Strolling on borrowed ankles Tapping stones together means you are not a couch potato memories are dividing themselves into other memories atoms of memory memory of atoms the yellow of beauty the groan of wood under your boots along the boardwalk echoing across the Thursday lake to where Andy can feel your heart unravelling like […] More »
With Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears splashed across tabloid covers, racing toward early graves, it’s easy to think they’re stupid or sick. But there’s something irresistably subversive about women who won’t behave The website “When Will Amy Winehouse Die?” reads like a macabre count-the-jellybeans contest. How many days does a junkie have left […] More »
Sixty years ago, on the occasion of Quebec’s 340th birthday, the painter Paul Émile Borduas gave to his beloved home province an unusual gift: an evisceration in 14 pages, entitled Le Refus Global (Total Refusal). Written by Borduas, and signed by 15 of his students and friends — members of a group of Québécois artists […] More »
Paraffin & Palm Spilled Salt A bitter of angelica & artichoke with carbolic strengthens & pacifies her body. Or sixpence spent brings up a blood-sweat & blister pops by tonic & suction cups. She’s not bilious but swollen lymphatic. Cracked bone cage filled with paraffin & palm spilled salt. She’s undressed & under wraps — […] More »
Could surfing really help bring Israelis and Palestinians together? Grant Shilling meets the beach bums, peace activists, and ex-soldiers who believe it’s possible Surf’s up in Ashkelon. So I hop on the train in Tel Aviv bound for the southern Israeli city with my surfboard bag in tow. The bag, stencilled with Boards Not Bombs, […] More »
The legalization of gay marriage in Canada has coincided with an era that might be dubbed the first “queer baby boom.” As such, this generation of queer parents and their children have been forced to adopt the ambivalent role of pioneers in a social space in which the model of the “traditional” nuclear family does […] More »
In early fall of 1950, Len Dobbin stepped out of a listening booth on Rue Ste-Catherine in Montreal to find himself confronted by five New York jazz enthusiasts seeking potential founders for a satellite jazz appreciation society. Only 15 years old at the time, Dobbin had never met enough fans to think the project would […] More »
For seven days in July, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission met in Gatineau, Quebec, to deliberate on the future of the Canadian internet. Until this summer, the CRTC took an essentially laissez-faire approach to the web: it was too new and too poorly understood to start carving out rules to govern it. But the […] More »
On May 5, 2006, 35 Toronto area video-game developers converged in one spot with a particular goal in mind: to create an entire game, start to finish, in just three days. It was a daunting task, but in the end 10 completed games were assembled, while seven others came just short of the deadline. The […] More »
CanLit has the literary equivalent of the Y2K bug—it can’t flip over into this century When he delivers public lectures, editor and writer John Metcalf is fond of illustrating CanLit’s paradoxical obsession with tales of the rural past by describing the query letter he once received from a then-unheard-of Russell Smith. Metcalf claims that Smith […] More »
In choosing Veronica over Betty, Archie Andrews overturns 70 years’ worth of cultural expectations “Just a matter of skill, that’s all!” Archie Andrews’ first words (said as he stood precariously atop his bike) may have seemed spontaneous in 1941, but 70 years have imbued the line with more weight than a supersized chocolate malt. The […] More »