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,” […]
Arts & Culture
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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 […]
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Going, going, Tong
Redemption is massive. It’s part and parcel of screenwriting 101. You put a guy in a tree, you throw sticks and rocks at him and then you get him down. You want to see him survive and get out of it.” Michael Dowse is talking up his movie, It’s All Gone Pete Tong, a new […]
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Plum deal
Success is in the eye of the beholder, but most of those who are in search of fame and fortune usually end up in bigger cities. The opposite is at least semi-true with graphic and recording artist Bryan Lee O’Malley. The 26-year-old grew up in London, Ontario and eventually relocated to Toronto. However, with a […]
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Teenage fan club
Sitting in a quiet corner of the teen genre — away from crude comedies, gory slashers and believe-in-yourself tweeners—is the coming-of-age film. Sometimes it stars a single protagonist, but more often it’s a group at the apex of its adolescence. The end result is always earnest, heartfelt sentiment, and the best ones manage to sell […]
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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 […]
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Extra Credit
In a vast white room lit by hundreds of metres of bright white fluorescent lights, Alvena Poole waits. She sits at one of ten folding tables set in the middle sixth of the room, closest to the door. Empty white walls, a towering white ceiling and floors tiled in dirty white linoleum surround her. The […]
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Funny girl
Nico the cat judders before springing atop a cafe-style table as comedian/teacher/writer Sherry Lee Hunter, set to swear off the lung rocket habit, fires one up. She inhales, then beats a beeline for an open side window above the sink counter in her compact kitchen. Trim, she moves around the room with the easy grace […]
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Roll credit
Shauna Hatt’s best year working in film in Nova Scotia was 2003. It was the SARS and blackout year in Toronto, a city that for years has been the biggest film production centre in North America outside Los Angeles. American producers, believing the paranoid projections of weak-kneed insurance companies and a plague-ravaged city of mask-wearers, […]
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Heti games
Tucked away in an alley behind Toronto’s earthy Annex neighbourhood is The Green Room, a bohemian watering hole styled with worn couches, cheap beer and unreliable washrooms. It was on The Green Room’s bookshelves that writer Sheila Heti found her muse—a neglected copy of The Life of William Hickling Prescott, written in 1863 by Harvard […]
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Stage duty
Martha Irving has come a long way since her directoral debut for Shipwrecked on a Haunted Island. The play, a terrifying ghost story, opened (and closed) 40-odd years ago in Irving’s friend Karen’s backyard. “I was a real tyrant,” says Irving of her 11-year-old self. “I wanted to play all the parts so I kept […]
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None for the ages
It’s not hard to believe what is said: the Academy Awards were created in the 1920s as a public relations exercise, to boost the California movie business and assuage the egos of the pretty, young stars. Award ceremonies are a coming of age for any industry—it means you’ve arrived, you’re making money and people really, […]
