Oct, 15th, 2009 Good evening kiddies. I hope you weren't enjoying your stroll along the internet too pleasantly, because I have some... Horrifying news for you. Yes kiddies, the air is getting colder, the leaves are swirling to the ground, the air foggier, the moon more full and rotund. You know what this means kids? Ah, yes. The GHOULS are coming out to play. It is after all, October, the fffffffffffffffffffreakiest month of the year. So what better time than Steel Bananas to have their first ever Ex-Spook-A-Scare-Boo-Scream-A-Fright-Horror-Ganza. If you thought that title was horrifying, just wait till you see what's in ...Read More
Photos by Matthew Filipowich// Steel Bananas’ Photo Editor, Matthew “The Pro” Filipowich and I are sitting at some ill-lit corner booth at the ancient West End haunt, the Lakeview Restaurant on a dark, wet and miserable evening. I’m wrapping up the “official business” section of our meeting with Toronto’s the Schomberg Fair, a band that can very loosely be described as playing psychedelic-folk-rock-blues-gospel-country-punk. The singer-songwriter/guitarist/banjoist/harmonica player of this demonic, ungodly outfit, one Matt Bahen, has ducked out of the interview to get another beer; thus, naturally, the conversation has steered in his direction. “When Matt’s trying to tell us that he wants ...Read More
Tinto Coffee House 89 Roncesvalles Avenue @ Marion Roncesvalles is littered with coffee joints, yet we’ve never ventured out there for our Caffeine-Buzzing purposes. What’s up with that? I don’t know, but it was something that needed to be rectified and rectified it certainly was. The Chief and I, we hopped on the 501 at Gladstone and got stuck in traffic. Shit, we could have walked to Roncesvalles in the time it took for that streetcar to lurch its way over there, and I can assure you that we were mighty surly when we finally made it. We walked into Tinto Coffee ...Read More
would have been a great Halloween show if it hadn’t closed just shy of the 31st. Walking into the Forest City Gallery to see the works meant passing through a sunny front room into what felt like the dim, sparsely decorated living room of someone long gone. Most of the light filling the space comes from the delicate glow of the artworks themselves. Each piece, petrified by the still light, showed signs of a life far removed from the work. Photography by Paul Walde A lampshade covered with the caramelized bodies of a few dozen houseflies sends out amber-tinted rays ...Read More
Balance folks, it's all about balance. I wrote reviews, and alas summer is gone, so both the time and money that's typically required to play, and then talk about, new video games may no longer available. Yet somewhere in the back of my mind I cannot help but shake the feeling I will still be playing a constant stream of new video games anyways... No, no, moving on, moving along. Welcome to a new series, my padawans, welcome to DO OR DO NOT, THERE IS NO TRY. Taking off from where mister Marshall began with his cardinal sins of game ...Read More
First of all, this is not a book review. As a rule, I don't much like book reviews. And what can I say of Michael Chabon's novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union that hasn't already been said? It only takes a glimpse at the disgustingly abundant neon blurbs from North America's biggest papers and magazines on the back cover to make a prospective reader nauseous. Don't let the heaps of praise dissuade you though, the book is actually awesome. No, this is not a book review, but it is what I hope will be the first in a series of spotlight ...Read More
Frankenstein is probably the most popular horror icon in all of English literature, perhaps only rivaled by Dracula. When we usually think of Frankenstein, we think of either Boris Karloff or some bad rendition of the story. Suffice it to say, no one in popular culture actually talks about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the novel that started it all. For those of you who have yet to read Mary Shelley’s novel (hint, read the original 1818 version, not the 1831), the story goes something like this: Victor Frankenstein manages to reanimate a corpse sutured together from various body parts. Horrified at ...Read More
Being an independent artist is a tough wrap. You need to have a day job, a pretty good work ethic and a Rolodex of excuses to legitimize your artistic aspirations. As the rough cut of Marc Boggio’s Fear the Reaper came to a close on the screen in front of me, I realized that making his vision coincide with reality was a damn sight tougher than most. Fear the Reaper is a kung-fu/slasher/superhero film shot guerilla style over the course of about three years. Because of the disparity between having virtually no budget and having genres that necessitate special ...Read More
Despite being a relative misnomer, the term Can lit does have its loose parameters, at least as far as public perception is concerned. Open spaces. Prairies. Cold. Boring. Pastoral shit. Where and how this odd reputation came to be (I'll sidestep the obvious reference) is unclear, but for small-press kids, lit-bums and art-losers, there is a whole realm of fiction outside of the typical Can lit criterion, outside of genre, gender, and grammar restrictions. This stuff has been festering in communities that still, technically, fall under the Can lit umbrella, though somehow, distinctively, fall outside of the realm of big-budget ...Read More
A man walks into a restaurant with his family, chatting amicably and smiling in preparation of a casual meal out, until he looks over the shoulder of another restaurant patron and witnesses utter carnage to a degree that he has never encountered in his narrow aesthetic with cuisine. He takes drastic measures: he roars and covers his son’s eyes at the same moment as he grabs the arm of his wife, tugging her frantically towards the door. “WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?! IT’S HORRIBLE!” Other customers enter the restaurant, looking quizzically at the man as he flails around, disoriented and trying to ...Read More
Every month Daniel Bernstein watches an old movie of questionable quality. Armed with the belief that there are lessons to be learned in all situations, he and another Steel Bananas columnist attempt to find meaning where maybe there isn’t any. This month, Daniel sits with Matt Marshall and attempts to analyze Roger Corman's horror classic, The Terror starring Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson. Synopsis – Spoiler Warning The Terror follows the story of a young French officer at the start of the nineteenth century named Andre (Nicholson). Andre finds himself separated from the rest of his unit and hopelessly lost on a ...Read More
A desk. A man. A radio. Come Together by the Beatles (Aerosmith cover) is heard. I’m telling you, I’m telling you, this is not the Beatles. No, listen – it’s not them! Does that sound like Lennon? Is that John fucking Lennon?! No. You’re a smart man, but you don’t know jack shit about music. Lemme guess, lemme guess, you grew up listening to Aqua or some shit? Hanson? Whenya gonna grow up. You’re in College now, buddy. You need to get your head out of top 40 land. Well, I guess Beatles was top 40 back when. But now it’s ...Read More
My aunt used to have the best Halloween decorations. They were both the highlight and most dreaded part of my childhood Halloweens. I often wondered how much of the design she based solely on the elements that irked me. After all, that would explain why it began to feel like a gauntlet of my personal terrors. Usually I would just have my Mom guide me by hand to the door while I shielded my little eyes with my little dinosaur to Super Mario mitten, so that I could just sit inside the house, eyes fixed on the sounds from the ...Read More
I guess there is a balance in the universe. When a field seems so saturated and overstuffed, it always shoots out a gem that makes the whole ordeal seem just worth it all. When you got sick and tired of zombie movies, Shaun of the Dead made you feel bad about your previous sentiments. Last year, when the last two words you wanted to hear was "vampire romance," Let the Right One In warmed you up and cooled your rage. This year... Well okay, I guess vampires are still the biggest shit this year, so say hello to your great ...Read More
Sure, no one can shut up about vampires right now, but some people, and I mean this, actually know a thing or two about vampires. And of that handful, Elizabeth Miller is probably a key digit. Not only one of Canada's top Vampire experts, she's one of the most respected in the world. She's spent over a decade being the know-all of vampiric knowledge. Having been published several times, her latest is A Dracula Handbook, for all you Twilight dummies that could learn a thing or two (or hey, let's start at a thing, one step at a time y'know?) ...Read More
Justin Erickson is a Toronto-based artist with a particular passion for horror and the macabre. His compositions are generated by working with a variety of illustrative media techniques, digital manipulation, graphic design, and narrative concepts. After graduating from Sheridan College's Illustration program in the spring of 2005, Justin experienced three years of success as a freelance artist before landing a dream position as a Graphic Designer for Rue Morgue Magazine where he has been gruesomely creating, along-side Art Director Gary Pullin, ever since. His success in the illustration and graphic design fields have won him praise from such notable names as Photographer ...Read More
I'd wager that for most everyone reading this, the Art Gallery of Ontario is one of the last places you'd think of when I say the words "horror," "ghostly," "creeptacular" or "Halloween." Since its recent reconstruction (what with its slick modern architecture and interiors so brightly-lit that shadows tell tales of it to their little shadow-children to scare them into brushing their teeth and going to bed on time) the AGO has nothing of the supernatural aura about it that would easily associate a place with Halloween. "So why write about the AGO in the season of spook?" you ask; or, ...Read More
When last we left our time-traveling rock and roll heroes, Jacqui, Steve and Liam, they had just slain the terrible dragon, known to many a villager as Shitty Music. I’m not going to give a full recap of their previous adventures, but needless to say, the Balconies kicked some serious ass all over time and space with the help of a magic cookie and the sheer power of their extreme rocking. It was magnificent. Yes, with the power of their rocking, Shitty Music had been banished from the kingdom of Rock; however, Shitty Music being merely the name of a specific ...Read More
September 22, 2009 Continuing on with our fruits and veggies thing that we've got going on, Steel Bananas recently launched a monthly reading series called the Monthly Eggplant to be held on the third Tuesday of every month - though this was not the case for the first instalment. Hilariously enough, the event, a joint production between SB and the venerable downtown coffee juggernaut, Zoots Cafe, was conceived barely a month before the borrowed microphone was turned on for the first time and the dulcet tones of various local writers rang filtered through an old, battered and borrowed guitar amp and ...Read More
Lately, I’ve been considering the possibilities of the universe. Put aside your skeptical post-postmodernist deconstructionist thinking, and consider. Doesn’t it seem ludicrous to assume we know all there is to know about the universe? Despite scientific developments, what we know about the universe is the equivalent of a grain of sand… that leaves billions of grains to be discovered, and who says one of those grains isn’t an afterlife or another dimension? And if you’re about to argue that you only believe what you know for certain exists, that’s ridiculous. I know Georgia exists. I’ve never been there and (unlike ...Read More
Cannibals clamoring in hordes throughout Ontario, snapping necks with confused slackened jaws, repeating short strings of language that drip off their rotting lips as slowly as the congealed blood of their victims. A crazed man in a car with a crying child, a stroke victim, a news broadcaster, a community, a province entirely helpless as the bizarre zombie-manufacturing AMPS virus - Acquired Metastructural Pediculosis - infects the signifiers of its victims and spreads through comprehension of the signified, wedging itself snugly into that neat pre-lingual gap. Catastrophe. Apocalypse. Language zombies. A semiotic virus. What on Earth could be more allegorical? Here ...Read More
HELLO KIDS, COUNT DUKE FUNKYSTEIN HERE, in case you have yet to notice, this month's issue is extra CREEPY. I did it all for you kids, but the ghost train won't stop there, oh no. Turn down the light, grab a flash light and place it directly under your monitor for the most effective method to dive into this delectable dish, a gallery of ghoul and ghost story from Steel Bananas contributors. Is that blanket wrapped tight enough? Is that thunderstorm rattling loud enough? GOOD! Go on brave reader, though I make no promise you will live to see the ...Read More
Ted Killin Tuesday Sept. 29, 2009: Banana Boy took an easy cross-country jaunt into Sneaky Dee's, only to be blown clear across the room by a shockwave of a larger-than-usual dose of PURE UNADULTERATED ROCK! He has, ever since, turned mystic and reads premonitions... of the future, which is how I know about the event unfolding in the first place. DON'T MISS THIS SHIT HITTING THE FOLIAGE! Sneaky Dees'; what a boosh. September 27 at 9:40pm - Comment - Like And so it was. Indeed the strange and often grotesque story of Banana Boy is occasionally shocking to those of a weak ...Read More
These are some guys. These are some serious guys. These are some guys who take their name from a Jane Austen novel, but play one of the most deafeningly loud and intense live sets you are likely to catch in this town. These are some guys who are so ballsy as to openly and thoroughly admonish their first album when their second record is still a very long way away from release. These guys, these Darcys, these The Darcys are a bunch of bearded, well-dressed dudes with English degrees and currently, they are one of the most exciting and interesting ...Read More
October is here and that means that Halloween is right around the corner. Let's be honest here, Halloween is probably the greatest holiday ever invented ever. It encourages people to dress up, wander the streets at night, and indulge in both candy and liquor. You show me a person who does not like Halloween, and I will show you a person with acute agoraphobia and a weird compulsion for licking stamp glue. With O Hallows eve getting closer every media outlet will soon be turning their attention the festivities. For me this means horror movies. I freely admit that I love ...Read More
For some reason, the search for spooky weird news this month yielded a disproportionately high number of baby-related stories. Maybe my biological clock hasn’t quite ticked long enough yet and I’m just irrationally scared of babies but I think there is something genuinely sinister about a parasite that grows inside of you, sucking up nutrients until it’s ready to be expelled in a bloody mess. Sometimes they come in pairs or trios or more if you’re that crazy Octo-Mom lady. Sometimes they come down your pants like 23-year-old Katherine Allen whose first glimpse of her newborn baby girl came after ...Read More
In the spooky vein of what I suppose is being considered the Metallic Fruit’s ‘Hallowe’en’ issue (that’s how it’s spelled; look it up), I have elected to do a little pondering about the absence of one particular literary genre from the theatrical stage: the genre of horror. While finding its home comfortably for centuries in literature and recently dominating the film medium, horror has all but disappeared from the theatre. Is it perhaps that celluloid began fulfilling the conventions of the horror genre more fully than its live-performance counterpart? I’d like to think not. As long as there has been literature, ...Read More
