“When the RCMP took me away that day, they said ‘Don’t come back here, Mrs. King. If you come back here, next time we see you, you’ll be in a body bag.’” And Donna King didn’t go back to her abusive husband that day, or any other. Instead, she went first to emergency shelter Bryony […]
longreads
Posted inNews + Opinion
Part 2: City of the dead
“I can’t go back there,” says my wife, Tami, talking on the cell phone. We’re driving from Carencro into Lafayette to find an insurance office and check out the food stamp line. She listens to the caller, a friend of mine from high school. “That would be great,” Tami says. They’re talking about Minneapolis. Every […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Part 4: The new New Orleans
“Why is this our problem?” I say this to Cindy. My family and I have been in her home in Carencro, Louisiana, about 150 miles west of New Orleans, for a month now. I say this to her when she brings up the matter of the various children in our evacuee household, trying to plan […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Reality cheque
The stress was like a dull throbbing toothache that wouldn’t go away. Her hair fell out, she chewed off her nails and she lost her appetite. Helen Jackson was in a vice grip of stress and anxiety for three years. It started with a single payday loan. “I was scared. I was ashamed to be […]
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
Festival express
In 1981, the world of film festivals was very different. Sundance wasn’t even known by the title of Robert Redford’s most famous role. It was The Utah/US Film Festival, just moved from Salt Lake to Park City. The Toronto International Film Festival was five years old, also under its former name, The Festival of Festivals, […]
Posted inArts + Music
Cutting crew
It’s Saturday night at Stage Nine. Sharp Like Knives are set to play their CD release show. The place is packed, almost too packed for skinny, mop-haired and bespectacled frontman Paul Hammond. “This is almost overwhelming,” Hammond says, looking around at the nearly shoulder-to-shoulder audience threatening to swallow him up. “I didn’t think there’d be […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Finding Fudge
The crowd is still the same, a group in search of a drink and a good time, and welcoming any gender, race and sexual preference. People still frequent the club for weekly events such as karaoke and dancing on Friday and Saturday nights. The renovations, new sign, and new ownership and staff indicate there’s been […]
Posted inLifestyle
Pipe Dreams
As Matt Healy bobs up and down in the ocean just off of Lawrencetown Beach, he is completely indistinguishable from the other 20 surfers in the water—they all look the same from the shore. It doesn’t help that every single one of them is covered from neck to ankle in black neoprene to block out […]
Posted inArts + Music
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 […]
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 inArts + Music
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 […]