We had quite a bit of trouble categorizing this review of The Shapes of Thought by The Einstein's Brain Project, a joint venture between two Calgary artists, Alan Dunning and Paul Woodrow, and Morley Hollenberg, a professor in the Department ...Read More
Mortal Coil Performance Society | Photo by Curran Folkers "Three stilt-walking equine women in white, red and black emerge from nowhere. Amidst fluttering manes and floating silk draperies, the crowd is transported to a world between worlds." Artist Statement | Mortal Coil ...Read More
“The +15 is the term for a network of indoor Calgary walkways that allow downtown workers to commute from building to building sheltered from the weather. Ghost is a 22-second looped video shot in the +15 at a location where ...Read More
Since I first laid my hands on their initial release in 2009, baffled by the logistics of perfect binding books by hand, I've been intrigued by the spirit of the Ferno House micro-press. Comprised of Spencer Gordon, Matt (The Door) ...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 ...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 ...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 ...Read More
When Latour was first recommended to me, it was under the guise of his being an anti-postmodernist. Preying on my open-mindedness, some of my pomophobe friends so very often try to deter me from my postructuralist leanings, or at least ...Read More
At the outset of my thesis research this year, my exposure to Linda Hutcheon's concept of historiographic metafiction really made me feel as though I would never ever come across a more shamelessly coined term of absolute emptiness. I know, ...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 ...Read More
The Book is not dead, nor can it die. The future of the book is its continuous present, its ability to change, adapt, expand, and move with the people who sustain it, the communities who foster it, the lovers of ...Read More
Back in his day, our good friend Shakespeare asserted that "All the world's a stage", but now in the age of the technological reproducibility of art and everyday life, what about the virtual world? This is exactly the domain of The ...Read More
Opera on Steel Bananas? Really? I know, opera isn't something that independent artists in Canada often consider within their realm of influence. Powdered wigs, haughty Italian vocals, fat ladies, and the inevitable presence of the pretense-ridden bourgeois? Our beloved Richard ...Read More
As a lover of contemporary cultural theory, I've made myself entirely incapable of functioning properly as a well-oiled cog in the system. Don't get me wrong, I'm just as much of a cog as everyone else, with my Facebook profile ...Read More
I really wish I could have made it out to more of the HOT DOCS film festival. I managed to make it out to only one night of the Toronto Jewish Film Fest last month, and on my way out ...Read More
"How did froth-head and barm evolve clouds overcast with winter's brume, moulding Man to primordial word-slime. Man the word-mime, jellied in woolpacks - gummed in hazes, scuds. Man the glue, cooked egg-white of hoots and cuckoo calls." ///Meredith Quartermain: Matter I love Bookthug, not only because their ...Read More
Oh yes, it's that time of year again, when forward-thinking fashion trendsetters in the GTA - who have been salivating, trembling and planning for weeks prior - break out the vintage BCBG pumps, buy a new Vena Cava dress, and ...Read More
I'm a shameless litslut. I devour short fiction. There is nothing more intriguing to me than the immediacy of short prose; the narrative's directed focus and inherent sense of urgency within a limited space. In the same way, I've courted ...Read More
I can't lie, the description on the Canadian Stage Company's website citing the "graphic portrayal of sex" in Stephen Sach's adaptation Miss Julie: Freedom Summer totally hooked me. Come on, in February, when everything is gray, cold and gloomy, who ...Read More
Born and raised in the GTA, I'm a public transit kid. I take it everywhere. Even when I moved out to the suburbs for the bulk of my childhood, my Mom didn't have a car and I shelled out my ...Read More
Curated by Emese Varga with the intent of bringing "contemporary Canadian artists and a composer together under one roof to juxtapose perspectives and expressions of what music/sound is to them", Permeate features visual artists Katie Pretti, Scott Everingham, Amanda Clyne, ...Read More
The word postmodern gets thrown around more than a cheap South-Korean hooker. Every now and then, a friend or acquaintance of mine recommends me some piece of art or literature, citing this word and the vague characteristics associated with it ...Read More
Ancient Greek plays are usually modernized with the intent of connecting the morals of the past with contemporary contexts, but Wesley Enoch's interpretation of the Medea in his modern play The Black Medea takes Euripides' concept to a whole new ...Read More
Every year, as the nominees for the Giller Prize are announced, I'm both intrigued by the choices of notable contemporary Canadian fiction, and saddened that Margaret Atwood, for another year, has exercised her hegemonic weight over the Canadian literary world. ...Read More
When people ask me the obligatory "What's your major?" question in polite conversation, I reply with the obvious "English Lit" and dodge the requisite"So i guess you want to be a high-school teacher" by throwing out "...and I want to study postmodern ...Read More
