Results tagged “eyeweekly”

On Tuesday, Eye published "The new NewMusic?", a fawning article about how MTV, and specifically MTV News, embodies all that was once great but is no longer about MuchMusic and The NewMusic. It's been updated a bit since then, but Google caught it in its original form, and you should go read it right now here [ Google's cached version of the article is now up to date, so you'll have to pretend like the last sentence in the fourth paragraph, in parentheses, isn't there—because it wasn't originally.] Seriously, go. We have a surprise for when you get back.

Due to the climate-controlled museum that shares a wall with St. Vladimir's Theatre, the event space was as chilly as sea air or the review Bert and I received from Eye Weekly on Friday. This must account for the low attendance on Saturday night because the performance surely does not. John E. Nelles, accomplished performer and Hollywood drama coach to the stars (Sam Neill, William Hurt, Jude Law, etc.), can act circles around anyone at Fringe, and he poured his heart and soul into the script, which he adapted from 50s-era humouristic stories centred around the Maine lobster fishery.

Eye is completely, almost annoyingly, obsessed with charts, diagrams, and other math-based minutiae. It's like their thing now! (Well, that, and articles written by Kate Carraway about her personal life.) But that doesn't mean we weren't delighted to open up the paper this morning and see, on the very tip-top of page five, beside their masthead and above their letters, that they'd devised formulas for determining "which websites are essential feeds and which ones are only recycling what you've already read on Yahoo News." It appears that, in Eye's eyes, we are the former! We're "Gawker - Fark - (US Weekly/Stillepost)"; "all the insidery snark that fits." And here we are, writing about it in an insidery and snarky fashion!

No-one's perfect. Darren O'Donnell, for instance, is a spectacularly creative and interesting Torontonian responsible for some of the city's most thrilling projects. As he admitted in Eye's cover story about him from the beginning of April, he's also “paranoid...It’s a mental-health issue. I just think everyone hates me because I hate myself. So it’s very difficult to project that over everyone and everything all of the time.” According to the article, written by Eye's newest staff writer, Chandler Levack—an article significantly less charitable to its subject than you might imagine—O'Donnell's seeing a therapist, and, "in 1993, he spent three days in the psych ward of Toronto General, suffering from delusions that included believing that he could cure AIDS, that 'the universe was magical,' and that he could radiate dangerous high-energy beams from his eye sockets."

Every single one of the 107,000 copies of Now Magazine published each week is read by (on average) three different people. Sure, PMB, whatever you say. Perhaps that's not surprising when your annual studies—used to determine readership numbers and thus a year's worth of ad rates—are based largely on how recognizable a publication's logo is [PDF].

Last week Eye Weekly launched its newly redesigned website, a bland, nondescript piece of work with which we were, at the time, less than impressed. Aside from its use of a puny font that borders on illegible for all but the eagle-eyed, our biggest quibble with the site was its lack of a distinct visual identity to set it apart from its competitors. Days later, Eye's online team has solved that particular problem; unfortunately, eyeweekly.com's new unique identity is "the website with the annoying, irrelevant, and nonsensical hyperlink ads peppered throughout every article"—which, we assume, is not exactly what they were going for.

Miracle of miracles! A month after Eye's paper got a new layout, its website finally got one too. And while it's (predictably) gray and white and red all over, the changes aren't only cosmetic. Eye's online editor, Stuart Berman, told Torontoist in an email this morning that "our previous homepage—while visually robust—didn't fully communicate the idea that eyeweekly.com is very much a daily operation. Now, our new content is displayed in a more logical, chronological flow as opposed to being segregated to specific sections. As a result of the new homepage design, we'll be ramping up our daily efforts even more." Why, that all sounds just like a blog!

Eye has a newish design! As senior editor Ed Keenan wrote on the weekly's website (which, incidentally, still desperately needs a redesign), the new print edition is, he thinks, "the most attractive we’ve ever had." He's pretty much right: overall, the new tweaked design feels a little cleaner, a little smarter, and strikes a nicer balance between image and text. There are new fonts (Minion and Gotham), new headshots for columns (so that's what Kate Carraway looks like!), more dotted and dashed lines (throughout!), lots more graphs (even when they don't make sense to use!), and the promise of greater, significantly more important things than the package's aesthetics being improved too ("more new features in the coming weeks, including space for more in-depth story packages and a variety of new columns").

Eye, we love you, but you're bringing us down.

Eye's Kate Carraway, in an article about how Toronto media is not even close to being mean, critical, or gossipy enough (which Gawker has already had a field day with): "Safe is too easy to get right, as is the all-consuming earnestness of Spacing, Torontoist, BlogTO and the rest of it. This city has needed these outlets (and also Wavelength and the uTOpia series and their similars) to build a sense of self-confidence. But none of them address this other stuff, this gore, that we need to talk about to be real and relevant. By their very/current nature, they can't."

In an article in last Saturday's Globe about NOW and Eye's dwindling readerships, Eye's City Editor Edward Keenan told the Globe that "we keep asking, how do we reinvent ourselves? But maybe we should stop trying to be the best of a dying species." Keenan's words felt a bit out of place, coming, as they did, at the end of an article that featured the publishers of both weeklies assuring the Globe that their papers were definitely not on the way out. (Michael Hollett of NOW: "Those numbers freeze a moment in time....but it's just one of many ways of counting. Our boxes are empty and business is good." Peter Burke of Eye: "The sky isn't falling....the industry remains a solid way for advertisers to reach readers and for journalists to serve a meaningful community of readers." )

Photo of d’bi.young.anitafrika and her son, Moon, courtesy of Women’s Press.

SEPT. 28, 2006: Torontoist publishes "Two Peas In A Pod," a poorly considered article making fun of Eye and Now for both deeming Nuit Blanche significant enough to feature on their covers the same week.

Selected quotes from "Toronto's Type and Tile Heritage" by Edward Keenan, from the November 14th issue of Eye Weekly:

As the unofficial fansite of Roncesvalles' favourite success story (and one of the oldest operating movie theatres in this country), Torontoist is pleased to tell you about another exciting event being staged by the good folks at the Revue Film Society. This time, money will be going towards brand-new educational initiatives the theatre aims to have up and running in early 2008, including a film school for neighborhood kids. This particular event, starting at...

The short story is an unfortunate middle child. Not romanticized like poetry, nor widely read like novels, the short story finds refuge in literary journals, the New Yorker, and writing contests. In fact, the Toronto Star, Broken Pencil, and Eye Weekly all have contests ready for your masterpiece. First, stalwart Toronto Star has its annual short story contest. The top prize includes $5,000 and tuition to the Humber School for Writers for Creative Writing....

Dual protests are set for tomorrow afternoon in Vancouver and Toronto in an effort to maintain media awareness of the misuse of force by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that led to the death of Robert Dziekanski, captured on video by a witness. The video, since viewed (in its various incarnations) by millions of people, documents a confused and clearly agitated Dziekanski sweating and pacing until a fatal confrontation with four RCMP officers killed the 40-year-old Polish immigrant. This week, the government of British Columbia has announced a public inquiry to investigate Dziekanski’s death, “and rightly so,” writes the editorial board in this week's Eye Weekly: "Perhaps the inquiry’s report can communicate some simple steps to prevent this sort of tragedy from ever happening again, and communicate to the RCMP that it is their job to protect people and expose lies, not to kill people and invent cover stories to protect themselves."

"Oh my God, my blow-up doll has been brutally murdered!" shrieked the young woman from the southeast corner of John and Richmond as she clutched her fake-blood-soaked inflatable companion. "My only friend, and someone brutally shot her! The horror! Why hasn't the police security camera done anything about it?!"

Photo by Nora Vass.

Have you entered our Hot Rod competition yet, readers? It's still running. You probably should enter, as it’s the most exciting film you could see this week, in our humble opinion. We really like Andy Samberg, you see. It’s so rarely worth struggling through an episode of Saturday Night Live just to see him (he’s so often wasted) but Hot Rod could be good! It really could!

Michael Moore’s much anticipated Sicko hits, and having seen it, we can say it’s not particularly essential for Canadian viewers to watch, unless you want to feel smug about our lovely health care system, or slightly surprised that it only takes an hour or so in London (Ontario) to be seen in an emergency room. Yes, the film is chock-a-block with anecdotal evidence, and it’s probably to the film’s fault that, as usual, Moore is selective with his anecdotes to only show free universal health care in a positively glowing light.

If you picked up a copy of this week's Eye, you may have noticed that the text along the bottom of the cover claims that "It's official! Eye Weekly has the largest circulation of any urban weekly in Canada!*" Yipee!

The Star's website is reporting that at 10:30 a.m. tomorrow morning, the TTC will announce details of a plan to blanket the city in a network of sixty to eighty kilometres of Light Rapid Transit (or LRT, as it's affectionately called).

Admirers and connoisseurs of adult films mark this down on your calendar: Ron Jeremy, the “hardest working man in showbiz” brings his, er, talents, to Toronto tomorrow evening.

Last week, Matthew Blackett quietly announced that his comic m@b would be taking an early retirement after four years of syndication in Eye Weekly. "I'm still happy with m@b", he writes, "[but] I've lost the energy to think about it. The spark of inspiration of when I saw someone do something insane, or say something off-kilter, has dulled and rarely goes off these days. I'd rather play Tetris on my cell phone that try to eaves-drop on the people in sitting in front of me on the streetcar." The comic's final appearance is slated for Thursday, March 29.

You may know Sasha van Bon Bon as the author of Eye Weekly's sex advice column, "Love Bites," or maybe you've seen her perform with burlesque troupe The Scandelles. This Thursday, Sasha reveals yet another talent, as "The Continental Pasty," an exhibition of her handmade pasties, goes on display at Paul Petro Multiples + Small Works (962 Queen Street West).

On Wednesday and Thursday nights at 9:00, Toronto media superstar Sook-Yin Lee will be in attendance at the Royal's screenings of John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus, the Cannes and TIFF hit (applauded by Eye Weekly's Jason Anderson as "Manhattan with money shots") in which she stars as a New York couples counselor on a quest for her first orgasm. Lee will be participating in a Q&A each night, the questions of which will undoubtedly turn to the Toronto-shot film's unsimulated sex scenes, a veritable Savage Love of possibilities and practises. Girl Cleans Sink, a 2004 short directed by Lee, will precede the feature.

Well, after what could be considered a bit of a drought, there’s enough movies to choke a horse on release in Toronto this week; and that’s a horse which had previously won speed movie-eating competitions.