It’s not hard to see why teenage Ellen Page’s character has a crush on cool guy Slim Twig in The Tracey Fragments. The young Toronto musician and actor’s persona exudes the sort of tight-jeaned, music-savvy, cinematic cool you feel like you never got to embrace as a teenager. It’s difficult to tell if there’s a […]
Laura Kenins
Posted inArts + Music
Weird science
“Obviously there’s always weirdos in every city doing experimental music,” musician and composer Zachary Fairbrother explains, nonchalantly. Those weirdos come out to expose the seedy underbelly of Halifax’s music scene—experimental noise, and other offbeat bands and performers—this weekend at the fourth Obey Convention. What started as a handful of shows at One World Cafe in […]
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Kenk: A Graphic Portrait
Kenk is an ambitious book—perhaps overly so. A journalistic graphic novel about infamous Toronto bike thief/ mechanic Igor Kenk, arrested in 2008, the book began as hundreds of hours of documentary footage. Producers/authors Alex Jansen and Richard Poplak turned it into a comic through an elaborate process of photocopying and drawing onto film stills. Jansen […]
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Moving Upstream
Local music collective Upstream Music Association is turning 20 this week, and to celebrate, they’re going back to their roots. The association was formed in 1990, and played its first show at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery. Now, still going strong two decades later, the birthday party includes a retrospective exhibit at the gallery, culminating […]
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Market Day
Mendleman, a young rug weaver waiting for his first child’s arrival, has his life thrown in disarray when he finds out the salesman he relied on has closed up shop and he can no longer get a decent price for his rugs. The story unfolds from the daybreak of one day until the next, slowly […]
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The Pack AD
Vancouver blues-punk duo The Pack AD doesn’t stop, playing 157 shows, producing a new album and driving across the country about a billion times last year. Their third album is more rock ’n’ roll, less bluesy than 2008’s Funeral Mixtape. Making the energy of their live act palpable on this album, you can just about […]
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Black Blizzard
Japanese comic master Tatsumi’s works previously published by D&Q (The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo) are simple, straightforward depictions of the lives of ordinary Japanese citizens in the mid-twentieth century. Black Blizzard was Tatsumi’s breakthrough work, published in 1956 when he was 21, here translated into English for the first […]
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Bicycle Diaries
A book about bicycling from musician David Byrne (of The Talking Heads) sounded like a perfect match. Looking at biking through a handful of different cities from Byrne’s home of New York to Manila to Istanbul, the book’s premise is great, but the actual bicycling content is minimal. Byrne starts each chapter, organized by city, […]
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Grand Trine
Grand Trine promised a rock ‘n’ roll record on this 12-inch EP, and they delivered, sounding more loud and brash in contrast to the experimental sounds of their two earlier tape releases. Opening track “I Am a Magnet” is downright catchy and begs for repeat plays. The psychedelic biker-rock vibe is strong, and this is […]
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Karen Tam trades spaces
Walking into the Khyber building in the fall of 2003, you found offices, a record store, a ceramics studio and a Chinese food restaurant on the second floor. Most of those were legitimate businesses; the restaurant, titled No MSG at Friendship Dinner, was an installation by artist Karen Tam, recreating a typical Chinese-Canadian diner of […]
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Locavore
Food can be exhausting. It’s easier to let the grocery store make our decisions, and listening to others’ food politics can be more exhausting than running a farm. In her travels across Canada to talk with the farmers and chefs trying to get Canadians to eat local, Sarah Elton feels a bit late to the […]
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Crafting The Bad Arts
Twenty-five percent danceable, 25 percent weird, 50 percent fast: this is the breakdown of The Bad Arts’ new self-titled EP. “We picked one [song] of each kind we write,” drummer Andrew Patterson says, “a dancey one, a fast one, a weirder one.” “A couple fast ones,” bassist Corbett Hancey chimes in. With a distinct post-punk […]