The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 21

THE ARTIFACTS OF LOUIS RIEL, B8 SISTERS, REVIEWED ON B9 EDITOR BARBARA CROOK 605-2120 FAX 605-2521 E-mail bcrook a pacprcss.southam.ca The Vancouver Sun MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1997 B7 I Ken Burns' TV voyage The documentarian who made the landmark PBS series Civil War and Baseball turns his distinctive lens to explorers Lewis Clark. Their 1804-07 expedition to the Pacific was a turning point in U.S. history. Economics, yes, but art, too, and lots of it: British Columbia lends APEC a richesse T57 Kjrf if. A.

If; 1 1 43, "A CAFE CULTURE CANADIAN COMICS SERIOUS ABOUT PRODUCTION WORK Two Canadian comic icons, Dave Thomas and Bruce McCulloch, are working on independent projects. Thomas, who has probably made more money as a regular character on Grace Under Fire than he ever did as a McKenzie brother, recently created his own entertainment company in Los Angeles called Maple Palm Productions. "The concept of Maple Palm is to take advantage of my Canadian citizenship and extensive production experience in Canada, using their tax-incentive system whenever possible," said Thomas. On its list of projects in development is what else? another Bob and Doug McKenzie movie. Written, directed and starring Thomas and faux-bro Rick Mora-nis, the follow-up to Strange Brew will start shooting in Toronto next summer.

Now shooting in Toronto is former Kid in the Hall McCulloch, who is writing and directing his first feature called Dog Park. The "sometimes savage, sometime sweet" comedy follows what happens when a man must share custody of his dog with his ex-girlfriend. Dog Park stars Janeane Garofolo, Natasha Henstridge, Luke Wilson and McCulloch. Look for the film some time next summer. BY ANY NAME, THIS ACTRESS WILL BE IN THE PINK INK, THAT IS As Paulina Gillis, she won a Jessie theatre award this year for her performance in The Anger in Ernest and Ernestine.

Who knows what she'll now accomplish as Tabitha St. Germain, the star of Pink Ink Theatre's production of The Baroness and the Pig, which opens Nov. 20. St. Germain is not going to be just a stage name for Gillis she's legally made the switch.

Pink Ink publicist Ian Morton says he's happy for PaulaTabitha, but wishes she'd told him about the name change before he printed all the posters and handbills for The Baroness and the Pig with the actress's old moniker. Despite the fact that Pink Ink publicized the name swap in a press release about the play, St. Germain declined to comment on her reasons for making the change. THE TEEN PALS OF GHOST WORLD WILL BE PORTRAYED ON FILM Director Terry Zwigoff, who wowed critics two years ago with his documentary about '60s cartoonist Robert Crumb, is working on a new film with comic-strip artist Dan Clowes. Zwigoff and Clowes, creator of the immensely popular Ghost World, are set to do a feature film version about the life ad-ventures of the strip's teenage best friends.

Together, they've written a script for Danny DeVito and partners at Jersey Films (producers of Pulp Fiction) that Zwigoff describes as grim, bleak and fun mm4k csp Jf ALEX STRACI1AN SUN TELEVISION CRITIC Making films about history, Ken Burns says, "even in this sometimes superficial medium of television, offers opportunities to revisit and re-examine those parts of our past which seem to give new meaning to the present." Burns, the Brooklyn-born documentarian of American history, has focused his distinctive lens on what he calls the most important expedition in the history of the American nation the 1804-1807 odyssey from the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean by Meriwether Lewis, the troubled 29-year-old personal secretary to then-President Thomas Jefferson, and his 33-year-old friend William Clark. Burns' four-hour film, Lewis The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, will be broadcast this week in two parts (Tuesday and Wednesday at 6 p.m. on WTVS-PBS and 9 p.m. on Seattle's KCTS). Burns describes Lewis and Clark's 2V2-year expedition from the Missouri River to the mouth of the Columbia River as more important than the moon landing, an extraordinary achievement and, ultimately, a grand failure.

Lewis and Clark would never find what Thomas Jefferson and others imagined existed a Northwest Passage, an easy water route linking the Atlantic with the Pacific. Instead, the explorers and their "corps of discovery" consisting of slaves and soldiers, French-Canadian boatmen and the sons of white fathers and Indian mothers would be the first explorers to traverse the Continental Divide and encounter the daunting peaks of the Rocky Mountains. Burns describes Lewis Clarfc as first and foremost an adventure story. Naive explorers travelled through a vast territory with wildly varying climates, encountering 122 animal species and 178 plants never before described by science in "a land of infinite variety and possibility." Burns was able to rely on period pho- tographs to create his public-television landmarks The Civil War and Baseball, but no photographic record existed of Lewis and Clark's expedition. Burns turned instead to archival material such as maps, paintings, drawings and pages from the discoverers' journals and used the voices of prominent actors to portray his historical figures: Adam Arkin as Meriwether Lewis, Murphy Guyer as William Clark, Sam Waterston as Thomas Jefferson, and, among others, Matthew Broderick, Kevin Conway and Tantoo Cardinal.

SEE BURNS, BIO BOWLED OVER: APEC official Bruce Forster shows off some of the pieces value totals almost $4 million, include an Inuit serpentineite carving (below) "7 1 ryu' MICHAEL SCOTT SUN ART CRITIC B.C. artists, galleries, designers and manufacturers are opening their collections to the Asia Pacific's economic leaders. More than 100 works of art, 200 pieces of craft and more than 175 pieces of furniture have been lent to the international economic forum that opens here Nov. 19. The market value of the objects is close to $4 million, APEC official Mary McNeil said.

Among the artists represented are Jack Shadbolt, Gordon Smith, Gathie Falk, Fenwick Lansdowne, Otto Rogers, Tak Tanabe, Joe Fafard and Betty Goodwin. The material will be used to decorate meeting rooms and offices during the week-long conference. According to conference organizers, APEC has agreed to pay insurance and shipping costs, an amount that will be less than $10,000. Curator Ingunn Kemble said she began with a wish list and approached galleries, collectors, individual artists and furniture designers. Her only concern was that the work selected be conservative in nature.

"No sex, no violence, nothing too shocking," Kemble said. The results are now being matched to individual participants. A Fenwick Lansdowne painting of a bald eagle, for instance, will wind up in one of American delegation's meeting rooms. A monumental Jack Shadbolt transformation painting from a private Vancouver collector will be the featured work in the conference's main meeting room at the Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre. Among the works of art on display at a press conference Friday were a sample of the leaders' chairs, created in an elegant modified Deco style by Coquitlam's Ausiman Durante Woodshop; a large Gordon Smith black-and-white IAN SMITHVancouver Sun lent to the forum.

The pieces, whose by Oviloo Tunnillie, of Cape Dorset. and the little Cossack melismas. And his spiccato, or bouncing effects on the bow were never out-size but still dazzling. A modest person, Lin really listened to the orchestra and played with a touching sotto voce in the slow movement a nocturne with the woodwinds sensitively echoing his avian violin trills. It was wonderful, melting playing, full of virtuosity but always at the service of expression.

The concert opens with the rising and falling harp arpeggios of Tchaikovsky's balletic pas de deux from the Nutcracker Suite, one of music's most sumptuous cliches. You expect cliches from an all-Tchaikovsky program, but the program introduces a rarity the third of his four nearly symphonic-length Suites for orchestra. These suites are rarely played, and for good reason: they're massively-scored, full of difficult off-beats, and Tchaikovsky never did learn how to write a proper fugue But the Third Suite is full of variety and saturated with the composer's native affection for ballet And except for a few moments of violin stridency in high register, it was played just as it should be with grace, bluster and a radiant feeling of showmanship. lily pond painting; a mossy green carving by Cape Dorset artist Oviloo Tunnillie; an impressive bent wood box by Glen Rabena and one of Bill Reid's small-scale bronze casts of the Killer Whale sculpture in Stanley Park. UXje Today, Nov.

3 George Leo 9 p.m., KIRO-CBS George Leo strives for nostalgia in tonight's segment, in which George (Bob Newhart) attends a charity auction and finds himself in charge of a therapy group of familiar faces from The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart, while Leo (Judd Hirsch) chauffeurs a group of sightseers from Taxi and Dear John. Tuesday, Nov. 4 the fifth estate 9 p.m., CBC In May 1996, Sean Kelly, a Canadian film student at the University of South-em California, drove to Tijuana and was kilied, supposedly the victim of a traffic accident. An investigation by CBC-TV's venerable news magazine uncovers several disturbing questions surrounding Kelly's death, many of which indicate foul play. Wednesday, Nov.

5 Law Order 10 p.m., VTV, KING-NBC In this typically topical episode from television's longest-running prime-time drama, the killing of a security guard at a betting track leads Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) and Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) to a militia group recruiting members through the Internet Thursday, Nov. 6 Tom Robbins: A Writer in the Rain 8 p.m., KCTSBS Seattle film-maker Jean Waiktnshaw profiles Tom Robbins, author of Still Life of the Woodpecker and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues described by various critics as "wild," "wholly original" and a "wizard of words." Friday, Nov. 7 Homicide: Life on the Street 8 p.m., Bravo! In this 1995 episode of the critically acclaimed crime drama, Bayfiss (Kyle Secor) and Pembleton (Andre Braugher) clash after Bayfiss becomes obsessed with the murder of a young girl and Pembleton sees eerie similarities between the case and a previously unsolved No cliches in lyrical treatment of Tchaikovsky ny, and very uncartoon-hke. "Everybody will typecast me as the cartoon director after I do this," said Zwigoff from a New Jersey diner, where his friend, director Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse) is working on his next film Earlier, Zwigoff turned down an offer to document Woody Allen and his jazz band on the road in Europe. Their plan to team up fell through, partly due to Allen's refusal to give Zwigoff total creative control, or, in director-speak, the final cut "I don't want to work hard on something where every single frame of it isn't something I do," said Zwigoff, who was recently in Vancouver for the film festival's trade forum DAWN OF A NEW BOOK BY FORMER MORNINGSIDE HOST GZOWSKI You can take the man out of Morning-side, but you can't make him sleep in.

Peter Gzowski still wakes up in the wee hours of the morning even though he doesn't have to any more. When he reads a book, he can't help making notes in the margins as if he'll be interviewing the author the next day. When he bumps into friends who were former guests on his CBC radio show, he admits he feels pangs of loss. But the 63-year-old Gzowski has put his nostalgia to work by writing TheMomingside Years. The book of favorite interviews, recipes and other selections from the show includes a compact disc with the intro theme music.

The McClelland and Stewart tome is new to Lower Mainland bookstores and costs about $35. ROSS ALLARD CP PETER GZOWSKI Tchaikovsky has plenty of chops and probably more notes per page than any other virtuoso concerto, but it's most successful when it's approached lyrically, as opposed to virtuosically, and lyrically is how Lin played it A little biography. Lin, whose friends call him Jimmy, now lives in New York. He began to play at seven, moved from Taiwan to Australia at 12 to study, and then to New York's Juilliard music schooL He tours Europe and Asia regularly. Last month he inaugurated a chamber music festival in Taiwan with his friends violinist Jaime Laredo and pianist Yefim Bronfman both famous musicians.

The festival drew 30,000 people. Soon he plays at the White House for the president of China. His playing with the VSO was practically note-perfect, and full-blooded, virile and passionate to boot His support from the orchestra under Sergiu Comissiona was sensitive enough to approach the ideals of chamber music Lin brought a singing quality to the concerto, and on the violin's outer two strings, which are hard to coax into song. His passage work was immaculate, as were all the other details, like the brilliant sixteenth-note roulades GREAT COMPOSERS vso conducted by Sergio Comissiona with guest violinst Cho-Liang Lin Repeated tonight at 8, Orpheum LLOYD DYKK SUN MUSIC CRITIC The 19th-century music critic Eduard Hanslick came up with the startling theory that a piece of music could actually smell bad. "An odorous stench," began his famous pan of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in Minor.

"The violin is no longer played, it is yanked about, it is torn asunder, beaten black and blue!" Begging to differ, history's verdict considers the Minor one of the world's top five favorite concertos, just as virtuoso violinists consider it among their Everests, or at least a K-2. It's featured in tonight's repeat performance of an all-Tchaikovsky program with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and the Taiwan-bom violinist Chio-Liang Lin, and this is one to catch. Lin is one of the best violinists playing today. The.