Christmas is a time of giving, and the Canadian Stage theatre company in Toronto has given Lynn Slotkin her credentials back.

It did so earlier this month after CanStage administrators met with representatives from CBC Radio Toronto who wished to see Slotkin reinstated as one of Mother Corp's two on-air critics of the Ontario capital's professional theatre scene.

You may recall that in September, Grant Ramsay, CanStage's director of public relations, removed Slotkin's name from the list of reviewers receiving complimentary tickets to the opening nights of its productions. Ramsay said his action was motivated by his belief that Slotkin had "never, ever given us a good review." CBC Radio reviewed tapes of Slotkin's on-air critiques from the last two or three years, decided they weren't oppressively negative or biased with respect to CanStage, and asked CanStage to reconsider. It didn't, resulting in CBC pulling Slotkin from the CanStage file and its other drama critic, Robert Crew, refusing to review CanStage productions in solidarity with Slotkin.

Chilly scenes of winter seem to have brought on cooler heads, not to mention the absence of reviews on CBC of the three CanStage productions mounted between September and now. With all apparently calm and bright, Slotkin and Crew plan to show up Jan. 6 for CanStage's world premiere of Sunday Father by Adam Pettle, and again on Jan. 13 forMaureen Hunter's Vinci.

In the great tradition of Andy Warhol's Empire, the folks at CITY-TV in Toronto are presenting LOG: The Christmas Special on Christmas Day from 6 to 10 a.m. The special will consist of a single shot of a roaring fireplace, thus allowing you and yours to simultaneously open gifts (provided that the tree and TV are in close proximity) and bask in the warmth of the electronic hearth without the messy hassle of tending a real one.

LOG was taped at a CITY-TV staffer's home two weeks ago. A crew of five, using a high-definition camera and two microphones were on-site at the fireplace. It took a little more than four hours to complete the shoot. Viewers will note that "a poker stick comes into the frame every once in a while to keep the fire going," says Mark Bandura, LOG'sproducer.

It's not the first time a TV camera has been stationed in front of a roaring fire. Indeed, it's been a Cancon staple of community cable channels for decades. But it's a first for Moses Znaimer's hipsters. Bandura notes that "some station did it last year in Manhattan and it beat everything in the ratings." Znaimer is doubtless hoping for same here.

Speaking of Manhattan, that, of course, is where Andy Warhol shot his classic Empire, a static, eight-hour-and-five-minute shot of the Empire State Building filmed with one camera one day in July, 1964, starting around 6 or 7 p.m. and ending in the wee small hours of the morning.

Until 2000 The Canadian Forum had been Canada's oldest consistently published political periodical. But that 60-year-old tradition came to an end in the spring of that year when its publisher, James Lorimer, halted publication. He said he needed time to find about $1.5-million in fresh money to make the magazine viable and to hire a dedicated, paid, albeit small staff.

No new issue of Canadian Forum was published in the interim, and last week Lorimer said his fundraising efforts were "totally moribund. I went through the whole exercise of looking for a combination of sources to move the Forum to the level of a fully professional operation. I found a lot of good will but I was never able to find the financing."

In short, there may be no revival of Canadian Forum, à laSaturday Night, in the short term, or forever for that matter. For some, this is a sad state of affairs. The list of contributors to the magazine over the years was an impressive one -- F. R. Scott, George Woodcock, Northrop Frye, J. S. Woodsworth, A. M. Klein, John Grierson all wrote for it -- and there's long been the feeling that this country's discourse has suffered by not having magazines with the heft of Harper's, The Nation and The New Republic.

Have you found yourself wondering, "Gee, what's up with Woody Harrelson these days?" Toronto filmmaker Ron Mann has the answer. In fact, the Woodmeister is the focal point of Mann's upcoming documentary, Go Further, that's having its world premiere in March at the fabled SXSW Festival in Austin, Tex.

Mann, whose previous acclaimed docs include Poetry in Motion, Grass, Comic Book Confidential and Imagine the Sound, calls his latest "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test on wheatgrass" mostly because it follows the 2,500-kilometre bike ride to Los Angeles from Seattle that Harrelson and friends made last year as part of the Simple Organic Living tour. Rolling along with the bikes was a "bio-fuel bus" that ran on hemp and vegetable oil. Harrelson, a dedicated environmental activist who, lest we forget, got an Oscar nomination for his performance in 1996's The People Vs. Larry Flynt, dubbed the bus "the Mothership."

However, Mann, as the title of his film suggests, saw it as just the latest incarnation of "Furthur," the legendary International Harvester school bus Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters drove around the U.S. in the mid-sixties.

Mann is now in postproduction, having wrapped his shooting schedule last weekend by filming a Medeski, Martin and Wood concert in Orlando, Fla. The hook here was that the electrical power for the MMW gig was supplied by fans riding six bikes hooked up to generators! Did MMW play Marvin Gaye's eco-classic Mercy, Mercy Me? Yes, they did. Other vegan/musicians in the movie are Bob Weir (Grateful Dead, Ratdog, the Other Ones); Dave Matthews; Trey Anastasio (Phish); and Anthony Kiedis (Red Hot Chili Peppers).
jadams@globeandmail.ca