Scarcely a month has gone by this year when we haven’t found ourselves at our computer in a rage blackout, pounding out an enraged letter to Spin. The music magazine has spent its quite commendable 20th year publishing lots and lots of lists. (It’s possible we’re in the minority here, but we think the “people […]
Tara Thorne
Posted inArts + Music
Talk of the town
Kirsten Dunst is pissed. As Dunst, in line behind writer-director Cameron Crowe and in front of actor Orlando Bloom, enters a stuffy room in Toronto’s InterContinental Hotel to take her appointed seat, she is bombarded by the flashes and weapon-sized lenses of dozens of wire photographers. “Chris-ten! Chris-ten!” they scream, looking for a photo that […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Culture club
Sketch comedy, lawyer dramas and trailer parks have all had their day on Canadian television. But for 25 years, there has been Degrassi. “I loved Lucy,” says Michele Byers, editor of the just released anthology Growing Up Degrassi: Television, Identity and Youth Cultures. “Lucy was kind of an ideal for a lot of little girls. […]
Posted inArts + Music
Dwell on this
Mammoth how-to-live mag Dwell (“At Home in the Modern World”) celebrates its 5th anniversary, and has dropped a Halifax plug amongst its celebratory issue. A look at “Modern Across America in Print” includes Plain Modern, Malcolm Quantrill’s book about local architecture wunderkind Brian MacKay-Lyons (full disclosure: we once lived in an early BM-L design in […]
Posted inArts + Music
Thumbsucker blues
Mike Mills is 39 years old. At 18 he moved cross-county, from Santa Barbara, California to New York City, New York, where he attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He was a bad student, but he could draw. Art school led to an internship with influential design company M & […]
Posted inArts + Music
Green as Moss
The craziest thing about CocaineGate 2005 is not that Kate Moss does cocaine. (Girl, please! Even if she weren’t a model, her boyfriend, Pete Doherty, is an honest-to-goodness crackhead!) It’s not even that she was photographed doing so (which was awesome). It’s that the waste-of-life fashion industry is pretending that this is an isolated case, […]
Posted inArts + Music
Crash of the titan
“My ego is too huge to not do something that has some impact on our culture,” said Jodie Foster in a 1997 interview, in which she also said, “I keep being in the same movie over and over again. Nobody realizes it but me.” Eight years later, one notion has fed the other to profoundly […]
Posted inArts + Music
4,827 kilometres
Ontario writer and Exclaim! editor Jason Schneider — who co-wrote the essential Canadian rock music tome Have Not Been the Same with Michael Barclay and Ian Andrew Jack — has just released his debut novel, 3,000 Miles, on ECW Press. It follows a handful of Quebecois teens in the aftermath of Kurt Cobain’s suicide as […]
Posted inArts + Music
Screen test
Whole New Thing Co-written by and co-starring Cape Breton’s prodigal son Daniel MacIvor, Whole New Thing is about a sexual awakening of a teenage boy (Aaron Webber, making his screen debut). After he experiences his first wet dream, he writes a 1,000-page book about it (complete with illustrations), so his worried hippie mom (Rebecca Jenkins, […]
Posted inArts + Music
Firking A
We’re generally not that interested in wire stories, those often blandly written nuggets of fluff available to newspapers the world over. But an interesting one drifted across our desk yesterday. It appears “fuck,” in all its multi-purpose glory, has been added to the 40th edition of The Canadian Press Caps and Spelling, a guide for […]
Posted inArts + Music
When the levee breaks
The Wall Street Journal pointed out this week that three years ago, Louisiana newspaper The Times-Picayune ran an in-depth five-part series warning of the hurricane danger to that part of the southern United States. It discussed, at great length, concerns about being surrounded on all sides by water as the ground continued to sink, how […]
Posted inArts + Music
Trail Blazing
With her incredibly auspicious debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, the acclaimed multimedia performance artist Miranda July makes the leap to feature film with such skill and vision it’s hard not to feel a tremor of excitement. A new voice in American cinema has arrived. In the annual guide outlining the programs […]