Jimmie’s third album is packing extra heat. Maybe it’s the rhythm section: Ryan Peters (Ladyhawk, Lightning Dust) on drums/percussion/backing vocals and Jay Baird, who plays in Feist’s live band, on bass/horns/backing vocals. They fuel the album with more frequent use of faster tempos, matching well with Jimmie’s guitar-playing style, by turns snap-crackle-pop and slash-burn. The […]
Sean Flinn
Posted inLifestyle
Knocked out
Boxing’s on the defensive. The art of pugilism is taking a beating at the hands of mixed martial arts. Ultimate fighting has marketing clout, heavy-hitting hype. Another potential blow to the sweet science comes from the very games being played here. The 2011 Canada Games mark the 40th anniversary—and final appearance, for the foreseeable future—of […]
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The Guardians
Male friendship has two types of rooms. Behind one door, dark and dank spaces remain; behind another, all is airy, fresh and bright. Andrew Pyper explores both states in The Guardians. Trevor, Carl and Randy return to their hometown, Grimshaw, where their old fourth, Ben, has committed suicide. Ben had spent years watching the property […]
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Lennon lives in Nowhere Boy
Sam Taylor-Wood’s background is in visual art. The English artist extends her interest in celebrity as the pinnacle of being watched, observed, revered and judged, to her first feature film. Telling a story of John Lennon is a bold move for a debut director. At and in any age, Lennon exists at monumental scale. This […]
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In Goodwin’s hands
Emeren Garcia pictures Betty Goodwin at a defining moment. “She had this very grand studio and she would create her own installations there,” says the head of touring exhibitions for the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Goodwin, the multidisciplinary Montreal artist who passed away in 2008 at 85, worked with many different materials and in […]
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Et Too, Unit II?
Ann Pocket’s “Urban Animals – Part Two: Rabbits…” (detail) To an outsider, the group’s name, Unit II, has an air of mystery to it. “And we are very mysterious,” says one of its members, Tonia DiRisio, playing along. The Anna Leonowens Gallery director is among more than 30 technical staff at NSCAD exhibiting work in […]
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Critics’ Picks 2010: books
Alexander MacLeod, Light Lifting (Biblioasis) MacLeod’s evocative short stories capture the motion (athletic competition, youthful thrill-seeking, chasing after kids, working), the emotions, motivations and meanings to these movements. –SF Amy Sedaris, Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People (Grand Central Publishing) Amy, get your glue gun. Crafting for Jesus? Beer-cap and pipe-cleaner castanets? The queen of […]
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Critics’ Picks 2010: music
Aloe Blacc, Good Things (Stones Throw) Apollo Ghosts, Mount Benson (independent) It’s criminal to have so many equally passionate and comical pop songs squeezed into 25 minutes, so I plug in my air guitar and press repeat. –RH Arcade Fire, The Suburbs (Merge) Mature and grown-up without losing their trademark energy, Arcade Fire take on […]
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Thirsty for art
The wind blows hard. The holidays approach. A few pints on a patio with friends is a distant memory for most. But Stefan Hancherow and Eleanor King have hung onto a thought hatched out in the sun. “It started in the summer over beer,” begins Hancherow, also the gallery technician at Mount Saint Vincent University […]
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Ceti Alpha
For the first six tracks of this third Ceti Alpha release, Nick Bevan-John uses the power-pop side of his brain. He finds like minds in Michael Jackson (guitar), Ken LeBlanc and Mike O’Neil (bass) and James McNeil (drums). The album kicks off with “Cocaine Teenage Riot,” an opener built around a spiky riff, which pairs […]
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The Native Trees of Canada
The illustrator, a Canadian in New York, re-imagines this country’s trees, each for its abstract possibility. Shapton identifies the trees by their leaves, rendering structure, pattern, texture and pigment in lush watercolour, needles, buds and cones. But the colours are wrong, and purposely so. This is not how the trees actually appear to the empirical […]
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Hauschka
This is an album about travel. The concept is expressed firstly in the instrumentation: a 12-piece string and wind ensemble comprised of members of San Francisco-based Magik*Magik Orchestra. This gets at the varied experiences and emotions one has away from home. But Bertelmann struggles with these multiple parts, unable to give them each a clear […]