picks by Lindsay Raining Bird All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (Knopf) This Giller Prize nominated novel from heavy hitter Miriam Toews is about Elfrieda—a talented concert pianist who desperately wants to die—and her younger sister Yolandi who can’t stop trying to convince her to live. Spanning their childhood and Elf’s most recent suicide […]
Kevin Hartford
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Astral Swans, the hippie in the punk rock van
Asked to contrast the experience of listening to an album by Calgary’s Astral Swans versus seeing the band live, frontman/mastermind Matt Swann explains: “The recordings have more instrumentation. Live, I usually play solo, or ideally with a drummer.” And there’s nothing like the real thing, apparently: “Physically I’m quite striking,” jokes Swann. “I’ve had a […]
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Who to see at Word on the Street
Though it’s only one day long, the Word on the Street Festival packs in the special guests and artfully highlights local talent. Ending with the East Coast Literary Awards, this is an unofficial literary week in Halifax. Our powerful poet laureate El Jones releases her debut book Thursday night, and reads at WOTS on Sunday. […]
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My Funeral: the dry run puts the fun in funeral
You’ve got three more chances to see Jane Kansas’ Fringe play My Funeral: the dry run, with shows tonight, Friday, and Saturday at Gottingen Street’s (((Parentheses Gallery))). “I’ve been thinking about my funeral for many years,” says Kansas, “and then in February my sister dropped dead. In March, I was talking about my funeral to […]
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On the Fringe
This year, the 24th Atlantic Fringe Festival went big. Boasting a whopping 350 performances of 60 shows, and with every single ticket coming in at less than $10—you owe it to yourself to catch at least one. Local and international theatre troupes, comedians and playwrights flood the city with their creations, all you have to […]
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Get on the bus with Legoland
Legoland is a musical about two bus-hopping, drug-dealing, ex-hippie runaways, Penny (Maggie Hammel) and Ezra (Henricus Gielis), who are forced to sing and dance as part of their community service. Their genre of choice? Vaudeville, which is “fast-paced, fun and predictably unpredictable,” says the show’s director, Gillian Clark. Popular in the late 19th and […]
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Androidgynous’ robot love
If you’re wandering around Halifax and see a man in make-up holding hands with a doll that’s holding hands with a robot, fear not—it’s just actor Ian Mullan promoting his Fringe show, Androidgynous. Mullan will be playing two roles, lovelorn Aunt June and her young, robot-obsessed charge Riley. “I was a kid who loved machines […]
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Seconds chances
If you’ve ever missed an opportunity to get the autograph of noted comics writer/artist Bryan Lee O’Malley, you’ll get another chance when he visits Strange Adventures in Halifax on August 2 as part of the tour for Seconds, his new book about restaurant meals, house spirits and magical, mushroom-induced do-overs. Similar to the good fortune […]
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Cool for Jack’s Cats
“It’s the sum total of all the skill and experience and music that we love,” is how Jack Malmstrom describes Low Down Dirty Swing, Live, the new album by his jazz band. “It’s a really accurate record of what it’s like to hear a live Jack’s Cats performance.” And while that might seem obvious given […]
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Low shows what two decades can do
OBEY festival focuses on artists who embrace innovation and experimentation, and though Minnesota-based band Low is known more for its downbeat music and minimalist arrangements, they’re also pretty progressive when they want to be. Note the furor stirred up by their set at last year’s Rock the Garden in Minneapolis, in which they played one […]
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Mary Fay Coady speaks from the heart
”I want the audience to experience a piece of theatre that feels like an intimate conversation,” says actor Mary Fay Coady, who will perform a monologue from her play Tender Beast at Agricola’s Lost and Found as part of this year’s OBEY. “I like talking about matters of the heart, and we all have one […]
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Group effort
Montreal band Fakes insists it fell into punk: “We were not really familiar with our instruments when we started,” says guitarist Frankie Burge, “so it seemed like the most accessible genre to us. We just wanted to have fun and do something cathartic.” After talking about starting a band with singer Hilary King, the two […]