Calgary Herald from Calgary, Alberta, Canada • 29

CalgarvIIerald ENTERTAINMENT Editor; Susan Scott TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1987 C9 Krieghoff painting disappears from museum MONTREAL (CP) An oil painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, valued at $40,000, has been stolen from the McCord Museum of Canadian History, a museum official said Monday. Marie Claire Morin said the 1860 work, Habitant en trai-neau, disappeared some time between Thursday morning and Friday morning, when its. absence was noted. It was part of a show entitled The Painted Past. There were no signs of forcible entry into the museum and no other painting or item on exhibit at the building's eight galleries was taken.

"It's a great mystery," Morin said, noting that the canvas was not the most valuable among the 40 paintings on loan from the collection of the National Archives of Canada. Most of the works in the show by various early Canadian painters had not previously been seen by the public, Morin added. She said museum officials are puzzled by the theft. "We're wondering if it could be a prank." It's the first time a painting has been stolen from the McCord, a small museum owned by McGill University, Morin said. She said the museum has tightened security by posting a guard in the gallery housing the show during visiting hours.

Until the theft, security guards circulated throughout the building. Morin said the painting was one of several versions that Krieghoff did of a French-Canadian farmer in a sled and was not considered a highlight of the show. But, she added, "it's a major loss because it depicts Canadian life at the time and has documentary importance." The painting, in an ornate old-fashioned frame, measures 33.2 centimetres by 45.8 centimetres. It was not the smallest in the show, said Morin, adding she doubted it could be whisked out of the museum inside a coat. Idiotic crudeness best Motley Crue could offer fans HI! 1 fi I i singer Neil being involved in a drunken car crash that killed a passenger from the band Hanoi Rocks and left two young female passengers with serious head injuries).

Oh, the band's music had its moments of heavy hipness and would've made for a good show, along with the flashpots and two female backup vocalists as sex-pots, were it not for the incredible stupidity Motley Crue exhibited every time Neil opened his big mouth. To quote a recent metal song, its entire philosophy is nothing more than party 'til you puke. And the Crue's idiotic crudeness was enough to make you want to do that, party or not. Even the opening act of Whi-tesnake was not above negating its good tunes with similar hedonistic hollowness. The band's lead singer declared the group's undying search for a certain region of the female anatomy and exhorted the audience to partying of the most primitive kind throughout its set.

He also made sure to mention the name of our city at least a dozen times just like Neil (showing both men had a wonderful grasp of geography). Such a dumb display completely took away from the killer guitar groove of Still Of The Night, a successful stylistic hybrid of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, and the band's current catchy hit Here I Go Again. The entire concert was a sermon in egoistic sexuality that makes lust, not love or even caring, the only form of expression between men and women. And the audience of 10,000 loved every preposterous pose, every dumb saying, showing no realization that it's possible to party without being brain-dead and that Motley Crue's life in the fast lane only leads to a dead end. MOTLEY CRUE and Whi-tesnake at the Olympic Sad-dledome Monday evening.

Attendance: about 10,000. By James Muretich (Herald staff writer) Motley Crue remain the reigning morons of metal music. There is no band among all the heavy-metal cretins that regularly desecrate the power of the decibel as utterly vacuous and stupid as these four posers from California. A band like Motley Crue has about as much in common with Led Zeppelin as Pee Wee Herman does with Charlie Chaplin. Yet by combining musical volume with lyrics about fornication and by never speaking out using as many words as possible, Motley Crue has become one of the niost popular metal acts in North America.

It's as sad an indictment of rock 'n' roll as it is the people who put up with such mental hogwash. And there were 10,000 of them at the Olympic Saddledome Monday night screaming their approval of every inane utterance of Crue singer Vince Neil. "If you're a pervert say (expletive) you," yelled Neil. And the crowd obeyed. "You like to get hot and sticky," shouted Neil.

And the hordes roared. It was the kind of follow-the-blind-leader mentality that would've made Adolf Hitler proud. Neil even introduced bassist Nikki Sixx (before his bumbling bass solo) as the sleaziest, lowest, filthiest form of life around. More cheers followed, naturally. Sixx then proceeded to spray the crowd with the contents of two' bottles of Jack Daniels (proving the group has gotten over any guilt feelings about 'WM'r Z.

JT De Niverville's work, The Stuff of Life, adorns a billboard at Barlow Trail Artists hired to paint the and Centre Avenue town company to celebrate its 100th anniversary. De Niverville's The Stuff of Life, a surreal canvas containing flying coffee pots and other breakfast paraphernalia, greets motorists at the corner of Barlow Trail and Centre Avenue, while James's vibrant abstract Red Orchid overlooks McLeod Trail at 42nd Avenue South. The paintings will remain on exhibit at these sites until Dec. 6. The works of Toronto-based de Niverville and James, along with those of five other prominent Canadian artists, have been touring major Canadian cities since last June.

Manufacturers, in a gesture toward giving Canadian art greater public exposure, commissioned the paintings on the suggestion of James. The Mediacom company of Toronto, working in collaboration with the artists, then transferred the originals on to huge Superboards for outdoor display. "We are hoping to make this show as accessible as possible," says Donna LeBlanc, communications manager for Manufacturers, which has its head offices in Waterloo, Ont. "We're encouraging all people in each city to look for the billboards, to have By Martin Morrow (Herald staff writer) Calgarians who've never set foot in a gallery are getting a taste of contemporary Canadian art, thanks to a major Canadian insurance company. For the past week, a pair of original new works by painters Louis de Niverville and Frances Pocock James have adorned large billboards on two of the city's main thoroughfares.

The pictures are part of The Manufacturers Life Insurance Company's Painting the Town project, a national outdoor billboard art show planned and financed by the Real-life J.R. Ewing left fortune behind Folksinger strives for musical link of past, present i 1 I w- -( YARMOUTH, N.S. (CP) There really was a J.R. Ewing. And lawyers are trying to find relatives who are entitled to a share of the small fortune he left behind.

James Ronald Ewing was born in Yarmouth and eventually became a marine captain. He died in Texas seven years ago under what Houston lawyer Edward Gillett describes as "skid-row He had thousands of dollars in his pockets when his body was found and left an estate valued at about $250,000 Cdn. J.R. Ewing also is the stage name given to the villain of the them notice this larger-than-life piece of art, and to react to it." LeBlanc says the entire proj- ect has cost her company 000, of which only $5,000 went to each artist. While many of them were accustomed to higher fees for their work, she says they were eager nonetheless to participate in this novel type of exhibition.

In addition to works by James and de Niverville, Manufacturers commissioned paintings from Lynn Donoghue of Toronto, B.C. artists Gathie Falk and Jack Shadbolt, Quebec's Yves Gaucher and Mary Pratt of Frederic-ton, N.B. TV series Dallas. He's played by Larry Hagman. Gillett, who left the Maritimes Monday after a weeklong search for relatives of the real-life Ewing, said several possible heirs have turned up in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

They thought it was a gag when he contacted them. Before he died, Ewing designated $50,000 for a common-law wife in Singapore, but the remainder of his savings await a legitimate heir. Gillett said his visit to Nova Scotia turned up several leads, but no major clues as to the rightful heir. If no heir is found, the money will be turned over to the State of Texas. questions from Conservative MP Bob Pennock.

Whittaker is on holiday and could not be reached for comment. A source said she is still a director of the consulting firm. MacDonald's answers to the questions which Pennock posed in the Commons Sept 15 show that Canada Consulting also gets an annual fee from the CBC "as a consideration for releasing Ms. Whittaker from her contractual obligations to CCG." MacDonald, in Europe this week, said in her written reply to Pennock that the CBC continues to do business with Canada Consulting. The CBC spokesman denied there is a conflict of interest He said the CBC customarily awards contracts without bids because certain companies, such as Canada Consulting, have exclusive expertise in some fields.

House eyes contracts passion for history outweighs the appeal of a melody. Still, Timelines is a strong debut disc. It's available at such local record stores as Sound Swap, The Record Store, Sounds Good and A A downtown. Keelaghan's subject interest such as the British being hemmed in on the west coast of France during the Second World War comes naturally as he's a history graduate from the University of Calgary. "I think people are too caught up in the present.

How people can divorce the present from the past has always been beyond me. "Certainly, the overwhelming immediacy of culture today encourages that. People's attention span has been whittled down to the three minutes it takes to watch a rock video." However, there also is a romantic side to several of Keelaghan's compositions. His best-known song to date is the haunting ballad entitled Jenny Bryce. It is written in a medieval poetic style and tells the tale of a man whose one true love dies during childbirth, leaving him alone with a daughter bearing his wife's name Jenny Bryce.

The song is on Keelaghan's new albumcassette, but also appeared last year on a recording by Canadian folk artist Garnet Rogers. "I've never told anyone this before, but deep down I kept thinking of (the 1968 hit song) Honey by Bobby Goldsboro when I was writing Jenny Bryce. I can't help but see Jenny Bryce By James Muretich (Herald staff writer) James Keelaghan is a time traveller. No, he hasn't built a time machine in his basement. The local singersongwriter does his time travelling through the folk songs on his independently released debut disc entitled Timelines.

"I don't feel that my personal life is that interesting to anybody, least of all to myself," Keelaghan says in an interview at his northwest Calgary home. "I find that writing about historical events, or things written in a historical context, gives me a good vehicle for expressing myself. And while the songs may be historical, or even nostalgic at times, it doesn't mean that they don't have any relevance to today. "A song like Boom Gone To Bust shows the circular nature of history. It's about someone's father who left Western Canada for the east in 1935 in order to find work.

Then, nearly 50 years later, his son is forced to do the same thing in reverse and travel from east to west to find work." Keelaghan is performing at the Kensington Delicafe tonight, the Unicorn Friday and Saturday and at the Calgary Folk Club on Nov. 13th. Many followers of the folk music scene consider Keelaghan to be one of Canada's best new songwriters. His tunes on Timelines are warm, inviting and insightful, though occasionally his Shannon Oatway, Calgary Herald Keelaghan's considered a rising folk star OTTAWA (CP) A CBC vice-president has awarded contracts worth at least $72,600 without bids to a consulting firm for which she worked and for which she is still a director, the government disclosed Monday. The contracts were awarded to Canada Consulting Group of Toronto, which received contracts worth a total of from the CBC since Shee-lagh Whittaker signed a contract as the Crown corporation's vice-president for planning and corporate affairs.

There was no open competition for the contracts, which include some from other CBC departments for which Whittaker is not directly responsible, said a CBC spokesman. Communications Minister Flora MacDonald disclosed the information in a written reply to "I can't say that he didn't influence me because he was the most influential folk figure of my generation," the 28-year-old Keelaghan says. "But I really don't hear the strong similarity that other people do. The only thing I can think of is that my material is in a similar storytelling vein and delivered with integrity. I'm sure, though, that when Stan started off people told him he sounded like other artists, too." as sort of a medieval equivalent of Honey." Keelaghan only began playing professionally in 1983 when he joined the backup band of fellow Calgary folk artist Margaret Christl.

He now performs across Canada on a weekly basis either as a solo act or with several other Alberta musicians in his "inflatable band." His style is most often compared to the late Canadian folk artist Stan Rogers..