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Species Counterpoint: Reverberations of Jenny Sampirisi’s Croak
Reviewed in this Sight-Reading: Croak, by Jenny Sampirisi. Coach House Press, 2011. Why did I introduce into the text all those extraordinary frogs and legs and things, all that fermenting matter, isolating them on the page only by the style, the cold and disciplined tone, and demonstrating to the reader how completely I dominated the…
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On the Real Way to Eat like a Caveman
Hear this piece read by its author, Dylan Gordon: [audio: issuetwo/dylan.mp3] Reviewed in this essay: Ancestral Appetites: Food in Prehistory by Kristen J. Gremillion. Cambridge University Press, 2011. We humans have learned to eat a great number of foods, prepared in an ever more astounding variety of ways. And as Ancestral Appetites demonstrates, this range…
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Need-to-Know: On Area 51
Hear this piece read by its author, Matthew Farish: [audio: issuetwo/matt.mp3] Reviewed in this essay: Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base Little, Brown and Co., 2011. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. New American Library, 2010. For two days…
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Everyone and I Stopped Breathing: William Basinski at the Met
Reviewed in this essay: “Remembering September 11,” a concert by the Wordless Music Orchestra at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 11, 2011. William Basinski’s epic four-disc masterwork The Disintegration Loops emerged in 2002 with two backstories. First, Basinski, a little-known classically trained composer, was digitizing analog tape loops of twenty-year-old recordings when…
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Joe Culpepper’s Exits and Entrances at the New Gendai Workstation
Reviewed in this essay: Joe Culpepper, Exits and Entrances New Gendai Workstation, 25 November 2011 What disappears in a vanishing act? Is it the illusionist himself or something within us? And what might it matter when what vanishes is, ultimately, the illusion? In his performance art–magic act Exits and Entrances, performed Friday 25 November at…
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“Hatred Warms the Heart”: Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery: A Novel
Reviewed in this essay: The Prague Cemetery: A Novel by Umberto Eco, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery is a novel about hatred, and about why people love to believe conspiracy theories, which confirm their worst fears about groups they fear or resent. “In some…
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Tattooing The Heart Of Darkness: a Review of Prick: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist
Reviewed in this essay: Prick: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist, by Ashley Little. Tightrope Books, 2011. Though no babe in the woods himself, when Anthony Ant Young, the redheaded protagonist in Ashley Little’s brief debut novel Prick: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist initially enters a Victoria tattoo parlour seeking an apprenticeship, his questionable virtue is unblemished…
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Fashion Designers At The Opera
Reviewed in this essay: Fashion Designers at the Opera, by Helena Matheopoulos. Thames & Hudson, 2011. Season after season both fashion designers and opera producers have to contend with the fact that their work will be hotly debated by the masses. Much of the scrutiny they receive comes from that greyest of all grey…
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William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Grey Mass Hung Over a Chunk of Canadian History
Reviewed in this essay: King: William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Life Guided by the Hand of Destiny by Allan Levine. D&M Publishers Inc., 2011. William Lyon Mackenzie King exists only dimly in our collective consciousness, as a kind of great grey mass hung over a rather substantial chunk of political history. Refreshingly, Allan Levine’s new…
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“Sally Forth, Comrades!”: Jesus Chrysler Drives Full Force into Toronto’s Progressive Theatre Scene
Reviewed in this essay: Jesus Chrysler, at Theatre Pass Muraille, 16 Ryerson Ave., Toronto. Runs until Dec. 11th, 2011. “Sally forth, comrades!” – with these three words you are likely to be ushered into Theatre Pass Muraille’s intimate backspace by a friendly-faced, trouser-clad woman named Jim. You’ll shuffle to your seat while she bickers with…
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Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows
Reviewed in this essay: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. Google. Huffington. Sports scores. Twitter. Text. Blog, blog, blog. Twitt—PHONE CALL!—Email. Facebook. Twitter . . . Does this read like the score of activities that occupy just two minutes of your day? In his Pulitzer-nominated book, The Shallows: What…
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Rothko on a Canadian Stage: a Review of Red
Reviewed in this essay: Red, at the Bluma Appel Theatre at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, 27 Front Street East, Toronto. Runs until Dec. 17. Canadian Stage’s audience has been the topic of many news stories since Matthew Joceyln took over as Artistic Director two years ago. Jocelyn, a Canadian director who has…