Surrealist 7 Stories
Tom Barnett, Murray Furrow and Jackie Torrens take a leap of faith. “It’s like taking a calm bath.” This is the surprising answer that actor Jackie Torrens gives when asked what it’s like to have to endure multiple, speedy costume changes to play several very different women in Neptune’s production of 7 Stories. “I just…
The Coast’s guide to a DIY Halloween
Notes from Meghan Whitton (photographer): cloak was made with a sheet and two drapes. I made the sword out of cardboard and tin foil. the “shield” is an aluminum plate from the dollar store. Fishnets from the dollar store. Dog chain bracelets from the dollar store, and lots of makeup. Photographers’ notes: hockey pads, bike…
Step Up for Stepping Stone
Speaking to Stepping Stone director Rene Ross the other day, I was pretty surprised to learn that the organization (which offers support and outreach to sex workers and former sex workers) has never had a fundraiser before. “We try to only ask for donations when we really need it,” Ross explains. With cutbacks and a…
BJ Snowden Returns
Honorary Maritimer, outsider music hero and all-around delightful human being BJ Snowden is coming to Halifax on November 15 to play a show at Gus’ Pub. If you saw her this summer at Sappyfest or at the Company House, then you know that this woman is not to be missed. Two of my friends ate…
Heart Comes to Halifax
AUGHGHGHGHHGHGHGHGHGHSDHFH Ever watchful sister-in-music Sue Carter Flinn pointed out just now that Heart has Halifax listed as one of the dates on their Canadian tour. The date is February 3 at the Metro Center. Tickets go on sale this Friday and OH MY GOD IT’S HEART AND THEY’RE COMING HERE AND I AM GOING TO…
This Halloween: Loukas Stilldrunk Knows What You Need
hahahahahha you’re a dork loukas Coast art/production guru and one of our top five favorite gingeys Loukas Crowther is also an ace DJ who happens to share a musical predilection that is very close to our own heart – ’80s darkwave. For someone who was never a goth (maybe you can elaborate on this, Loukas?)…
The Return of Monotonix
photo stolen from digbeth.org I know it’s barely Halloween but there’s an early Christmas prezzie on the horizon for all you fans of Israeli stoner/freak-rock. The terrors from Tel Aviv, Monotonix, will be returning to Halifax on December 12th to the Seahorse to presumably blow your faces off with their hairy-chested little antics. Fun to…
TONIGHT: Nick Cave, MC5 and Marilyn Manson
I don’t think this photo is sexy in the least. KNUCKLE BITE! The Fantods are doing a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds tribute this Thursday at Gus’ (along with The Grass as the MC5 and Quiet Parade doing Marilyn Manson.) Nick Cave in any incarnation is sort of like catnip for me—-he makes me…
Chris Benjamin makes Canada Reads longlist
I was hopeful that books might actually stay off of the Idol voting lame-train, but no such luck. But then I thought about it again, and realized that anything that gets people talking about Canadian authors, and draws attention to lesser-known names (AKA un-Atwood) is actually a good thing, especially when it involves one of…
Free Will Astrology
SCORPIO (October 23-November 21) You could really use your own personal doorperson—someone who would accompany you everywhere you go and help you gain entrance through the portals you encounter. In my vision of what you require, this assistant would go further. He or she would find secret camouflaged doors for you and do the equivalent…
I’m Here
Ignore that this Sundance short film is sponsored by a vodka company, tagged “A Love Story in an Absolut World,” or that it originally appeared online in March (eons ago in internet world), this sweet story about a robot—a cross between your mom’s PC and a Lego man—and his clumsy crash-test dummy girlfriend gets a…
Kent Monkman triumphs
The saloon music that plays from video installations as you enter Kent Monkman’s exhibition is deceiving—the collection of his work from 2003 to today betrays anything you’d see in an old western. Romantic, mountainous landscape paintings depict scenes of 19th-century “cowboy and Indian” role reversals, with Aboriginals assuming lead roles and the central figure often…
Indexical Elegies
The book itself bears the design of an index card, from old wooden catalogue drawers with brass handles. The image works perfectly, recalling the certain anxiety of knowing how much one didn’t know about the location of information and the connections that went on and on, seemingly without end or sense. We’re all similarly indexed…
Gypsophilia dons masks, invites you in
The seven members of gypsy jazz band Gypsophilia are donning their masks and inviting you to a masquerade ball for Halloween this Friday, where you can watch their new, stop-motion animated video release made by artists Sydney Smith and Jason Levangie. Local Eastern European-esque band Krasnogorsk and DJ Regalia will round out the night for…
Antony and The Johnsons
The man who can break a thousand hearts with one warble, Antony Hegarty, examines the dark side of nature in his usual morose-cabaret style. At times he follows the path too closely: Hegarty’s most memorable songs are the ones where he shifts the melodrama out of the darkness. He follows Björk’s lead on “Fletta,” a…
Hitting the road with Ryan Cook
Yarmouth native Ryan Cook is going it alone. When he first started working as a full-time musician four years ago, Cook played with backing band Sunny Acres (now The Stanfields, see page 19 for their plight to get home), and remembers “that kind of a show: a very schticky, kind of retro thing.” But with…
Roots Manuva meets Wrongtom
Producer Wrongtom takes tracks from Roots Manuva’s four proper studio releases and reworks them to re-imagine, perhaps re-emphasize the dub underlay of the UK MC’s material. Whole new beats are brought to bear, but sometimes it’s just a matter of making a small change to make a big difference. Tom alters the tempo for “Proper…
Great Georgas
Vancouver artist Hannah Georgas looks headed for fame. With her first full-length album, This is Good, released only this spring, she’s already had radio airplay across the country, her music featured on TV shows and in a Walmart commercial, and cover stories in Exclaim and the Globe and Mail’s arts section. Yet Georgas seems to…
Waka Flocka Flame
The Don Killuminati this is not. This is the kind of music that’s going to make you hide in an alleyway as the car playing it drives by. One of the biggest questions raised after hearing a couple gun onomatopoeias is whether Flocka’s empowering the ignorant or relieving people under a lot of stress. The…
Let’s do the time warp…again!
Come up to the Khyber’s lab and see what’s on the slab—the arts centre is bursting at the seams with Halloween activity, starting with a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at 10pm, followed by a midnight party with music from Duzheknew, Catbag, Fever Pitch, duelling DJs and a special guest. “Come all ye…
The Vaselines
Glasgow’s The Vaselines might have been forgotten had Kurt Cobain not been their biggest fan. Nirvana covered three of their songs: “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam,” “Son of a Gun” and “Molly’s Lips.” Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee have reunited for an album for the first time in 20 years. A listen makes…
Harmer time
The break was initiated by guilt. “I did a kind of crazy and exhausting UK tour,” says Sarah Harmer, calling from her Kingston kitchen just before lunch to report on her four-year absence from our collective consciousness. “I read the book Heat by George Monbiot, and it was all about how to stop the planet…
Dreaming about Drakaina
Meeting French fantasy art model Drakaina at a local diner is like a phone booth rendezvous with Clark Kent. She’s not difficult to spot, even while wearing a wool minidress that demurely covers her double-D chest. It’s the hair that gives Drakaina away: long, blonde curls that cloak her shoulders and back. Fantasy art has…
Hobo with a costume
Jason Johnson sits in his studio surrounded by dangling mannequin parts, suits of armour, a bizarre assortment of masks and animal fur. Strange plastic dolls, dressed in leather and endowed with robotic arms, gas masks, skeleton limbs and anatomically correct genitalia stare menacingly at their creator as he works. Hobo with a Shotgun’s costume designer…
Pop life
She’s one of Hollywood’s biggest, most respected stars, an actor who could probably score an Oscar nomination for getting out of bed in the morning. But to the animators behind Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life, Meryl Streep doesn’t outshine one of the Maritimes’ favourite folkies. “We only hired Meryl because…
Paranormal Activity 2 fizzles
Paranormal Activity was an object lesson in micro-budget terror, one that set an impossibly high bar for a commercially inevitable but artistically redundant prequel that doesn’t leave nearly the same psychological imprint. Katie Featherstone and Micah Sloat reprise their roles, although the story picks up before the events of the first film and centres on…
Kids demand candy
“Glarghhh!” A chorus of gags and retches fills the kitchen. The culprit: raisins. Nicolas (five years old), Matthew (seven), Jade (five), Sarah (nine), Megan (10) and Avery (five) are wide-eyed and pink-cheeked with excitement, counting down the days until Halloween when they will flit up and down sidewalks, haunting doorsteps in search of candy. Not…
Living in the Hereafter
Three people in Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter feel the reverberations of their brushes with death: a Frenchwoman miraculously survives a tsunami; a London kid yearns for his recently deceased twin; a genuine medium, played by Matt Damon, tries to avoid employing his abilities. Hereafter is tedious. It portrays characters consumed with notions of an afterlife, but…
Don’t Fear the Coyote
Coyotes are the new bogeymen. They handily scare small children and simple-minded adults. OK, there’s a slight difference. Last year, bogeymen killed zero Nova Scotians. Coyotes didn’t kill any Nova Scotians either, but two coyotes killed one Toronto visitor—Taylor Mitchell—and that’s a tragic, unusual loss. It’s a tragedy for Mitchell and the people who love…
The Killer Inside Me
Adapted from a 1952 novel by Jim Thompson, we get to know small-town Texas lawman Lou Ford (baby-faced Casey Affleck) who serial-kills and struggles to cover up the evidence of his crimes, narrating all the while. An audience member at Sundance called the film “just horrible” right to director Michael Winterbottom’s face, in response to…
Petty bitch, or is he an asshole?
Q I am a 23-year-old woman. I have been with my boyfriend for three years and we have lived together for two. We have a very healthy sex life and the longer we are together, the better it gets! There is just one problem: He wants me to get really raunchy with his come when…
Scary tax attacks!
I worry when my 10-year-old twins stand on neighbours’ doorsteps shouting, “Trick or treat!” Last Halloween, Jimmy and Joanie collected six razor-blade-bearing apples. Admittedly, the twins were courting disaster. Joanie was garbed in a Stephen Harper outfit complete with a motorized Pinocchio snout that lengthened every time she prorogued, while Jimmy masqueraded as Maggie Thatcher…
Tall tales
Stillness fills the inside of St. John’s United Church, a large red-brick building at the corner of Windsor and Willow streets. The church was closed two years ago when structural and environmental assessments concluded the building was beyond repair. Worshippers now assemble at the nearby Maritime Conservatory. Louisa Horne and Heather Bown have returned to…
Taking in An Evening of Grand Guignol
Just in time for Halloween, Taboo Theatre is bringing some suitably chilling and macabre works to the stage. An Evening of Grand Guignol is made up of three plays that were written in the very early 20th century, when this lurid, sensational style of theatre was popular in France. The evening includes a very funny…
Atlantic Fashion Week falls down
Late Tuesday Atlantic Fashion Week, which disappeared without a word this season, announced it will return in spring 2011. Posted on its Facebook page: “During the fall we will be helping to promote any designers having solo shows.” A wise move. Familiar AFW faces such as Katrina Tuttle, Akshay Tyagi and Chloé Comme Parris (critical…
To Capture Light
In 2008, the first “good sketch and underpainting” of Mary-Colin Chisholm’s To Capture Light was presented to critical acclaim at the SuperNova Festival. Since then, the play has been further workshopped and has grown to a more fully-realized and technically stunning production. It tells the story of Frances Jones Bannerman, a little-known Nova Scotian artist…
Pop Explosion Night Four: Friday, Die-Day
Friday featured my good friend Sleep. My cat concurred (and conquered): so groggy…. Then it was time for some P-I-Z-Z-A: my brother stepped out of ’94 with PIZZA! And some Cold Warps, who were perfect. Paul Hammond was all like “Whatever”, they played some Ramones and there was lots of “ooohs” inserted craftily in the…
Pop Explosion Night Three: G-Dogs and Sombreros
I am still reeling from the last three days while simultaneously coming off of a bit of depression. A red shiny wristband is lying on the floor, there are gross earplugs everywhere, my house is messy and smells like Yoohoo and beer and my cat is suffering a mighty comedown after three days of being…
