“Um, this may sound strange, but have you seen a…” The painter cuts off the question in mid-sentence, as he leans over his scaffolding and opens a pack of Players. Using a fresh cigarette as a pointer, he nods, “The giant ball? It rolled that way, towards the Commons.” By the time the ball—which isn’t […]
Sue Carter Flinn
Posted inArts + Music
Writing the streets
It’s a well-documented fact: Canada is an enormous land mass. You can make this country your home and still never, in your lifetime, experience isolation in the flat prairies, vertigo peering up at the Rockies, or rapture from the alien glow of the Northern Lights. This sense of mystery, which in its darker moments can […]
Posted inArts + Music
D’oh! Where’s my deer?
You might not notice anything out of place among the Mutations in the Garden of Delight. In fact, unless you look at the map for the Port Authority and NSCAD University’s new outdoor sculpture park at the entrance to Halifax Harbourwalk, you wouldn’t know that something is terribly amiss. At some point during the night […]
Posted inArts + Music
Girl Talk
A young girl—still a virgin—is called a slut simply because she lives in a group home. At the age of 10, another girl overhears her principal whisper “slut” as she walks by in a pair of short shorts. Yet another makes the mistake of kissing a boy and ends up being shunned by her classmates […]
Posted inArts + Music
Free Form’s function
“Hold on, let me give a quick hurray — we just found out we’re not lost,” says Ryan Wylie, turning away from his cell phone to cheer on his fellow passengers. Navigation woes are inevitable as the co-founder of the Free Form Film Festival travels across North America in a convoy of three vehicles—two vans […]
Posted inArts + Music
Great escape
Douglas Coupland’s Souvenir of Canada books prove our country’s fascination with our own iconography. From stubby beer bottles to Nanaimo bars, Coupland’s photographic dissection of Canadian culture is one of the most amusing visual interpretations of our home and native land. Artist Leah Modigliani grabs hold of Coup-land’s magnifying glass and looks much deeper. Although […]
Posted inArts + Music
The art of public art
Last February when artist team Christo and Jeanne-Claude cloaked New York’s Central Park with 7,503 saffron panels, created from 99,155 square metres of woven fabric, they accomplished much more than an awe-inspiring installation of public art in one of the world’s most famous landmarks. Their work, formally titled “The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979-2005,” […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Space to Grow
On a lazy Wednesday night, a couple of volunteers from Seymour Green Organic Community Garden bring along plastic bags—there’s plenty of lettuce, perky and alert, ready to take home. The group chats, as some weed and others taste-test the produce. One volunteer crouches down to check beanstalks winding up a homemade wooden cage. A discussion […]
Posted inArts + Music
The stills
It’s easy to pick out photographer David Cieplinski as he turns the corner from the parking lot behind St. Antonio’s Hall on Hunter Street. A camera bag, adorned with a colour wash of rock pins, straddles one shoulder. A palm-sized silver digital camera is hitched onto his belt, clipped alongside a mini-flashlight and a vintage […]
Posted inArts + Music
Sex and the Pope
Long before the Material Girl claimed she had a dick in her brain, years before any of the grrls started rioting or Peaches donned a beard, there was Carole Pope. The former singer of Canadian band Rough Trade, self-described as “crude, lewd, rude and socially unacceptable,” has made a career from pushing, yanking and twisting […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Karen package
New York’s architecture is laid on an invisible foundation of stories. From Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Jonathan Lethem’s requiem for a Motherless Brooklyn, there are few cities in the world that have inspired as many tales of hope, love, loneliness and utter despair. Although it’s early in the morning, you can already hear evidence of […]
Posted inArts + Music
Rob in broad daylight
Everybody should have at least one hobby. Some people enjoy bird watching—filling their fanny packs with binoculars and guide books in hopes of spotting that rare triple-horned, green-bellied finch. For those who prefer People magazine to tiny pecking beaks and hay fever, there’s another, more urban, pastime sweeping our city: celebrity watching. The relatively low […]