Christopher Mackay's Blog

Maury Chaykin died yesterday.

A dual US/Canadian citizen, his career goes back to before he had a role on the quintessential Canadian TV show, The King of Kensington (he missed The Beachcombers). 

Jiam Gomeshi of CBC Radio One’s Q interviewed him in February of this year.

Of course, even if his name means nothing to you, you’ll recognize him from the roles he’s had in movies like Dances with Wolves, Whale Music, Entrapment or The Sweet Hereafter.

I was pleased to hear him mention — along with Whale Music — one of my favourite films among his favourites, too: the Diane Keaton-directed Unstrung Heroes, starring Andie MacDowell, John Turturro, Michael Richards and Nathan Watt.

61 is awfully young.

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I’ve read Wake, the first of Sawyer’s WWW (Wake, Watch, Wonder) trilogy, and am nearly finished Watch. They are, as always with Sawyer, excellent.

In the WWW trilogy Sawyer’s exploring the meaning and consequences of several varieties of consciousness — human, primate and artificial. Throw in BlackBerrys, EyePods [not a typo], a LiveJournaling blind-from-birth teenage math-wiz protagonist transplanted from Texas to Kitchener-Waterloo and artistically-inclined webcam-chatting primates, and you’re getting the idea.

It’s a little weird seeing a trailer for a novel that isn’t also the trailer for a movie, but Sawyer’s work is such a natural fit for the screen, that it only makes sense:

Plus it makes it look like the web’s made of electic jellyfish, so how cool is that?

Visit Sawyer’s website: sfwriter.com.

Black Dub w/ Daniel Lanois: The Birth of Bellavista Nights from Daniel Lanois on Vimeo.

Sadly, the purchase option on BlackDub.net seems not to be working. Hopefully Lanois will recover fully from his motorcycle accident soon.

“Failure is an option, but fear is not.” A great talk by James Cameron at TED, February, 2010; touches on his early love of science fiction, his love of diving, working with Stan Winston at Digital Domain, and his work on The Abyss, Titanic and Avatar.