November 1, 2004 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture
Looking around North America these days, it’s hard not to conclude that much of what was revered as independent culture is suffering from a major identity crisis. Publications that once thrived on “alternative” issues, for ... Read More »
Anyone who’s ever watched an episode of The Simpsons knows that the long-running cartoon is topical, wickedly satirical, subversive, laugh-out-loud hilarious, and has oodles of street cred among disaffected youth who came of age in ... Read More »
November 1, 2004 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture
Though Tom Cruickshank and John de Visser’s Old Toronto Houses focuses exclusively on the domestic architecture of the city that Canada loves to hate, any reader interested in the ideas and building styles that preoccupied ... Read More »
July 19, 2004 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture
The sound of lapping water always sends me into a delicious stupor. Add to that the persistent ding of sailboat masts and you have a moment of perfect communion. At its best, that’s the feeling ... Read More »
May 12, 2004 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture
The Voluptuous Gardener by 1976 Governor-General’s Award-winning poet Joe Rosenblatt does not live up to the hyped controversy already surrounding it. Before it could go to press at the Winnipeg printer that publisher Beach Holme ... Read More »
April 20, 2004 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture
In 1961, when Jane Jacobs wrote about the “attrition of cities by automobiles,” Moshe Safdie had just begun his now-famous career as one of Canada’s most imaginative and successful architects. More than 35 years and ... Read More »
April 20, 2004 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture
There may be only one thing missing from Nicholas Jennings’ Before the Gold Rush: an account of how an almost incoherent Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins got involved in the recording of the 1970s Canadian album Xaviera! ... Read More »
April 20, 2004 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture
Winnipeg was once thought to be Canada’s version of Chicago, a nexus of train lines where freight and people would be transferred for passage between east and west. Victim today of some of the highest ... Read More »
April 20, 2004 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture
A self-described Prairie artist who’s also traveled across Canada, David Collier’s Hamilton Sketchbook ($22.95 paper 1-89597-48-3, 160 pp., Drawn & Quarterly) is the latest in a series of published sketchbooks from the renowned comics publisher. ... Read More »
April 20, 2004 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture
In the postmodern tradition of taking the most irreverent “cultural bottom feeders” and elevating them to the lofty heights of intellectual discourse, curator and writer Peter White, scores with It Pays to Play, an exhibition ... Read More »
April 13, 2004 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture