The Miss Universe pageant, that so-appalling-it’s-compelling affair helmed by Donald Trump (how can they still get away with it in 2010? Why can’t we stop watching?), is on tonight, and Torontonians have an excuse to tune in this year—Miss Universe Canada is one of our own. Allow us to introduce Elena Semikina, the 26-year-old, six-foot-one bombshell who’s boldly representing our great nation.
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Toronto’s Elena Semikina competing in Miss Universe pageant tonight
Neil Young’s new album title and release date announced
Hitchhiker will be released in October (Image: 6tee-zeven)
If, as the song goes, Neil Young is getting old, he’s not showing signs of slowing down. A year and a half after the release of his last studio album, Fork in the Road, the nearly 65-year-old Can-rock icon is coming out with a new solo effort: according to Warner Music Canada, it’s called Hitchhiker and is due on October 5. The record is being produced by Daniel Lanois, a Canadian producer-singer-songwriter known for working with the likes of Bob Dylan and U2. The pair have been getting along famously; Lanois told the CBC last month, “There’s an automatic communication system that exists between two Canadian dogs.” Not even a nasty motorcycle accident could keep Lanois away from the project, which he calls “some of [Young’s] best work in some time. We’ve really hit the motherlode.” You just keep right on rockin’, Neil.
William Shatner wants you to know he swears in front of children
Wild Bill's at it again (Shatner: Meredith P.)
Maybe a bit bitter about being passed over for a stint as the new governor general, William Shatner is waging war on political correctness. The fun-hating Parents Television Council (PTC), with no mildly racy “Gossip Girl” ads to provoke its outrage over the summer, is redirecting its boycott-urging energy to the title of Shatner’s new CBS sitcom, $#*! My Dad Says—and Bill is having none of it, reports the Sun.
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Margaret Atwood documentary coming to Toronto in October
Ron Mann’s In the Wake of the Flood, the documentary about Margaret Atwood’s less-than-typical book tour, had its world premiere in Sydney yesterday, but a Toronto gala debut at the soon-to-open Bell Lightbox isn’t far off: the film is slotted to launch the Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival on October 13.
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Hear Margaret Atwood sing with The Sadies
Atwood on The Year of the Flood set (Image: Marco Secchi/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images)
Margaret Atwood’s singing cameo may have been cut from TIFF opening film Score: A Hockey Musical, but she showed the producers what they’re missing by singing on Q yesterday. She performed a song from her unconventional Year of the Floor book tour (billed as “a literary performance with music”), with Canadian indie rock band The Sadies backing her up. The tune—called “The Water-Shrew That Rends Its Prey”—is all Southern saloon-style twang, and Peggy nails it. She’s tone-deaf, sure, but no one can deny that she’s got swagger; we especially like the way she repeatedly chants “Constant threat” like she’s going to eat us, and concludes with a menacing growl (to be fair, the song is about predators). Have a listen here.
Literary vices: there’s a naked book reading tonight at the Gladstone
(Image: Soaringbird)
“Naked Girls Reading” sounds like someone’s half-serious suggestion for getting people hooked on literature again, but that’s the name of the event kicking off the Toronto Burlesque Festival tonight at the Gladstone. The scholarly salon, which has a sci-fi theme this year, will spotlight women reading works by such authors as Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury in nothing but their birthday suits—and maybe a space-age accessory or two. The Globe even wondered whether it might be “the most provocative literary series in the world.”
This Ain’t the Rosedale Library closes after speculation
(Image: Google Maps)
It looks like the curtain has closed on This Ain’t the Rosedale Library—for now, at least. In a blog post explaining that a last-ditch proposal to their landlord was rejected late last week, owners Charlie and Jessie Huisken announced, “The store has no future at this [Kensington Market] location.” While there was initial talk of a fundraiser in the days after the bookstore was locked up and branded with a bailiff’s notice, the Huiskens are now saying, “At this point, a fundraiser could only be a Pyrrhic victory.” They assure supporters that they’ve exhausted all their current options but haven’t lost hope that “the store may re-emerge in the long-term.”
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This Ain’t the Rosedale Library addresses closure rumours
Toronto’s literary set assumed the worst on Saturday when a bailiff’s notice appeared in the window of This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, the Kensington Market (by way of Church Street) indie book institution, informing the business that it has until Thursday to come up with $40,000. Owners Charlie and Jessie Huisken addressed the speculation about their closing on their blog this morning, explaining, “Our situation, which could be told as a long story about the plight of bookstores in Toronto and in many North American cities, is really quite a simple one.”
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Margaret Atwood on the future of books
(Image: Q TV)
Margaret Atwood has spoken on the future of books, and her predictions aren’t as grim as you might think. She is the creator of the LongPen, after all. Far from bemoaning the slow death of paper, Peggy lays out the benefits of e-literacy in a recent post on her blog:
Reading is not decreasing, as feared—in fact it’s increasing, as one must be able to read in order to use the Internet—but it’s being done in different ways… I speculate that the availability of e-books is actually increasing reading, as e-books are cheap, portable en mass, and instantly available. I also speculate—based on the two previous blogposts I did on this subject, and the wide range of comments received—that readers, given the choice, would like to have both formats—the e-book to take on travels long or short, and to read to see if the book is one you might want to keep; and the paper book for favourites, gifts, cozy reading at home (in bed and bath, for instance).
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Eight must-sees: a procrastinator’s guide to Luminato’s last days
If you’ve noticed a buzzing noise hovering over the city this past week, don’t be alarmed—it’s just the sound of concentrated creative activity (and those vuvuzela horns). Luminato is in full swing, with a diverse roster that includes an opera by Rufus Wainwright and an installation involving a displaced, bizarrely outfitted ship. Missed the boat so far? Here, eight must-see events of the final weekend.
PRIMA DONNA
Rufus Wainwright’s debut opera may be kind of meta (it’s about opera), but don’t expect a modern artist’s self-conscious winks and nudges. This is the genre in all its unabashed, melodramatic glory—red roses, shabby grandeur and underdeveloped plot elements. The portrait of a suffering diva is also an undeniable homage to Wainwright’s mother, folk musician Kate McGarrigle, who died earlier this year. Though the story meanders, it comes together somewhat at one climactic moment when the whole cast sings in harmony. June 18 and 19. $50–$200. Elgin Theatre, 189 Yonge St.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's Ship o' Fools (Image: Luminato)
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If the sight of a 30-foot Chinese junk perched in Trinity Bellwoods is disorienting, wait until you climb inside. Canadian experimentalists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have imagined the allegorical vessel as a misty maze, with slapdash contraptions clanking and whirring on all sides; it’s like a nutty professor’s room of rejects. Flickering bulbs and looped sounds create the illusion that the boat is pitching aimlessly to and fro, but you’ll be too charmed to toss up lunch. June 18 to 20. Trinity Bellwoods Park, Queen St. W. and Strachan Ave.
Rufus Wainwright’s debut opera opens in Toronto, earns comparison to “Loblaws grocery bag”
(Image: Rubenstein/Martyna Borkowski)
Rufus Wainwright’s Prima Donna made its North American debut last night as part of Luminato, and critics aren’t exactly tossing roses. The Star condemns the Canadian singer-songwriter’s first opera as “a dramatic wreck,” tossing out cattily that “you can’t get a Louis Vuitton clutch from a Loblaws grocery bag”; the Globe is more charitable. Reviews from over the pond (it premiered in Manchester last summer and arrived in London this past April) were equally mixed, with the Guardian’s Andrew Clements grumbling:
For interminable episodic stretches it seemed as if Prima Donna would take over in my personal pantheon as the worst new opera I’ve ever seen… the banality of what is sung is sometimes breathtaking.
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Margaret Atwood book tour to be released as documentary
Show us your jazz hands (Image: Marco Secchi/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images)
Margaret Atwood has never been run-of-the-mill, and her international tour for The Year of the Flood—her dystopian novel set after a humanity-destroying pandemic—was no snoozy book signing affair. Wanting to “break free from the traditional structure of a book tour,” Atwood employed local actors and choirs at each stop to help narrate her novel through “a literary performance with music.”
Thankfully, Canadian director Ron Mann got it all on film for his documentary In the Wake of the Flood. “There is a marvelous convergence of creative energies coming together around Margaret’s stage performance that I felt important to document,” Mann said. The doc will make its debut this August at Possible Worlds, an annual Canadian film festival in Sydney, Australia; it screens at home in the fall.
Atom Egoyan’s Luminato installation a tribute to the late David Pecaut
David Pecaut (Image: Luminato)
David Pecaut was quite literally a man who followed his dreams. Shortly before his death from cancer this past December, the co-founder of Luminato sent several letters to friend Atom Egoyan describing the experience of waking up each morning, reports the Star. “As I gradually gain consciousness,” reads one e-mail, “I begin to become aware of my situation and the illness and how much things have changed.” This daily shift from peaceful, ignorant reverie to grim actuality struck Pecaut as a kind of “cinematic experience,” and one he wished to be a presence at the fourth annual festival, which he would not be able to attend.
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Margaret Atwood calls plan to close prison farms “dumb as a stump”
Margaret Atwood scared us into improving our recycling habits with her novels about environmental apocalypse, but the CanLit queen doesn’t confine her eco-activism to the realm of fiction. She was in Kingston this weekend to head a protest against the closure of the country’s six prison farms, where inmates currently produce much of their own daily bread. Before the marchers posted their demands on the door of the Correctional Service of Canada, Atwood rallied the crowd with a feisty speech in which she argued that, besides being a big step back from sustainability, the supposed cost-cutting measure is penny-wise and pound foolish: the farm program helps rehabilitate prisoners and equip them for a life outside prison, where they won’t continue to eat up taxpayers’ dollars. The author did serious research on Kingston Penitentiary for her 1996 book Alias Grace, so she probably knows what she’s talking about.
True to form, the ever-candid Atwood didn’t mince words in her conclusion:
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Brad Pitt wins bidding war for rights to Canadian author’s first novel
With Canadian programming shafted from fall TV lineups, it’s nice to know that our lit is still getting some international love. Brad Pitt’s production company has snapped up the film rights to The Imperfectionists, a first novel by Vancouver-raised, U of T–educated Tom Rachman about a flailing English-language paper in Rome.
Christopher Buckley’s gushing review of the book in the New York Times—in which he claims, “[The book] is so good I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off”—sparked a bidding war among a number of producers. Brad, of course, came out on top, as he does in most areas of life.
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