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Culture Hawker Chronicles: John Bowker and She Said Boom!
In this series, Trevor Abes gets to know the people behind the counter at Toronto’s music stores, book shops, and art galleries. John Bowker is the owner and operator of She Said Boom! Roncesvalles. For five years he served as board director for the Review Cinema and he is the current chair of the Beautification…
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Sea urchins, Wim Wenders and Rapunzel: Bookishness for July 29, 2013
Wim Wenders’s number one rule of filmmaking “You have a choice of being “in the business” or of making movies. If you’d rather do business, don’t hesitate. You’ll get richer, but you won’t have as much fun!” + 49 more. Woody Allen movies as infographics More at Vulture. Rapunzel Syndrome “How disgusting could a condition be…
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Scandals behind the stage: A review of Deidre Kelly’s “Ballerina”
Reviewed in this essay: Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection, Deidre Kelly, Greystone Books, 2012. Following the recent acid-attack on Bolshoi Artistic Director, Sergei Filin, and the scandals unfolding in its wake, the cracks in ballet’s veneer of perfection have never been more visible—or as puzzling—to those outside of the discipline.…
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Turtle Creek Books: A Mississauga Bookstore in the Digital Age
Turtle Creek Books is now located online. Denise Choppin has an inexplicable passion for books. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t reading,” she says. “It makes as much sense to me as breathing.” This love affair began in earnest when Choppin stole her first book as a 10-year-old, lifting The Book of Myths off…
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The Ozu Experience
Next up in Borderless Cinema, our new series profiling lesser-known gems of world cinema, we review “Late Spring.” The film is written by Kogo Noda and Yasujiro Ozu, directed by Yasujiro Ozu, and stars Chishu Ryu, Setsuko Hara, and Haruko Sugimura. Running time 108 minutes. Available on DVD via Criterion Collection. The first time I…
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Reading while drinking, attracting readers, and sending from iStuff: Bookishness for July 22, 2013
Reading more than beer bottle labels “The reality is, going to a bar alone and ordering a drink doesn’t have to reek of sad, lonely cowboy syndrome.” BlogTO rounds up Toronto’s best bars for reading while drinking. Come Sit By Me: A Literary Alternative to Missed Connections “An idea started to gel. Maybe if I’m choosy…
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Poetry Winners, Digital Cosmopolitans, and Hamlet’s Ghost: New Books of Note
Much-anticipated, curious, or simply thrilling, here are some new and notable books out this month. The Griffin Poetry Prize 2013 Anthology: A Selection of the Shortlist (House Of Anansi) edited by Mark Doty, Suzanne Buffam, Wang Ping — The Griffin Poetry Prize honours the world’s best poems written in English. The 2013 anthology includes selections…
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Community Sustains Montreal’s The Word Bookstore
The Word Bookstore is located at 469 Rue Milton, Montreal, Quebec. Only two blocks east of McGill University is The Word, one of Montreal’s premiere independent bookstores with a history as exciting as its academic neighbor. The Word bears a simple and modest exterior that can be easily mistaken for another apartment within the McGill student ghetto.…
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Soundstreams, Dusk Dances, and the Latte Art Smackdown: T.O. Events for July 18-August 1, 2013
Journalist and cultural critic Chuck Klosterman reads from his latest collection of essays entitled I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined). 6:30PM-9:30PM. July 23. Gladstone Hotel. $8-$10. The 19th annual Dusk Dances Festival brings contemporary choreography to Toronto’s public parks. Host dancers lead neighbors, kids, and passersby into dynamic dance routines.…
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Atwood’s BookTweetables No. 3
Margaret Atwood’s best tweets, every two weeks. [View the story “Atwood’s BookTweetables No. 3” on Storify]
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Wild Food Spring #5: Fäviken
In this series, Dylan Gordon considers cookbooks, memoirs and fictions about wild, foraged foods. Reviewed in this essay: Fäviken by Magnus Nilsson, Phaidon Press, 2012. Chef Magnus Nilsson, at “the world’s most isolated and daring restaurant,” deep in the heart of the northern Swedish wilderness, has been called “part Viking lumberjack and part Shaman.” Rebelling against…
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Guess the author, abandonment issues, and voguing dinosaurs: Bookishness for July 15, 2013
Mystery (author) solved “Readers described it as complex, compelling and scintillating. They compared the author — a former military police investigator writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith — to P. D. James, Ruth Rendell and Kate Atkinson. They said the book seemed almost too assured and sophisticated to be a first novel… As it happens, they…