2009 May | Apartment613

Monthly Archive for May, 2010

Canadian Museum of Nature’s Grand Reopening celebrations

Written

on Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Mark your calendars! We’re planning three days of exciting activities for the Canadian Museum of Nature’s Grand Reopening celebrations, and there’s something for everyone.

Saturday, May 22
Ceremonial Parade and Official Unveiling Ceremony

• 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.
Ceremonial Parade

Led by the town crier, enjoy marching bands, multicultural performers, historical figures, museums from coast to coast, community partners, celebrities and much, much more!
Parade route: Starting at Ottawa City Hall (Lisgar Street), along Lisgar to Metcalfe Street, to McLeod Street, to museum main entrance.

• 11:30 a.m. to noon
Official Unveiling Ceremony

To commemorate the official reopening of the museum, a ribbon cutting will take place at the main entrance with a blessing from Algonquin Elder William Commanda.

• Noon

Museum opens. Admission today is free.

• Noon to 1:00 p.m.
Welcoming Concert

Capital Brassworks. Sponsored by PKG Joint Venture Architects.

Saturday, May 22
Rediscover Your Museum

Noon to 5:00 p.m.

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to chat with many of the behind-the-scenes people who’ve helped to renew the museum. Find out what’s involved in designing and creating an exhibition, see 3D demos, hear anecdotes from fieldwork and collecting, and even interact with a roving robotic dinosaur puppet! See the schedule.

Saturday, May 22
Nature Fest

It’s Biodiversity Day on May 22 and the International Year of Biodiversity in 2010, so join us at Nature Fest and learn all about biodiversity from some of Canada’s best museums and their nature-related partners. They’ll be on site to provide you with some fun family activities:

• Noon to 5:00 p.m.
Dance and Dress-Up
Delightful Dancing Magical Rainforest Creatures

Dance anyone? Wear your best animal costume and dance along with Ottawa’s Phoom dancers, who will be dressed up as magical rain forest creatures.

• 1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.
Concert

The National Capital Concert Band will perform.

• 2:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Lantern-Making Demonstrations

Make your own lantern in our special workshop today and show it off in our lantern parade. Get ready for our Tribute to Light event planned for Sunday—a magical evening of lanterns and light.

• 1:30 p.m., 4:00 p.m.
Special Concert!
Junkyard Symphony

Based in Ottawa, Junkyard Symphony is an eco-entertainment group that performs an amazing junk percussion/comedy/circus show. Formed in 1991, it reuses junk materials to create radical rhythms, awesome antics, terrific tricks, clownish comedy and plenty of participation. In this show the performers are the conductors, while the audience becomes the symphony. Spaces are limited, so make sure you arrive early.

Saturday, May 22
HD Nature Movies for Families

Noon to 7:00 p.m.

Don’t forget to take in an HD movie in our new theatre: special weekend entertainment for the whole family during the day.

•Water Life: Dive into the Blue Planet and discover amazing and diverse worlds brimming with colour and life. From tropical rainforests to coral reefs, miraculous and mysterious water holds the secrets to life on Earth. Duration: 26 minutes.

•A Modern Castle—The Rebirth of the Canadian Museum of Nature: Premiere of the documentary about the museum’s renovations. Duration: 24 minutes.

Saturday, May 22
Museum by Night

Ghost tours, music, a wine bar, movies and much more. The museum as you have never seen it!

• 7:00 p.m. to midnight
Ghost Tours—100-Year-Walks Back in Time
Historical Animation

Tours start every 10 minutes.

These 40-minute guided tours by Haunted Walks are designed to explore and discover the rooms and halls of this great museum. They take you through the unique history of the building and the impressive renovations with century-old ghost stories. Featuring the Anj Daub Mandolin Players and historical characters along the route.

• 7:00 p.m. to midnight
Music and Wine Bar

Music and special museum moments are planned for the evening throughout the building. Relax and enjoy the sounds of the Capital Swing Band in our wine bar located on the first floor, just steps from Nature Café. Sponsored by Beau’s All Natural Brewing Company.

• 9:00 p.m. to midnight
Nature Movies

Green Porno: Think you know all about the birds and the bees? Green Porno is a series of short films on animal sexual behaviour that was humorously conceived, written and produced by Isabella Rossellini. Note: Adult programming; for a mature audience. Duration: 25 minutes.

Sunday, May 23

The museum opens at 9:00 a.m. New admission fees apply.

Sunday, May 23
Rediscover Your Museum

9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to chat with many of the behind-the-scenes people who’ve helped to renew the museum. Find out what’s involved in designing and creating an exhibition, hear anecdotes from fieldwork, fish stories and more! See the schedule.

Sunday, May 23
Nature Fest

• Noon to 5:00 p.m.
Dance and Dress-Up
Delightful Dancing Magical Rainforest Creatures

Dance anyone? Wear your best animal costume and dance along with Ottawa’s Phoom dancers, who will be dressed up as magical rain forest creatures.

• Noon to 5:00 p.m.
Lantern-Making Demonstrations

Make your own lantern in our special workshop today and show it off in our lantern parade. Get ready for our Tribute to Light event planned for Sunday—a magical evening of lanterns and light.

• 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m.
Special Concert!
Arthur l’aventurier

French presentation.
For the last 14 years, Arthur L’aventurier has been taking the whole family on exciting outdoor adventures in some of nature’s most beautiful locations. His unique and tireless efforts to draw attention to the environment won him the prestigious Phénix de l’environnement award for education and awareness in 2003. Arthur will be presenting his latest songs as he celebrates with us the grand reopening of the museum. Spaces are limited, so make sure you arrive early.

Sunday, May 23
HD Nature Movies for Families

Noon to 7:00 p.m.

Don’t forget to take in an HD movie in our new theatre: special weekend entertainment for the whole family during the day.

• Water Life: Dive into the Blue Planet and discover amazing and diverse worlds brimming with colour and life. From tropical rainforests to coral reefs, miraculous and mysterious water holds the secrets to life on Earth. Duration: 26 minutes.

• A Modern Castle—The Rebirth of the Canadian Museum of Nature: Premiere of the documentary about the museum’s renovations. Duration: 24 minutes.

Sunday, May 23
A Tribute to Light
The Official Lighting of the Lantern

• 6:00 p.m. to midnight

Admission is free.

• 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Magical and Musical Entertainment

The museum’s lantern is a unique glass structure built over the main entrance. It is a unique and significant architectural feature of the building and serves as a tribute to the original tower built in 1910.

To launch this new beacon in the nation’s capital, join us for the celebrations. This magical event features costumed lantern people, stilt walkers, Dr. Kaboom and his fire spinning spectacle, Xin Hua Dance Troupe, nature-themed glass lanterns and wishing well, musicians (featuring Acacia Lyra harpists on the hour, and singer Natalia Spirina and Andrei Krylov on guitar on the half hour), actors in fairy costumes and more!

• 10:00 p.m.
Lighting of the Lantern

Grand finale and a spectacular lighting event in the museum’s new “lantern” tower, choreographed to create a moving and unforgettable experience for everyone.

Monday, May 24

The museum opens at 9:00 a.m. New admission fees apply.

Monday, May 24
100th Anniversary—Victoria Day Celebrations

10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Join us for a full day of exciting 100th-anniversary activities on the last day of our Grand Reopening weekend celebrations.

Monday, May 24
Rediscover Your Museum

10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Monday, May 24
Great Big Birthday Cake

10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Celebrate the museum’s birthday by joining us for on-the-hour cake-cutting ceremonies. This is one time you can have your cake and eat it too! Magicians, clowns, historical characters and more. Sponsored by the National Bank of Canada.

Monday, May 24
Victorian Tulip Tea

First seating: 1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Second seating: 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Enjoy a traditional Victorian Tulip Tea in our beautifully renovated and popular salon. This event will be hosted by the Famous 5, with a string orchestra featured as entertainment. Sponsored by Gourmet Cuisine. An official activity of the Canadian Tulip Festival.

Fee: Adults $15; children $7.50.

Reservations are required: 613.566.4791 or reservations@mus-nature.ca.

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Ottawa: A Look Back

Written

Migneault

on Sunday, May 31, 2009

first-half-of-century

For my last post, I used the Internet Archive‘s excellent resources to host the MP3 of my interview with Bruised Tongue. Their free hosting and archiving was just too good to resist.

Now that I’ve been spending a little time at the Internet Archive I thought I should look around to see what I could find. When I entered the search term “Ottawa” I was amazed at all the free documents I had at my fingertips. One of the most interesting things I found was a digitized copy of a book called The First Half Century of Ottawa.

Click to continue reading “Ottawa: A Look Back”

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From the Apartment613 Flickr Pool: Stuff on Walls

Written

Katie

on Sunday, May 31, 2009

Courtesy of Fieldtripp	Courtesy of emilybean
Courtesy of blurasis	Courtesy of Terriko

In our quest to capture Ottawa’s culture and spread it over the blogosphere, Apartment613 depends a lot on photos provided on Flickr under the Creative Commons license. Forty-six generous photographers have joined our Flickr group and have allowed us access to their work over the last four months. Unfortuately, there are a lot of great pictures that we never get to use in the course of our weekly blogging. This new series will try to put this awesome resourse to use. If you are interested in joining our Flickr group, just click the icon on the sidebar to the right.

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Eduardo Galeano’s Mirrors launched in Ottawa

Written

Francois

on Saturday, May 30, 2009

mirrors-eduardo-galeano-hardcover-cover-art More 40th Anniversary activities from our friends at Octopus Books.

Mark May 31st on your calendars because Eduardo Galeano is coming to town to launch his new book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, translated by Ottawa’s very own Mark Fried, and Octopus Books will be there slinging books at Saint Brigid’s Centre for Arts and Humanities (314 St. Patrick @ Cumberland) at 7:00 p.m.

Mirrors, is an unofficial history of the world seen through history’s unseen, unheard, and forgotten. As Galeano notes: “Official history has it that Vasco Núñez de Balboa was the first man to see, from a summit in Panama, the two oceans at once. Were the people who lived there blind??”

Recalling the lives of artists, writers, gods, and visionaries, from the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century New York, of the black slaves who built the White House and the women erased by men’s fears, and told in hundreds of kaleidoscopic vignettes, Mirrors is a magic mosaic of our humanity.

Eduardo Galeano’s works, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages, include Memory of Fire (three volumes); Open Veins of Latin America; Soccer in Sun and Shadow; Days and Nights of Love and War; The Book of Embraces; We Say No; Walking Words; Upside Down; and Voices of Time. Born in Montevideo, he lived in exile in Argentina and Spain for years before returning to Uruguay. He was the recipient of the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom.

Galeano defies easy categorization as an author. His works combine documentary, fiction, journalism, political analysis, and history. The author himself has denied that he is a historian: “I’m a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America above all and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.”

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Velo Vogue… a fashion show for cyclists.

Written

Francois

on Saturday, May 30, 2009

Photo courtesy of M J M on Flickr.

A pretty obvious clue that summer is upon us is the growing number of cyclists around town. Nancy Kukurudz has taken on the challenge of making these cyclists look stylish. She is the organizer of Velo Vogue Bicycle Fashion Show. It is the second show of its kind, the last one having taken place on a cold night in January, in the middle of a transit strike.

The show, organized to celebrate Clean Air Day, is brought to you by City Councillor Clive Doucet, in collaboration with the Netherlands Embassy, and will take place on Wednesday, June 3rd, from 12:30 to 1:30 pm in Jean Piggott Hall, at City Hall.

The bicycle fashion show is a free event, and will feature a range of stylish, hip and sexy looks that work great on a bike. Nkururudz hopes to both inspire new commuters and make existing ones aware of the fashion possibilities. The event will also include an exhibit of Dutch cycling photographs, inspiring speakers and local cycling and environmental groups.

So clean the air, ride a bike. and ride in style.

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Go Green! Go Dutch! Go Bike!

Written

Karen

on Saturday, May 30, 2009

Photo courtesy Shiratski on Flickr.

I know this is last minute, and I apologize. But I can’t resist plugging this event, hosted by my homeland, even though it is tomorrow…

So the Dutch are known for their super biking skillz. With bike parking lots with capacities upwards of 20,000 bicycles in many cities, it’s obvious that the two-wheeler is a serious thing for the Netherlands.

That’s why the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is hosting bike rides across Canada tomorrow, May 31, to promote the healthy living that cycling brings. The bike ride will start at the Pretoria Bridge at 2pm, where everyone will bike on down to Lansdowne for the unveiling of the Dutch “mushroom” signpost, a gift to the city of Ottawa from the Netherlands (they just love giving Canada stuff – tulips, signposts…).

The event will end down at Dow’s Lake, where Dutch snacks, along with Dutch groceries, will be all set out for you. (Buy the hagelslag! and some kroketten! Maybe they’ll have poffertjes! Oh man, the food is taaaasty.)

So grab your bike and head on down for a celebration of all things Dutch! I guarantee it will be well worth it.

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Health in the City Part 2: The Value of a Trainer

Written

apartment613

on Friday, May 29, 2009

Photo courtesy of Perfecto Insecto on Flickr.

Guest post from Kym Shumsky, an Ottawa writer shares her thoughts and pictures of things she likes on her blog at Relishing.ca. This post is part two of a three-part series on Fitness in the Capital Region.

It’s only our second session, and already, my trainer is giving me hell. But not about my lunges.

“You made it sound like you were a beginner,” says Avril Patrick, a petite and energetic woman of ageless countenance. She’s grilling me on Part One, what I thought was a fairly generic set-up into the heart of the matter; personal fitness.

Avril is taking issue with my disclosure, which, admittedly, was narrow. Her point is that I don’t represent someone just beginning a fitness regimen; I already drink the Koolaid.

Click to continue reading “Health in the City Part 2: The Value of a Trainer”

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Cyclin’ City

Written

Karen

on Thursday, May 28, 2009

Photo courtesy Marco Gomes on Flickr.

This week, in Toronto, they had a mass bike to work day. Tons of cyclists took to the streets and biked. Awesome.

So, Ottawa, you ready for the same?

Maybe not. Maybe we’re too straightlaced for this. (Go ahead – prove me wrong! I’d be delighted, and would join you on my 1995 mountain bike!) But the MP for Ottawa Centre is ready to start exploring this with us.

Paul Dewar is hosting a cycling summit on Saturday, May 30, at St Giles Church (Bank and First). He’ll lead a conversation about how we can make Ottawa a better place for cyclists from 10am to 2pm – email dewarp8@parl.gc.ca to rsvp for what’s sure to be an interesting discussion!

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Audio Visual Rundown May 27

Written

Tina

on Thursday, May 28, 2009

Matt Rosen, Tina Hassannia, Travis Boisvenue, and Peter Henderson

Hello everyone! I’m Tina Hassannia, Peter’s co-hosting better half on Audio Visual. Our May 27 show was undoubtedly one of the most solid hours of radio we have ever produced … ever produced on campus radio of all time. Audio Visual has had a soft spot for local theatre coverage since its innception but May 27 was all about the music: arts journalist Travis Boisvenue talked to us about the new revival of audio-cassette tape labels — much like Jon’s post below — and Matt Rosen a.k.a. Liar’s Rosebush made a special appearance to discuss his album release party at Mercury Lounge the night before, his music, and of course to spin us some tracks off Thank You Machines. Arts photographer Ming Wu also made an appearance, though if you were listening on air you wouldn’t have guessed it — he was too busy snapping away some shots in the background, including the photo in this entry.

Download:

Click here to subscribe in Itunes, click here to subscribe in another RSS feeder.

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Tapes ‘n More Tapes

Written

Migneault

on Thursday, May 28, 2009

Some of Bruised Tongues' tapes.

Do you remember tapes? The first one I ever got was Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill back in 1995. Like most people, I didn’t buy too many tapes after that because CDs quickly caught on with consumers and the music industry alike. Audiophiles and music afficionados, meanwhile, stuck with their beloved vinyl records.

In our current age of digital downloads, however, some have started to miss the tactile relationship with music that existed only 15 years ago. For a few years now, this need manifested itself in a vinly revival. It is now easy enough to find vinly releases from a large number of artists who aren’t in the Top 40. Even U2, arguably the biggest rock band in the world today, released this year’s No Line on the Horizon as an LP.

In some cases, the more affordable and versatile cassette tapes are no longer being relegated to nostalgia. The fantastic Brooklyn band Dirty Projectors, for example, will be releasing their upcoming album, Bitte Orca, on a limited edition cassette. Atlanta’s Deerhunter also has a cassette tape version of their latest EP, Rainwater Cassette Exchange.

In our own neck of the woods there is one label that has been bringing tapes back in a big way. This past year Ottawa’s Bruised Tongue has been releasing tapes for a few of the city’s bands.

I caught up with Pierre Richardson and Craig Proulx, the two guys behind Bruised Tongue, and recorded an interview for your listening pleasure. You can check it out below.

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