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By: Meghan Davidson Ladly
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CHIROGRAPH
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A woman in her late 20s is walking down Queen Street and stops in front of a bicycle. She opens her bag and pulls out an airmail envelope. There is a hole punctured on the side with a piece of string attached, the woman crouches and ties the string to the handle. The next morning the bike receives another visitor, the owner. The word “love” is scrawled on the bottom right corner of the dangling envelope; inside she finds a love poem. The carefully constructed note was created by Lindsay Zier-Vogel, who has been scattering these anonymous love letters around Toronto for eight years. Not your traditional love letters, these poems gush with emotion for places or things, not humans…. Keep reading
The largest event of its kind, the CONTACT Photography Festival brings together local and international artists at over 175 venues across Toronto. This year’s theme, Field of Vision, focuses on how photography affects imagination and our apprehension of the everyday. May 1-31. Various Venues. Free. Just like its name, rock.paper.sistahz is a dynamic, multifaceted festival that celebrates the work of black theatre artists. Open to experimentation, events include filmed workshops, interdisciplinary improvisations, a variation on the soul train and a reading by M. NourbeSe Philip. May 24-31. Various Venues. Tickets $10-$45. Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns) talks to Heather Reisman about his life, humanitarian work and new novel entitled And The Mountains… Keep reading
Reviewed in this essay: The Golden Mean (Live), Compagnie Marie Chouinard, which ran May 8 – May 12, 2013 at Canadian Stage Canadian Stage recently welcomed Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s The Golden Mean (Live), a repertory piece first mounted at the 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad. This was the first presentation of a major Marie Chouinard work in Toronto since Canadian Stage presented Orpheus and Eurydice in 2011—a curiously long absence for a choreographer with an eponymous company more than 20 years old and likely the most internationally recognizable name in Canadian contemporary dance. For this piece, Chouinard took audiences into another world for a few hours. She transformed her dancers into futuristic creatures not unlike us, but with a stronger communal sense, a… Keep reading
Victoria Day long weekend may be over, but we can still enjoy two more weeks of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. Throughout your commute across Toronto over the last few weeks, you may have noticed unusual sights such as the gallery of photos replacing ads along the platform of St. Patrick Station and new visuals lining the walls of your favourite cafes. In accordance with this year’s theme “Field of Vision,” CONTACT 2013 employs installations and open exhibits across the entire city as an invitation to extend our personal field of vision beyond the mundane. Here are some key events of the last two weeks of the festival: Lecture by Michelle Valberg: “Arctic Kaleidoscope The People, Wildlife and Ever-Changing Landscape” “Arctic Kaleidoscope”… Keep reading
Canadians are daily inundated with news reports concerning the “rise of China,” as visions of that country’s latest economic mega-project flood our television screens. Universities and governments have flocked to China, both literally and figuratively, producing mountains of discourse concerning the new “global superpower” and how Canada should interact with it. Yet how can an average Canadian reach behind the shiny images of soaring skyscrapers and booming assembly lines to gain a sense of everyday life in the country? How have average Chinese men and women experienced the massive economic transformations they have lived through? When people ask these questions, I tell them time and again: watch Chinese independent cinema. There is a vast visual archive right in front of… Keep reading
Like the Mint Julep, the Gin and Tonic is of unusual provenance. Similarly born out of a unique historical conjuncture of East and West, the seemingly timeless combination of gin, lime, sugar, and tonic water came into being almost by pure chance, at the intersections of colonialism, modern medicine and, well, boredom. The now famous drink was invented by a group of British soldiers stationed in India in the early 19th century, who undertook several experiments to make their acrid malaria medication passably quaffable. Once the quinine used to treat their malaria was mixed with sugar and lime, it was really only a matter of time before something boozy entered into the equation. Not long afterwards, the G and T arrived in its imperial home to… Keep reading
The Toronto Comic Arts Festival (2013) was not your average convention. People weren’t dressed in carefully considered costumes or walking around in character stockpiling freebies indiscriminately. Set in the Toronto Reference Library over the second weekend of May, the intimate space lent itself to discovery and spontaneous conversation more than sweaty-palmed, star struck fervor. TCAF opened its doors to the simply curious and the comic-obsessed with equal grace, focusing attention on creators and their work. Caitlin Cass, an artist based in Buffalo, NY, is the founder of Great Moments in Western Civilization, a cooperative dedicated to picking and blending stories from history. Her work draws on influences from Heraclitus to Paddington Bear in a poetic attempt to fit the whole world… Keep reading
What to expect when you’re expecting a book “I waited until my first book was published to learn the genre, and when Oprah announced “It’s literary fiction!” just seconds after my pub date, I was overcome with joy. When we found out that I’d written a second book, however, we decided to find out ourselves what it was. A genre reveal party, in which we’d learn the genre of the book at the same time as one hundred of our closest friends and family seemed like a fun way to go!” How to host a genre reveal party. Look closer “When first approaching the artwork of Japanese artist Takahiro Iwasaki it’s entirely possible you might miss it altogether.” (via.) Point Break as directed… Keep reading
Why is the opulence of The Great Gatsby so controversial? Thanks to Baz Luhrmann’s production, the book has a new set of critics with a common refrain: Gatsby-esque affluence is bad news. “Did anyone actually read The Great Gatsby?” asks Zachary M. Seward in Quartz, citing the perennial popularity of Gatsby-themed parties before complaining that “so many people seem enchanted enough by the decadence described in Fitzgerald’s book to ignore its fairly obvious message of condemnation.” In her article in Vulture, “Why I Despise The Great Gatsby,” Kathryn Schulz laments Gatsby-inspired consumerism before dismissing the book as an emotionless vehicle for condemning “the degeneracy of the wealthy,” in which Fitzgerald is “more offended by pleasure than by vice.” For Richard… Keep reading
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