When asked who their influences are, the two members of Special Noise mention North of America first. Then Slight Return, Thrush Hermit, the Super Friendz and Burdocks—all Halifax bands the duo has seen live. Greg Napier, the group’s drummer, and Jef Simmons, who sings and plays guitar, sit around a table at the North End […]
Arts + Music
Live theatre, art exhibits, comedy, literary, spoken word – The Coast guide to Halifax and Dartmouth, NS . The downtown, local arts scene – plays, writers, actors, artists and performers. Painting, sculpture, photography, stand-up, stage.
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The smooth talker
Massari, AKA Sari Abboud, lives the life of a smooth talker. His words are like the fine-tailored white suit he wears on the cover of his debut CD—silky and sleek. A request for background information turns into a calling card for a burgeoning Don Juan at a singles’ bar. When asked how old he is, […]
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The Brothers Grimm
Two thousand five has been a big year for big-name filmmakers. For me, the auteurist successes have come from Wong Kar Wai, Steven Spielberg, and to a more modest degree, Hayao Miyazaki, Jim Jarmusch and Tim Burton. On the other end of the spectrum is the newest work by Fernando Meirelles, John Dahl, Ridley Scott […]
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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 […]
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Inside the Fringes
Challenging the very definition of the term fringe, this year’s Atlantic Fringe Festival includes three established companies: Angels and Heroes, Foghorn and Exodus Theatres. Alongside Angels and Heroes’s raunchy Hard-On House (a take-off on George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House) and Foghorn’s emotionally raw I Stand Before You Naked by Joyce Carol Oates, Exodus’s production of […]
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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 […]
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Hers to discover
Montreal songstress Neema’s debut album, Masi, is highly intellectualized pop music accompanied by probing philosophical insights. She is making two intimate stops in Halifax: at The Economy Shoe Shop on August 30 and on September 1 at One World Cafe. “The talented François Turgeon is joining me at both shows,” she says by phone […]
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Making monsters
A block or two from the Via Rail station in Halifax’s lower south end, a nondescript shoebox-style apartment building houses one of the plucky Argyle Gallery’s stable of young creative talents—artist Mary Kim. Her shared flat, really an enlarged bedsit, is hived off into four small rooms, intended, it appears, for tightly budgeted living and […]
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Flowers, Plain And Dukes
Broken Flowers Don Johnston is the type of character Bill Murray has played a lot recently—generally indifferent to his surroundings. As Broken Flowers begins, his fed-up girlfriend leaves him. He then receives an unsigned note from an ex, claiming to have mothered his son. Don doesn’t want to get involved. With his mystery-obsessed family-man neighbour […]
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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,” […]
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Cuff love
Cuff the Duke frontman Wayne Petti is sitting in a ferry terminal in Kitchener. Together with drummer Matt Faris, lead guitar player Jeff Peers and bassist Paul Lowman, he has just finished a 26 hour haul from Winnipeg and is waiting for a boat to take him to play his slot at the Wolfe Island […]