It’s a cold, wet, Montreal night. The reflection of traffic lights glitters on damp streets. A black-clad figure rides through on a bicycle, clutching a piece of posterboard beneath one arm. He dismounts near a crosswalk, glancing furtively around him, and pulls something from his pocket. We hear the rattle-rattle of the spraypaint can as […]
Alison Lang
Posted inArts + Music
I & I
At first glance, George Elliott Clarke’s prose novel I & I seems to follow a familiar formula. Boy meets girl, girl’s family doesn’t approve, boy and girl run away, and after a seemingly accidental violent incident, both go on the run. And as the tragic romance of rich, white Betty Browning and the black boxer […]
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Classified
Classified’s first major-label album certainly looks the part. The beautiful cover artwork by Justin Broadbent features a torn poster motif with the Enfield rapper staring defiantly outward. It’s a striking image that promises big things. And for the most part, Self Explanatory delivers. The album features a narrative thread modelled after the Choose Your Own […]
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The Best Worst Movie
In 1989, a group of Italian filmmakers set up in a small Utah town to film their version of a typical American horror film. They hired a group of mostly Mormon locals with virtually no prior acting experience. None of the actors spoke Italian, the director and crew almost no English. The director, Claudio Fragasso, […]
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Constantines constant touring
For many rock singers, vocal lessons seem to herald the approach of impending wankerdom. Case in point: Raine Maida takes vocal lessons. Sebastian Bach does too, no doubt while tossing his blonde mane as his reality-TV bride stands astride the piano. So when someone like Bry Webb admits he’ll be starting his first-ever vocal lesson […]
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K’naan
Compared to the grittiness of his debut, The Dusty-Foot Philosopher, K’naan’s latest album Troubadour might come across as a bit of shock. The production is super-slick, the beats are clean and radio-ready and the guests are high-profile: Mos Def; Adam Levine and Kirk Hammett (!?) all take a turn. All this may have some purists […]
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Meet the Pretty Bloody ladies
The horror webmistress speaks slowly and clearly from behind her desk, half-lit in shadow, intoning with sober conviction. “I’m not a dark person,” she says. “I’ve never been in jail, never murdered anyone, never had a crack addiction, and I was never a prostitute.” “If anything,” she adds, “I was just slightly geeky.” This interview […]
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Let the Right One In
The writer Douglas Winter once said that horror is not a genre, it is an emotion. It’s a fitting sentiment to apply to the beautiful Swedish film Let the Right One In, which takes a played-out horror trademark—the vampire love story—and infuses it with great tenderness and depth. On paper, the plot is deceptively simple. […]
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Bruce Springsteen
You will not want to like this album. The title, Working on a Dream, is so nakedly optimistic and Obama-ready that it may make your gorge rise. The lyrics aren’t so hot, either. And in his sinewy middle years, Brucey’s voice is more warbly and strained than ever. But then “The Wrestler” will come on […]
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Q-Tip
Mainstream hip-hop sucked in ’08. Overproduction, Auto-Tuned “singing” and overuse of the synthesizer—all signs pointing to a genre in dire need of an enema. Enter The Renaissance, an album that rushes through the system like a sweet and heady colonic. But—contrary to the album title’s suggestion —Q-Tip isn’t orchestrating a hip-hop rebirth. He’s simply doing […]
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Homegrown Skateboards’ wheel life
Wheel life It’s no grind: Homegrown Skateboards’ new promo film Knock on Wood celebrates the team and their skills. Alison Lang avoids the concrete. For the uninitiated, the average skateboarding video makes the whole thing look pretty easy. That is, until a hapless rider hits the lip of a curb the wrong way and hits […]
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Drop-In
Drop-InDave Lapp(Conundrum Press)The story of the well-intentioned teacher working in a cross-cultural environment appears often in North American pop culture. We’ve seen the idea mined for both its cheesily dramatic possibilities (Dangerous Minds) and its satiric potential (Hamlet 2). But Toronto artist Dave Lapp captures the experience at its most genuine. For 10 years, Lapp […]