while, he found work as a film composer, writing the music for movies including Bruce McDonald's Roadkill and Highway 61, The Kidnapping of the President, starring William Shatner and Hal Holbrook, and 1985's Blood and Donuts. He also collaborated with Vanderhorst on a series of works that combined surreal visuals with his unorthodox music.
Plewman announced his retirement from music in 2012, writing on his website that it was "time to roll up the bandages." In a long posting, he wrote that he "refused to be slick and artificial," and noted his pride in a "remarkable 40-year career in the music biz with no hit (commercial) records." He also pointed out that he successfully sued Pepsi for "misappropriation of personality," but received only bragging rights in exchange.
By way of explaining his retirement, he wrote about the way file-sharing had "devastated" an important source of income, a matter that Brunton confirmed bothered his friend.
"I think he just lost the buzz of performing," said Brunton, whose documentaries The Last Pogo and The Last Pogo Jumps Again explored the bustling late seventies Toronto punk scene in which Nash the Slash thrived.
"He was very fed up with how easy it was for people to access his music and not get paid for it."
Plewman publicly confirmed he was gay in 1998, but he was generally reluctant to reveal any details about his real persona, proving coy when asked about his real name.
He first took to the stage in his mask in 1979 after the Three Mile Island disaster, warning of the dangers of the nuclear age.
"I think he loved the mystery," Brunton mused. "He loved the showbiz thing where he had this really cool persona. … He was quite a character."
He opened for artists including Gary Numan and Iggy Pop – though, as Plewman pointed out in his own retirement note, famed Rolling Stone scribe Lester Bangs once wrote that "Nash the Slash is the kind of opening act that makes the headliner work twice as hard" – and proclaimed himself the first Canadian artist to use a drum machine on an album. His other innovative works include the album Decomposing, which was designed to be listenable when played back at any speed.
Numan was among the many who paid tribute on Monday. "Nash was quite possibly the most unique performer on the planet," tweeted the Cars rocker. "Very sad news."
Brunton, for one, argues that Nash the Slash's contributions have been unfairly marginalized.
"He was pretty influential," Brunton said, listing Academy Award nominee Owen Pallett as one of the musicians indebted to Nash the Slash's influence.
"Nash really had a talent and he knew what he was doing. He was ahead of his time. And he was a very nice guy, very opinionated."
NICK PATCH
TORONTO
THE CANADIAN PRESS
PUBLISHED MAY 12, 2014UPDATED MARCH 25, 2017
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Liz Ingram
I have two wonderful sons of 30 and 25 years old. Still no grandchildren!!!! Live in Edmonton with my husband Bernd and work in my home art studio.
For forty years I taught printmaking, drawing and intermedia in the department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta. I retired in 2016, and am currently Distinguished University Professor Emerita. For many years I participated in juried international exhibitions and received awards for prints in Canada, Slovenia (Yugoslavia), Korea, Brazil, Estonia, India and Finland.
-Recently appointed to the Order of Canada in 2017
-Recipient of the University Cup in 2011
-Elected into the Royal Society of Canada for her contributions to Canadian culture in 2009
-Inducted into the City of Edmonton Cultural Hall of Fame in 2008
-Elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1998
Recent exhibitions include: Liz Ingram: Water/Bodies, Fine Arts Building Gallery, U. of A., Edmonton, AB, 2017; INTER•WOVEN / New Canadian Perspectives into Textile and Printmaking, Kobro Gallery, Academy of Fine Arts, Lodz, Poland, 2017; Canada and Japan, International Print Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art (curator and exhibitor), 2016; Liz Ingram: Print Encounters, Prince Takamado Gallery, Embassy of Canada, Tokyo, Japan, 2015; Liz Ingram: Transition and Transformation, Schwabenakademie, Irsee, Germany, 2013-14; The New World, MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art, Debrecen, Hungary, 2013; Perceptions of Promise, Chelsea Art Museum in New York USA, 2012. Public commissions include: Touching Water: Anticipation and Memory, Edmonton International Airport, 2004; Confluence Through the Looking Glass, Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium, Calgary, Canada, 2011; and Water Ways, Sensing Connections, Fort McMurray International Airport, 2014.
The human body and the elemental in nature are recurring sources for my art practice which investigates transitional states between material presence and the ephemeral, and issues relating to the fragility of life and the environment. Through my work I hope to emphasize the complete interconnectedness of our species with all forms of life through images and experiences that provoke feelings and sensations of profound connection.
