Culture
Culture
Artists in residence
Making It Montreal, a program designed to promote the work of artistes émigrés in Montreal, was born out of organizers Tasha Anestopoulos and Louis Rastelli’s interest in the city’s status as a breeding ground for young artists. The project, which...
Culture
Moving through memories
The Sentimentalists blurs the line between reality and reminiscence
Early in Johanna Skibsrud’s new novel, The Sentimentalists, the reader realizes things may not be exactly as they seem. Driving north with her sister and her father, who is moving from his home in Fargo to live with his friend...
Culture
Function is the future
Concordia design students unite tradition and innovation
From March 4 to March 20, “Material Applied” – an exhibition that focuses on the relation between art, commerce, and design – will be running as part of Concordia’s Art Matters Festival, a three-week long celebration featuring new work by...
Culture
Doesn't make sense, doesn't matter
Confusion is the order of the day in TNC’s production of The Bald Soprano
The critic Martin Esslin coined the term “absurd” in reference to theatre in the introduction to a Penguin anthology of plays entitled Absurd Drama. The term evokes an anxious confrontation with a meaningless world, a loss of illusion and solution and...
Culture
The XX factor
Montreal artist-run studio seeks to open cyberspace to women
When Paulina Abarca-Cantin talks about how busy she’s been lately, there is no trace of the mopey, late-winter woe felt all over campus. In fact, Abarca-Cantin is positively glowing as she describes “some of the most exciting months ever” for...
Culture
Precious melodies
Silly Kissers release their first vinyl on Arbutus Records
Having released their first two records on their own, Montreal synth-pop band Silly Kissers shook hands with Arbutus records and pressed their very first vinyl release, Precious Necklace, this past February. Better known for their music’s danceability than their lyrics...
Culture
Sound surroundings
“"Ghost Acoustics” explores our relationship with the background noise of our lives
We generally don’t attribute any significance to the sounds that surround us in our daily lives. If we do happen to pay them any attention, they are often dismissed as “background noise,” “noise pollution,” or the like. But for the...
Culture
Big, burly, and beautiful
A step inside the world of Montreal’s bears
Bears are roaming around downtown Montreal. Really. It wouldn’t be unusual to find a variety of these furry guys wandering out of the Beaudry metro station at 12 a.m. on a Saturday, clad in leather or wearing suits and ties,...
Culture
Dâm this looks like a YACHT of fun
McGill alumni-run LOOKOUT organizes a weekend of music
Montreal is crowded with event promoters – a fact that can make weekend planning a chore. Recognizing this, McGill grad Jesse Walden co-founded LOOKOUT in 2004, a creative services company that strives to foster the crème de la crème of...
Culture
Breakfast all day, all night
Growing up, I rarely went “out” for breakfast. I suppose I can attribute the lack of venturing to weekdays of school-morning flurry: staple-less book reports, Froot Loops, and still-unsigned-by-mom-despite-being-due-today field trip allowance wavers all jumbling together cacophonously. As for weekends,...
Culture
The house that Al built
Contemporary poets seek to preserve iconic sanctuary of Canadian poetry
Jack Kerouac had his ’49 Hudson; Leonard Cohen had his tower of song; Al Purdy had his humble A-frame cabin in Ameliasburgh, Ontario on the edge of Roblin Lake. The poet George Bowering writes that Prince Edward County, in which...
Culture Briefs
Vintage melodies
Erin Lang's music has a certain wistful charm about it; her songs contain echoes of an old music box rediscovered in one's attic, or a salon with empty velvet couches and half-finished champagne glasses scattered about. Most of Lang’s music...
Culture
The familial jungle
Dance has a difficult reputation to escape; it’s often thought of as a technically challenging, formally beautiful art form that hasn’t changed much since the Ballets Russes caused a riot at the premiere of the Rite of Spring. However, as...
Culture
Techno feminism
Salons Femmes br@nchées are a proud tradition at Studio XX, Montreal’s bilingual, feminist digital art centre. These evening show-and-tells serve the studio’s mandate to facilitate “the creation and promotion of digital art...to ensure that women are a defining presence in...
Culture
The perils of being earnest
Acclaimed Irish writer explores the frictions that fueled Oscar Wilde
Much of Colm Tóibín’s lecture on Oscar Wilde last Thursday focused on the concept of “doubleness” – the doubleness of being an Irish writer among English gentry, and of being gay in Victorian England. For Wilde, this latter tension was...