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Do not ask Rosie DiManno about her weekend. On Saturday, the Internet took aim at one of the Toronto Star columnist’s recent pieces, and the scathing and hilarious critiques included one from the takedown specialists at Gawker, who awarded her the prize for “Worst Lede of All Time.” At least DiManno can take comfort that she’s not the first of Toronto’s writerly class to run afoul of the site. Below, we rounded up Gawker’s most angry screeds and memorable jabs at Toronto media.
All stories relating to Esquire
Gawker Gotchas: the snarky site’s top six takedowns of Toronto journalists
The Conversation: artist-illustrators Gary Taxali and Graham Roumieu on art, wine and wolverines
(Image: Daniel Ehrenworth)
The place: The Gem on Davenport.
The people: artist-illustrators Gary Taxali and Graham Roumieu.
The subjects: art, wine and wolverines
Gary Taxali’s quirky, handcrafted illustrations, reminiscent of early 20th-century advertising and comics, have graced the pages of Esquire, Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone, as well as several book and rock album covers (his collaboration with singer Aimee Mann earned him a Grammy nomination). The high art crowd loves him, too: his work has appeared at the Whitney and the ROM, and he was a featured artist at the Made in Polaroid 50/50/50 exhibition in New York earlier this fall. Graham Roumieu (above, right) creates droll weekly editorial cartoons for the Globe and Mail and often illustrates for the New York Times and The Walrus. He’s best known, however, for his Bigfoot books—wry, raunchy tomes about a sasquatch who just wants to be understood. Both have new books out: two European publishers have assembled collections of Taxali’s work, while Roumieu recently collaborated with Douglas Coupland on Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People, which features, among other nefarious creatures, a homicidal juice box. We met the pair for drinks at The Gem and listened in as they chatted about the state of their art. Click here for Taxali and Roumieu’s conversation »
Six things we learned about Ryan Gosling, including that he has a shy bladder
In this month’s Esquire cover story, writer Tom Chiarella followed Ryan Gosling as he travelled around New York, stopping in Brooklyn, Coney Island and Manhattan’s East Village. Gosling collaborated on the cover with photographer Perou, and in the magazine, the pair recreated interpretations of Gosling’s recent dreams involving ghostly apparitions. And that’s not even the most interesting stuff we discovered about Canada’s dreamiest movie star (sorry Ryan Reynolds). Here, six more things we learned about Gosling.
1. He doesn’t talk about Breaker High. Read the rest of this entry »
Though Gosling says “I went through puberty in a theme park,” referring to his time spent as a Mouseketeer at Orlando’s Disney World, both he and Chiarella neglect to mention the show all Canadians under 30 first saw Gosling on: Breaker High. Is there a rider in his contract somewhere that says the subject is verboten or something? Really, why on earth would Gosling be embarrassed of playing Sean Stanley Hanlon, the wannabe ladies’ man with a penchant for silk shirts? The rest, after the jump.
In the ’60s, Marshall McLuhan was Toronto’s most famous intellectual; now, the world has finally caught up with him
In the ’60s, McLuhan was hobnobbing with celebrities, advising politicians and forever changing how we think about mass media. A hundred years after his birth, the world has finally caught up with his theories
Marshall McLuhan. (Image: Robert Lansdale Photography/University of Toronto Archives)
Nineteen sixty-five was the turning point of Marshall McLuhan’s career—the Annus McLuhanis, the Year of Marshall Law, the heady, vertiginous breakout of McLuhan-mania. It was the year the irreverent journalist Tom Wolfe published a star-making profile of the Canadian media guru in the New York Herald Tribune that repeatedly asked, in Wolfe’s typically antic, hyperbolic way: what if he is right? “Suppose he is what he sounds like,” Wolfe wrote, “the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov, studs of the intelligentsia game—suppose he is the oracle of the modern times?”
In the 40-odd years since Wolfe first posed this question, many others have asked it again and again. McLuhan was right about so many things. Browse his books, dip into any of the interviews he gave, and almost every probing, aphoristic utterance feels preternaturally prescient. Decades before doomsayers decried the Internet’s negative rewiring of the brain, he dramatically outlined the psychic, physical and social consequences: “One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.” He predicted the slow death of magazines and newspapers: “The monarchy of print has ended and an oligarchy of new media has usurped most of the power of that 500-year-old monarchy.” And he foresaw the rise of crowd-sourced news: “If we pay careful attention to the fact that the press is a mosaic, participant kind of organization and a do-it-yourself kind of world, we can see why it is so necessary to democratic government.” McLuhan anticipated reality TV long before it was a glimmer in the Survivor producer Mark Burnett’s eye: “I used to talk about the global village; I now speak of it more properly as the global theatre. Every kid is now concerned with acting. Doing his thing outside and raising a ruckus in a quest for identity.” When, in his bestselling book The Medium is the Massage, he wrote, “Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new environments created by electric informational media,” he could have been writing about how Twitter and Facebook shaped the Arab Spring. The world that McLuhan conjured is a world that now looks an awful lot like ours.
In his first novel, The Free World, David Bezmozgis finds beauty in a layover from hell
(Image: Spencer Heyfron)
David Bezmozgis’s debut, the 2004 collection Natasha and Other Stories, was an unlikely success, given its targeted subject: Toronto’s ex-Soviet Jewish community. It won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, made the New York Times Notable Books of the Year list, was blurbed by both Jeffrey Eugenides and T. Coraghessan Boyle, and earned a “scary good” from Esquire. His first novel, The Free World, which comes out this month, has already been excerpted in the New Yorker, and the magazine recently anointed Bezmozgis one of its “20 Under 40.” The Free World works as a kind of thematic prequel to Natasha. It’s set during an obscure historical episode in the late 1970s, when thousands of Jewish families emigrating from Russia, Latvia and other Soviet republics were forced to sit and wait in Italy for months while countries such as Canada deliberated on whether to let them in. Bezmozgis—who was born in Latvia 38 years ago and grew up at the north end of Bathurst Street—is not the first author to mine the plights of his immigrant cohort or the story of its arrival. But he is up to a lot more than simply dramatizing family albums. His tale of one clan’s extended layover in Rome and its outskirts is laced with cultural and historical ironies, dark comedy, heartbreak and outbursts of violence. Though Bezmozgis is far from a stylistic innovator—not for him the bravura set pieces or genre bending in vogue among many of his peers—his prose has an almost cold-blooded elegance. Even as he drills down further into the past of one small group, Bezmozgis is doing what all great writers do: building an entire world in fiction.
Skins recap, episode 5: the show that gets high school right–except when it doesn’t
Michelle embraces Stanley (Image: MTV)
This week’s Skins was all about Stanley. We’re not sure why. Doesn’t it feel like we already know Stanley? He’s goofy, gets food all over himself, loves his best friend’s girl and has a poor relationship with his parents. Oh, and he skips school a lot, which was the kickoff to this week’s action-packed (and yet strangely humdrum) episode. Below, our usual reality roundup, this time including why Esquire magazine needs a refresher course on the teen pack mentality.
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Introducing: Oliver Spencer, Queen West’s new menswear boutique
The clothes at Oliver Spencer are wearable and made for cool temperatures (Image: Fraser Abe)
The place: British tailor turned menswear impresario Oliver Spencer has opened his first Canadian outpost (his third shop; the others are in New York City and London) on Queen Street West, smack dab between fellow men’s retailers Fred Perry and Ruins. Spencer has clearly received the Queen Street decor memo: there is the requisite exposed brick, rough-hewn hardwood flooring and kooky accents (this time in the form of beakers, test tubes, butterfly specimens under glass and a human anatomy poster). Beyond the standard-issue interior, there’s a lot for guys to get excited about here—namely, a collection of wearable clothes not too avant-garde (read: weird-looking) to pull off.
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Five things we learned about Canada from Esquire magazine’s grudging cross-border compliment
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The stories just keep on coming: Canada has weathered the economic crisis relatively well, thanks to our prudent and stable banking system. We’ve been praised for it in The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and, earlier this week, Esquire. The monthly offers the compliment only backhandedly, though. Esquire expresses complete surprise that Canada could actually do something right, and dedicates a sizable amount of text to explaining why we suck so much. Below, the five key things we learned about our homeland from the glossy men’s mag.
