Yesterday afternoon, hundreds of people who were way cooler than Torontoist came out to the Gladstone Hotel to see the 175 independent publishers, artists, and writers at Canzine, Canada’s largest zine fair and festival of alternative culture. The day-long event was organized by Broken Pencil, the quarterly magazine dedicated to all things underground culture and the independent arts.
Twelve thousand dollars. That’s the budget the organizers of the first edition of the International Festival of Authors (or Harbourfront International Authors' Festival, as it was called then) had to work with in 1980 to showcase twenty-two writers of varying infamy. Capacity crowds throughout the six-day event proved to organizers and potential sponsors that Toronto could support a literary festival.
In 1993, CPG (Community Programs Group) began publishing The New Jr. Jays Magazine, an eclectic mix of baseball, sci-fi, health and safety tips, and overt product placement. The magazine was designed to develop the Jays’ younger fan base, and featured comics, baseball articles, interviews with fans and players, and movie, book, and video game reviews. For only five dollars a year, Jr. Jays club members received four issues, a personalized membership card, and several Topps baseball cards. In the words of Ed Conroy, the publisher of The Magazine, a monthly magazine for kids, and a former Jr. Jays writer, "You couldn’t make something like this today."
Book season is well and firmly upon us. Like the changing colours of the leaves and the rediscovery of the scarves in the back of your closet, the sudden surge of literary prizes and the annual return of the International Festival of Authors signal that autumn is decidedly here. And it makes sense, really: what better way to combat the chill than with a pile of books that keep you safely indoors?
The internet, many people like to remark offhand, is killing print. With a twenty-four-hour news cycle better served by the instant response times of broadcast and online outlets (including the online arms of print publications who will run those same stories in the next morning's paper), e-books finally taking off, and shortening attention spans that prize bells and whistles over the sedate pleasures of slow perusal, the old-fashioned printed word is facing hard times. Or so this line of thought goes.
With the closure of Pages Books a couple of months ago, Toronto lost one of its great literary institutions. As we reported at the time, however, the news wasn't entirely grim: "There is, fortunately," we said, "the silveriest of silver linings, which is that Pages' much-loved programming, run under the banner This Is Not A Reading Series (TINARS), will continue."
After street artist (and Torontoist contributor) Posterchild finished philosopher flâneur Mark Kingwell's recent book, Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City, the Vandalist curator and street art advocate noticed that Kingwell's celebration of concrete and the cities built out of it missed one reverie in particular: graffiti.
Now ranked as Amazon's best-selling product, the Kindle has been a remarkable success in the American marketplace, possibly signalling that e-book readers have reached a tipping point. The devices can download books wirelessly without being tethered to a computer, and text is displayed on a reflective electronic paper screen, which isn't backlit and uses very little power. The Kindle has been available south of the border for two years, and in a press release late yesterday, Amazon announced the rollout of their iconic e-book reader in more than a hundred countries. While consumers in places like Botswana, Sri Lanka, and Mongolia are now able to order the thin white tablet, however, Canadians are—again—left twisting in the breeze.
The contenders for Canada's most prestigious literary award, the Giller Prize, were announced a few minutes ago. On the shortlist this year are: Kim Echlin for The Disappeared (Hamish Hamilton); Annabel Lyon for The Golden Mean (Random House); Linden MacIntyre for The Bishop's Man (Random House); Colin McAdam for Fall (Hamish Hamilton); Anne Michaels for The Winter Vault (McClelland & Stewart). This is one of those times when just being nominated really is a boon—shortlisted authors routinely see a significant spike in sales and exposure. The winner of the Giller almost inevitably becomes a national bestseller, in addition to claiming the fifty-thousand-dollar prize.
Parkdale was established in the late nineteenth century as a suburban enclave where middle-class families could enjoy parks, the lakeshore, and the new exhibition grounds far from the bustle of the central city. Over the course of the twentieth century, Parkdale became increasingly seen as a slum at the end of a downward spiral. Then, in more recent years, the neighbourhood has been resurrected as a gentrifying urban village. So goes the commonly accepted version of Parkdale's history.
Evan Munday’s Quarter-Life Crisis: Only the Good Die Yung is the first book in a new graphic novel series set in a post-apocalyptic Toronto where only twenty-five-year-olds have survived. In this dystopian future, mindless robots control Queen’s Park, a vile organization runs the Rogers Centre, and brainless thugs in bad suits roam Bay Street. (This is fiction, right?) The story is told from the perspective of Harper Yung, a former record-store clerk and quintessential hipster. Since the disaster, he and his brother Aaron have taken refuge in the "box of doom" over the ruins of OCAD, and the two stay alive by scavenging for copper to trade with the Rogers, a paramilitary outfit that controls most of the resources left in the downtown core.
Remember The NeverEnding Story? That 1984 film about some kid who gets lost in a magic book and ends up having an excellent adventure involving a giant, flying, luckdragon?
This year's edition of TIFF marks the first time in quite a while that the opening film—Creation—isn't a "Toronto film" in some sense. But don't think that that's an indicator the festival has forgotten its hometown roots.
So you have Gossip Girl seasons one and two on DVD and no one likes the show more than you. But have you ever laid awake at night wondering, "How many husbands has Lily van der Woodsen had? What song do Blair and Chuck make out to in the back of the limo? Who designed the dress Serena wore in 'Seventeen Candles'?" Sure you have.
Earlier this week, Lula Lounge was converted into a world in which hip-hop reigned supreme. As part of Manifesto's One City Series, hip-hop heads and curious media-types came out to support Toronto author Dalton Higgins at the launch his latest book. Hip Hop World —his newest contribution—is a thorough examination of hip-hop culture from a global perspective.
After thirty years, one of Toronto's most legendary independent bookstores will close its doors for good in only a few more hours. At Pages Books and Magazines, customers are scouring the almost bare shelves looking for an excuse to make one more purchase.
It’s a surreal experience—interviewing a guy about an online “lifecasting” experiment and unwittingly becoming a part of it. But if there’s one lesson we can take away from the hour we spent with Hal Niedzviecki and his surveillance equipment (in his home, no less), it’s this: we should probably get used to it. That is, we should—and you should—probably get used to being watched.
"Nothing ever ends," the bright blue Doctor Manhattan tells Adrian Veidt towards the end of Watchmen, the seminal graphic novel about costumed heroes. Consistently emotionally unaffected, Doctor Manhattan thinks in purely logical terms, and Veidt, the world's smartest man, has (spoiler alert!) just killed millions in an elaborate plot intended to rescue a deteriorating world. For the first time, though, Veidt seems in some small way insecure about whether that end justified the means, and asks Doctor Manhattan if he "did the right thing," because "It all worked out in the end." "'In the end'?" Doctor Manhattan replies, "Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends."
The Eglinton was the grandest of Toronto's Art Deco movie houses. People from all over Toronto flocked to Eglinton near Avenue Road for the grand opening showing of King of Burlesque. Kaplan and Sprachman, the prolific pair who would design over one hundred cinemas in Canada, won the Governor General's architecture award for the building in 1937: although it was asymmetrical, its elegant design and fine interior detailing invested a trip to the movies with an aura of sophistication, its defining feature the colourful, neon-lit marquee that's been a neighbourhood icon for generations.
Historicist: Life in Wartime
Weekend Planner: November 7–8, 2009
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