Tales of Mystery and Imagination

Musician Eric Woolfson, a singer and songwriter best known as co-founder of progressive rock group Alan Parsons Project, has died. He was 64.

A songwriter since the early 1960s, Woolfson created 10 albums with Alan Parsons, an engineer who had worked on the Beatles' Abbey Road and on the Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon.

Their low-key albums, recorded with a revolving cast of session musicians, had a cult following, especially in Germany and the U.S. Their biggest selling album was 1982's Eye in the Sky.

Other albums included I Robot and Tales of Mystery and Imagination, which was based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

In the 1960s, Woolfson worked alongside two then-unknown writers, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.

Canada Border Services Agency are DINX

An award-winning film, on its way back to Canada from an international gay and lesbian film festival in October, was held up at the Canadian border for more than a month.

On Nov 24, Edmonton filmmaker Trevor Anderson received a letter from Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) informing him that his short film DINX had been detained on Oct 21 and was being investigated for obscenity. A few days later, the tape was returned to him in the mail.

"It concerns me that the determination of what gets into our country is in the hands of individual border guards," he says.

A fun parody and a call-to-arms

Bash’d – A Gay Rap Opera will be at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa from January 12-31.

Billed as “a gay rap opera,” the Edmonton-grown, Fringe-Fest-honed musical Bash'd has intrigued and titillated audiences in Canada and the United States. It garnered the 2007 Outstanding Musical Award at the New York International Fringe Festival and the 2008 GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) Media Award in the category of Off-Off-Broadway Production.

The plot follows two star-crossed lovers who fall in love and get hitched. As the name implies, one of the men is eventually gaybashed. Enraged at the brutal attack, his spouse vows revenge. That’s the opera part. The gay part, of course, is that the lovers are a couple named Jack and Dillon, who first meet in a gay bar.

The rap element is a twist that might initially perplex the average theatregoer. While there is indeed music, spoken word, and a bit of good old-fashioned poetry thrown in, this approximately hour-long production is presented and narrated almost completely through the medium of rap — by two MCs named Feminem and T-Bag.

Gay rap or hip hop, aka “homo hop,” has existed as an underground movement since the late ’90s, thanks to the influence of such pioneers as Tori Fixx and the Deep Dickollective. However, Nathan Cuckow, co-writer and co-performer of Bash’d, admits that he was unaware of the movement when he created the character of Feminem ten years ago, for Edmonton’s Loud & Queer Cabaret.