Canadian Music Week, compared to NXNE, may not have as many bands I’d really like to see, and may push headliners that alienate people who really like music, but who can really complain about a handful of badass acts playing venues all over Toronto? Plus, with a media pass through Steel Bananas, I can avoid [...]
5:08am | just finished my gay male lit essay | feeling wired and free | come see the duck!
Perhaps it’s my love of gruesome fetish, or just my lust for gappy-toothed models like Lara Stone, but I love last year’s La Fiction Noir editorial spread in Vogue Paris by Steven Klein. This PG selection really makes me wonder how delicious this shoot could have been. Blood, bondage, and face-paint with a minor in [...]
Yours Truly Presents: The Morning Benders “Excuses” from Yours Truly on Vimeo.
Thanks to Riaz for the tip-off. This is beautiful.
Steel Bananas Presents: Jane’s Party, The Rucksack Willies and Hemingway
Pop, Country & Funk at the Rivoli, March 19th!
Spring is nigh and our good friends, Toronto’s frighteningly charming folk-pop “Rubber Soul” enthusiasts Jane’s Party will be hitting the Rivoli with an alarming force March 19 for what will no doubt be the best possible way for [...]
I am officially and madly obsessed with Maira Kalman. Exploring her work has truly been one of those prize experiences of vast and calamitous emotional movement. I love her bright colours, simple charming captions and beautiful bareness. She moves from existential longing to mundane musing with grace and ease, possessing an honesty that is remarkably [...]
I met award-winning avant-garde composer/Professor Ted Dawson just over year ago in February 2009 at the opening of the Permeate Exhibit at the Music Gallery in Toronto, an art show exploring intersections between music and visual art. Before then, I knew nothing of avant-garde visual notation (I still can’t say I’ve performed any, though I [...]
Ginette Lapalme is a wicked illustrator from Toronto that I recently stumbled upon while searching out more work of the much beloved Michael Comeau. I’m obsessed with her obsession with cats.
“She was one of the dreaded ‘Cat People’ - doomed to slink and prowl and court by night . . . fearing always that a lover’s kiss might change her into a snarling, clawing KILLER!”
This B-movie from 1942 is too good to be true…
…in 69 days! I’m already trembling with excitement. I just sent off my volunteer application to Terry at Shakespeare & Co. so I might be lending a hand in the most renowned bookstore in the world! Even if they reject me because they’re up to their ears with young volunteer writers from around the globe, [...]
I’d throw a stick for you.
I was recently interviewed as part of the Maker Culture Podcast Series, discussing the love of the home-grown SB not-fot-profit and GULCH. Listen to episode six here. I talk fast. From the series:
In this episode, we get our hands around all types of home brewed media—from books to music. What drives people to get out the [...]
I had an epiphany while standing on the corner of Parliament and Carlton today with Curran. We just left Jet Fuel after a particularly fruitful attack on my thesis when I was hit with a profound change of mood and a completely new vision. The world literally looks and feels different to me. I’ve been [...]
Issue 16 of SB for February 2010 is alive, bursting with new faces, new essays, new interviews, and beautiful artwork! For this issue I interviewed the guys from the Ferno House micro-press along with their recent collaborators from the The Emergency Response Unit chapbook press. The cover spot went to Devon Wong’s interview with horror [...]
Up late watching Mitch Fillon’s Southern Souls videos from southern Ontario musicians. Best thing to happen since my beloved Blogotheque. Gravity Wave’s is particularly good. Beautiful music is everywhere.
Made for Living | Starla Bontecou | 2010
I started a new fashion blog. Lord knows I don’t need another goddamn weblog, but I talk about fashion enough to warrant a place where I can keep my button ramblings. I also wanted to use a picture that I made of dog-headed women in design somewhere, so voila!
the perennial mystery:
was it absurdity or existentialism?
sex or love?
Le Cok Boy chante | Starla Bontecou | 2010
I can’t lie: I don’t often find myself in the area of the Scotiabank (formerly The Paramount) Theatre these days. Perhaps it’s the blaring club-tunes and limousines full of drunk suburban high-school girls crying on their Blackberries on Richmond Street, or maybe I left the Entertainment district in that era of my life when hobos [...]
During today’s ritual e-digging I came across simone lueck from L.A. - a woman whose small portfolio of photographs, mostly of glamorous older women, really clubbed me over the head. “Making pictures in LA is good” she writes on her main page, “It’s like sifting through an old trunk filled with worn out fan letters [...]
Carnaval Carnival | Starla Bontecou | 2010
“What’s this? What’re the antagonists doing here - infiltrating their own audience? Well, they’re not, really. It’s somebody else’s audience at the moment, and these nightly spectacles are an appreciable part of the darkside-hours life of the Rocket-capital. The chances for any paradox here, really, are less than you think.”
Zak Smith, did it eat [...]
