November 15, 2009 My, my! November has been a crazy month for SB thus far! We started off the month at Canzine 2009, we just launched our first print project, GULCH, with Tightrope Books on the 12th at the Trash Palace, and we're looking forward to the third installment of the Monthly Eggplant Reading Series this upcoming Tuesday. It's amazing to be able to interact with the artistic community so often, outside of these digital characters, in the realm of readings and basements and Pabst. Check out a few of the photos of the exploits: This issue finds Steel Bananas ...Read More
Background music. In my experience with televisual media, there’s a lot of credence and attention given to jingles, to full bodied orchestras playing news themes, to the soundtrack of popular dramas, to the animated penis frog that infiltrates the minds of children by recycling a song named for an Eddie Murphy character. Music establishes tone and mood, comforts, excites, builds tension, expresses relief. It segues. It communicates with a subversion worn on the sleeve. Soundtracks do horrible and brilliant things to songs. I have a laundry list of my favorite song choices in film, established mostly because I can never hear the ...Read More
Do you ever find that when you try to do anything productive in your house, you always just end up reading arbitrary Wikipedia pages and back-articles from Pitchfork? Does the combination of rumbling roommates, a cat that's always doing something weird and having all of your personal belongings in one spot make accomplishing things a grotesque ordeal? Do you ever just need to get the fuck out of your pad? Well, if you live in a shit-hole in North York, this would definitely ring true. Living downtown, on the other hand, is a whole new bushel of apples, with all ...Read More
Since encountering those flip-books from the bins in the kindergarten classroom, I've always had a soft spot for mix-and-match monsters. Surely you know the ones: sectioned like three-piece barn doors, the upper section bears images of various animal heads; the middle, torsos; the bottom one, legs. Flip to different pages in each section and a new abomination unto Nature is born! Hours of fun! (Or at least the relative equivalent, given a four-year-old's attention span as the frame of reference.) Yes, ever since those ridiculous volumes I've thought on monstrous hybrids with something of a fond and covetous smile. In ...Read More
November sweeps in. A time to remember those who have sacrificed their lives for our peace on the horrid stage of war. A time to wear the red poppy on your breast. A time to lose that aforementioned poppy on your breast somewhere around your apartment. A time to be really paranoid that, while inattentive, you will like, step on that poppy you really swore was still on you that's now somewhere on a floor, maybe your floor, and will totally hurt your foot and suck. It is a time to wait in line with four million fucking people to ...Read More
UNION STATION. Evening. Late summer, 1974. Lights up on a MAN, jeans, scruffy plaid shirt, brown jacket, either drivers cap or short-brimmed fedora perched on HIS head. Suspenders. HE speaks with the drawl and hard ‘R’s of a rural boy from Northern Ontario. HE is 21. HE must picture this GIRL. SHE is burned into HIS mind forever. States between Devilish and Sweet. Brutal honesty. It’s impossible to masturbate in a bus station. All hours of the night people are comin’ and goin’, from all points of the city, the province, the country. A cross-section of Canadiana. It happened in Simcoe County, at ...Read More
“When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” –Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone" "What a swamp the world could become without the call of socialism, the hope of socialism, and the 'danger' of socialism." -Mansoor Hekmat What is going on today? The on-going global financial crisis signalled the fragility of liberal-democratic capitalism, not just in the West, but also on a world scale. Yet the mainstream consensus is that the social order will continue, that the crisis was merely a momentary hiccup that can be fixed and patched, that capitalism will go on. The question is what reform changes will ...Read More
According to my macbook’s built-in dictionary: gam-bol verb (-boled, -bol-ing; Brit. –bolled, -bolling) [intrans.] run or jump about playfully : the man gamboled toward Connie. noun [usu. in sing.] an act of running or jumping about playfully “I guess this explains why I don’t really dance, I confuse running and jumping with dancing. I like to call myself a Song & Dance Man; I tried to explain that to Chris Eaton [Rock Plaza Central] – he had me and my fiancé over for dinner at his house the other night. Other friends of his were there and they asked me, musically, what do I do ...Read More
You've double take'd at enough adverts by know to know that yes, The Toxic Avenger: The Musical is both very real and very here in the city. After Evil Dead and Reefer Madness, the cult film to stage musical craze is one mad ball that will probably continue to roll. But before we see Manos: Hands of Fate, Songs of Joy or a singing impersonation of Robert Z'Dar, I'm glad that The Toxic Avenger, sort of the Citizen Kane of cult cinema, gets its treatment first. But the question is, was I glad to see it? I think there's one thing ...Read More
Photo Credit: Matthew Filipowich// Finding a good, reasonably priced chunk of cow in the downtown sprawl is no simple task. A couple of bars may have specific steak nights that allow for cheaper meat, combined with pitchers of cheap beer, but more often than not such events turn into drunken flops that end up serving rather lacklustre meat. And places that have customarily served the cheaper steaks in the city, notably a local favourite called D-Ganz, no longer exist, in this specific case replaced with a nondescript Indian restaurant. There are tonnes of steakhouses around the city, and surely there are varying ...Read More
When was the last time you heard someone describe a type of music as “rock,” “rap” or “country?” In most cases, these delirious characters are the sorts of people, in the words of Rowan Atkinson, “one emigrates to avoid.” Overly general descriptors are for big-budget record stores and radio formats; in short, they denote passive consumption. Equally annoying are the overly complex explanations of genre (although I’m guilty of this folly myself). “Neo-classical art funk implosion” and “post-rapture ambient electronica” sound more like ice cream flavours than descriptors of sound. Genre distinctions seem to elude linguification more than most signified because, ...Read More
Photos by Madd Hattere // Are You Man Enough? - Phil McAndrew I sure hope so. This 18-page mini-comic by Syracuse, NY-based illustrator Phil McAndrew is quite possibly - and I am pointedly not one for hyperbole - the funniest thing I've ever read. This is the sort of silly absurdism that holds up to multiple, multiple readings and, after showing this thing to almost everyone that has crossed my path while I had the book handy, is not looking to get old any time soon. The story here, spoiler free, revolves around a young artist who seeks the permission of his ...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 Borna Radnik and examines the techno-thriller ‘The Net’ starring Sandra Bullock and Dennis Miller. Synopsis – Spoiler Warning Angela Bennet (Bullock) is a hacker and system analyst for Cathedral, a large software company. Angela works entirely from her home, and her interactions with other people are limited to her Alzheimer’s stricken mother and the people on an ...Read More
A few moons back, I visited local game developers Capybara who had given me two recommendations of things to hit up. One was a ramen noodle place that is apparently behind city hall. The other was The Hand Eye Society. They seemed to bring up this mysterious organization quite a few times in our little sit down, hammering in their importance to the point that I began to wonder if they were some shadowy Illuminati type that ruled over our local game makers with invisible vices. So, stricken with fear, on one of the many nights during a why-am-I-doing-nothing spells ...Read More
So, OK. The first time I tried to write this piece, it just turned into a standard write-up of an event that I went to and it very pointedly didn’t engage with the ideas presented therein at all. I even started it in the standard way that you would start an article revolving around cycling. You guys know the drill: potholes, traffic, streetcar tracks, and boy it sure is tough to be a cyclist these days, et cetera and so forth. That was so harsh. I was a little bit ashamed of myself, I must admit. So, dear reader, consider ...Read More
The internet should have been such a great thing. All the creativity and outlandishness of television and the world that makes television, why isn't that what the internet is made up of? Why do I despise Youtube, but adore cable access television? It can happen, right? That magic? That spark? That oddity? Of course it can. OF COURSE IT CAN. Meet John Kilduff, and for those of you who don't know, he makes art. He also jogs on a tread mill. He also answers phone calls. He also blends drinks, or cooks burgers, or a number of other tasks. He ...Read More
Photo by Matthew Filipowich // Sitting at the counter at Zoots Cafe on Dundas West, recorder running, I'm baffled by how vividly Pelee Island emerges in my mind; a small, isolated, forgotten place, low buildings and open land, log cabins and Victorian homes, trading posts filled with teacups. I lean my head on my hand, listening to Melanie Janisse speak, picturing the wrinkled face of the 82-year-old poet who sells bicycles, or the log cabin full of Scottish sweaters with silver clasps, saucers and old china. The dark, shadowy landscape emerges from her words, fraught with history and legend, evoking a ...Read More
I took last month off to write a horror-theatre themed article in light of the holiday we just celebrated. That was with regard to an entire genre of theatre; this month, I return to my specifically Canadian critiques. A theatre is a building, a space, a warehouse, any physical structure in which an act of performance occurs (as Peter Brook calls it, an "empty space"). The theatre, however, is simply the act of putting on a play. It does not need to exist in an auditorium to be deemed theatre, and in fact (as I have theorized in previous articles) some ...Read More
Kim Sokol is a recent graduate of Sheridan College's Illustration program. She's a Toronto-area illustrator, diving headfirst into the freelance business. She works with ink, watercolour, and a copious helping of Photoshop to create bright, dynamic narrative illustration. She's inspired by strange people, old hats, cars from before 1930, terrible movies, weird mythology, and eye-searing colours. She has found herself in such varied situations as a brief internship at the National Post, illustrating children's travel guides for Paris and Amsterdam, doing an animation for the United Nations World Food Program, and redesigning brochures originally made by a colour-blind engineer. She's starting to ...Read More
Remember, remember the fifth of November, The gunpowder treason and plot, I know of no reason Why the gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot. As I write this sentence, November 5th is one hour and seven minutes away. Soon it’ll be Guy Fawkes Day, which some young people do remember these days thanks to the comic book stylings of Alan Moore and David Lloyd. Perhaps in the U.K. it’s different, but I for one would not have known a thing about Guy Fawkes if it weren’t for the graphic novel V for Vendetta. As you read this, of course, that day will have passed, and I ...Read More
Who says that snap judgements and prejudice aren’t a good thing? Not I, Daniel Bernstein that is for sure. Every month I take a look at the movies that we the viewing audience are to be subjected to and gives my often bitter, twisted thoughts about them. I don’t need to see them to know what is good and bad. I am just that awesome. The Twilight Saga: New Moon Stephanie Meyer is the worst thing to happen to vampires since Anne Rice. I know that I have said this before, but I feel like I need to say it again and ...Read More
As much as I dread school sometimes, and as much as I am horrified at the idea that when I am finished all my education I would have spent 19 years or 76% of my life in school, I value education and recognize that it is a privilege that not everyone has. It is no secret that those from families who are socio-economically advantaged fare better at school and perhaps as a result, end up attending higher-ranked post-secondary institutions. A middle school in Goldsboro, North Carolina really wants to drive that point home by offering higher grades to students who ...Read More
Describing Polaroids is simple. It’s a big, black, paperback photography book containing all of the polaroids that Dash Snow selected to be enlarged and displayed as works of art during his career. However, explaining Dash Snow’s polaroids takes much more consideration. One of the collections eight titles, 'Situations Galore', best describes the miscellany you’ll find within. Sex, rats, drugs, stray dogs, beaches and blood only find coherence in their format of capture; the dusty, bright, yet tepid hues of the Polaroid. In what follows I will set out a brief history of Snow’s early photography to critically situate these situations ...Read More
