When thinking outside the box just isn't enough
Cold in July While I’d have been more than happy with Matthew C. Hall in a mullet, Sam Shephard being a lethal but loveable old dog, and Don Johnson reliving Vice-era novelties with a car phone the size of an attaché case and a red convertible the size of a tugboat, there’s a lot more […]
Oh ye ole Fantasia Fest. Ye sideburns of geek. Ye vixens of awkward. Ye meowers of dark. Ye forever awesome lineup. It’s been a few years for me, but I’m right pickled to be back in the Fantasia action, and these first few days have not disappointed. Here are a couple of movies you might […]
I ended up at Untitled Sam Mullins Project at the Montreal Fringe because I’m an idiot—this, I promise, is not a disclaimer. The fact is I ended up at Sam Mullins because my Interweb Googleplexing abilities rather failed me in the moment, and while I thought I was in the right place for Johnny Legdick, […]
I’ve never been to a wake, but I can safely say hosting one in a bar, a most Irish affectation, I am told, may come with a certain set of unfortunate but hilarious outcomes. It’s an old cliché that death rituals are about the living—a show of elegy, narcissus eulogies. Sermo Scomber Theatre’s In Memoriam […]
The priest is going on about water. At length. Namely, he’s going on about the presence and abundance, vs. absence and shortage, of it in our lives, in our regions, where we’re from and live, where our souls linger. He’s pretty boring with the words. You can tell by the variety this congregation attracts that […]
In light of the continual push-and-pull-and-fuck-about us Wertern millenials call “being an artist,” I present an abridged list of procrastinations here on my side of Freelance Arsehole blvd.: 1- A relatively lucrative week among the shills down here means that while writing should follow an afternoon of catching up on my more quixotic reading pursuits, […]
You don’t know this by the look of me, but I’m very, very straight. I mean, I grunt whenever I get up. I crack my knuckles, and give things slight punches à la Underwood (there’s an irony there, I know). I do pushups and shadowbox—a Rocky fan. A die-hard Die Hard fan, a roadie for Roadhouse. Along even more […]
“When the curtain rises on that little three-walled room, when those mighty geniuses, those high-priests of art, show us people in the act of eating, drinking, loving, walking, and wearing their coats, and attempt to extract a moral from their insipid talk; when playwrights give us under a thousand different guises the same, same, same […]
There’s this thing I do the second I get in the door: as soon as I’ve removed my shoes, be they oiled leather boots or burnished tan calfskin wingtips, I pull out the large Moneysworth 100% horsehair shoe brush I keep by the door especially for these routine instances and I vigorously, smartly, swiftly give […]
Like most men of art in this au courant city, I feel an overwhelming urge to let my facial hair grow out as winter settles in. It’s a rather invigorating show of machismo, a throwback to the golden age of manhood, and a new dandy object to dote on—a velvety pet to stroke into regal […]
Lioubov, mender of all coats, taperer of pants, hemmer of lock, seamstress of my heart—you are my one good reason for ever, ever stepping into NDG. And today is no different. I carefully descend the neatly snow-swept steps into Elvis Shoe Repair and Valet Svc., your undisputed domain, and find you there as I left […]
St-Henri’s been getting me snickering lately, and I’ll gander you might agree. Folks have been trying to refurbish its tenement-of-yore, slant-floored, jute-insulated grandeur for a while. The speed of it is starting to show. I remember 5-buck two-egg breakfast down at Restaurant Place St-Henri, with its onion soup-soaked “home” fries and its greenish eggs. What […]
What strikes me now from when I first met Anthony Benda is his single-minded, maniacally unwavering focus on coffee, making it and sharing it with some nice folks. I met him in a non-fiction writing workshop in my fourth year at Concordia and while most of the rest of us were trying…
