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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 magazines
Gawker Gotchas: the snarky site’s top six takedowns of Toronto journalists
Reasons to Love Toronto: No. 16, because the play of the year is set in a Korean corner store
For decades, the variety store has served as a centre of Korean-Canadian life—the place where new immigrants find work, build a community and hustle to sell enough chocolate bars and packs of smokes to provide for the next generation. As a kid, the playwright and actor Ins Choi would hang out at a store run by his best friend’s parents—“We’d eat, count the money, check out the porno magazines,” he says—so when he began writing his first play he chose to set it in that formative world. Kim’s Convenience was a huge hit at last year’s Fringe Festival, with audiences queuing around the block. Several theatre companies fought for production rights and the eventual winner, Soulpepper, opened its 2012 season with Kim’s.
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Perfecto Mag launches video about Queen Street West street style
Perfecto magazine’s Diego Armand, May Truong and Kristjan Hayden have taken street style from photos to video in issue five of the online fashion magazine. The local trio toured the streets—mostly Queen Street West—of Toronto with videographer JT Ivanov, and captured some rather faux-candid moments: a girl seductively dropping her shades to reveal darting eyes; a girl taking long strides in draped white clothing; and a girl who’s surprised by the fact that there’s a video camera (yes, she waves hello). Although this video is a reminder that staged street style is rampant these days (and a little hokey), we think Perfecto mag is at least doing something visually compelling with a tired model. Perhaps maybe fewer kaleidoscope effects at the beginning and end next time, since we got a bit dizzy.
Jesse Brown: Why the latest multi-purpose e-readers are great for everything but reading books
The smell of an old book. The heft of a thick novel. The sensation of turning the last page of a ripping yarn with a freshly licked index finger. It’s all a bit silly, and kind of gross.
Old books smell because they’re rotting. Heavy books require dead trees and burnt fuel, as millions of them are shipped around the globe each year. Digitization preserves books forever while all but eliminating their environmental consequences. There are good reasons to resist e-books, but erotic fixation isn’t one of them.
The advantages of paper books arise not from their weight, their texture or any other feature unique to them, but from the features they lack. You can’t check your email from a book. Books don’t suddenly serve you pop-up ads in high-resolution video. Books don’t allow you to instantly stream porn or play addictive bird-flinging games whenever a narrative gets dull. Books are made to be read, and that’s all they’re good for. They are dedicated hardware.
Until recently, e-readers like the Kindle, Nook and Kobo have also been single-purpose machines, designed for nothing but book reading. Since the iPad, that’s changed. To compete with Apple, e-readers have become fully functional general-purpose computers. You can still buy basic e-ink devices, but these will soon be phased out as the new versions take over. On the new gadgets, book reading is just one of many apps, and not a terribly popular one: Google Books is ranked number 63 on the Android charts, behind Netflix, Pokémon and a video game called Drunken Pee. Apple’s iBooks sits at number 53, behind Sudoku and a Tim Hortons app. The fact is, the new e-readers aren’t electronic readers at all. They’re tablets.
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Quoted: Mike Del Grande on Playboy, public libraries and (imaginary) men in trench coats
When I think of libraries I think of wholesome….I don’t think of men in their trench coats in the library.
That’s silver-tongued budget chief Mike Del Grande on the Toronto Public Library’s Playboy magazines and books (and those nefarious men in trench coats who apparently read them). Aspiring Rob Ford spokesperson Toronto Sun muckraker Sue-Ann Levy did a bit of digging to uncover the sordid collection, which consists of microfilm at the Toronto Reference Library and a handful of books scattered throughout the system. “It certainly gives a whole new meaning to jacking up the literacy rate,” she writes in her column. To which we say, who ever talks about “jacking up” the literacy rate? Also, ew. [Toronto Sun]
Today in Toronto: National Geographic Live!
National Geographic Live! The nature and anthropology magazine with the iconic yellow cover has a whole series of lectures happening throughout the U.S., but for some reason Canada has not been a destination until now. The inaugural event is a presentation by Swedish photographer Mattias Klum, who has shot rainforests in Borneo, lions in Asia and glaciers in Iceland. Expect eye-popping visuals and more than a little eco-guilt. Find out more »
Coco Rocha channels a majestic stallion for her recent Dazed and Confused Korea cover shoot
It’s official: not only can model Coco Rocha dance with a horse-like trot, she is confident enough to portray a stallion on the cover of a magazine. Rocha recently posed for this September’s Dazed and Confused Korea, outfitted with shimmering horse ears and a dress with frayed edges that resemble flyaway horsehairs. Given Rocha’s track record of being easy to work with, we assume she didn’t buck once.
Brian Porter and Carrie Low thought they’d hatched the perfect plan to avoid the eight-lane gridlock they faced every week on their drive to the family cottage in the Kawarthas. Porter, a soft-spoken 41-year-old Toronto firefighter, would arrange his work schedule to be home on Friday. He’d pack the car at noon and pick up his daughters, Lily and Amelia, from daycare shortly after lunch. Then, rather than head from their home in the Beach to pick up Low downtown, he’d drive to a strategic pit stop in Oshawa. Low, a slim 41-year-old redhead, works as a lawyer with RBC in the financial district, her days and nights packed, respectively, with meetings and paperwork. Her role in the escape plan was to get off work early and catch the GO train to Oshawa Station. Often, she’d end up working a pressure-packed day until 5 p.m. anyway, leaving Porter and the girls waiting at the station for hours. In the end they never gained that much time—it could still be a challenge to get to the cottage before nightfall. But at least they’d avoided the worst hours on the DVP and the 401. How that disposable pamphlet of infotainment that’s an inescapable part of our daily commute—a.k.a. Metro—is now the most-read paper in the country
(Image: Andrew B. Myers)
It’s 9:30 a.m. on a Thursday, and Metro’s Church Street newsroom is quiet and empty. By now, reporters at every other paper are shuffling into work, slowly gearing up for the daily sprint toward afternoon deadlines. But here, the production team won’t arrive at their desks until 1 p.m., at which point they’ll begin assembling a product that will be read by 1.4 million Canadians—more than any other daily paper in the country. The team includes editors and a production manager, but not a single reporter or writer. Nevertheless, Metro becomes more popular each year, gaining new readers and revenues as the newspaper industry itself implodes.
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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.
McSweeney’s posts excerpts from first issue of David Chang’s Lucky Peach mag
The opening page of Anthony Bourdain’s article on ramen in film (Image: McSweeney’s)
In preparation for David Chang’s impending takeover of Toronto next year, we’re taking a first look at Lucky Peach, the print and iPad publication he’s launching in June. The new quarterly food journal is a collaboration between Chang, Zero Point Zero Production (of Anothony Bourdain: No Reservations fame), writer Peter Meehan and hipster-lit publishing mainstay McSweeney’s, which has just posted some excerpts from the first issue. The focus, unsurprisingly, is ramen.
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The Avenue recap: new Web series “takes” Toronto—and so far, we want it back
Toronto-focused television already has its place in fiction, from the mind-warping fantasy of Being Erica to the gang’s-all-here approach of Metropia. So when The Hills collapsed in Lauren Conrad’s absence and a trashy void needed to be filled, Toronto stepped up with the racial stereotyping of Lake Shore. Or that’s what we thought until we saw The Avenue.
Local production company Fisher/Morris had dollar signs in their eyes after meeting Gregory Gorgeous, a flamboyant, back-treading gay caricature from an undisclosed Ontario suburb, and stuck him in the show. The Avenue is a Toronto-based Web series that has generated some early interest after only five heavily scripted Webisodes (everyone seemed to be talking about its coming finale on Twitter last night). Here, we go back to the beginning to recap the first installment, following the show’s five vacuous wannabes as they tear up over snubbed non-contracts, difficult gay men and the trials transplants face when trying to “make it big” in the dark, mean streets of semi-privileged Toronto.
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With two new products, can Rupert Murdoch and Amazon save news from the Internet?
We’re well past the dark years of 2008-09 when it seemed like newspapers and magazines were an endangered species, but the anxiety has been bubbling along since then. So it’s probably good news that this week has seen some bright, well, news: Today Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp unveiled its iPad-only newspaper, The Daily (“paper” rapidly becoming the superfluous nipple of industry lingo, we guess).
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Jeanne Beker’s favourite 100 stores in Toronto
Few would argue that Jeanne Beker isn’t the high priestess of fashion in Canada—the woman is a legend. We’re more familiar with watching Jeanne explore the runways of Paris than the streets of Toronto, so when Post City Magazines published Jeanne’s picks for the top 100 stores in Toronto, we set about dissecting it. We were able to suss out where her daughter’s bought their prom dresses (Betsey Johnson), the store that makes her drool (The Room), where she goes to find out what the cool kids are up to (Propaganda) and her neighbourhood standby (Gee Beauty). Check out the full list here.
Yesterday’s News: a look behind this week’s Globe and Mail redesign
Phillip Crawley, the publisher of the Globe and Mail, is gambling $1.7 billion on a redesign that could revolutionize the industry. The flubs, the firings and the ticking doomsday clock at our national newspaper
(Illustration: Kagan McLeod)
About four months ago, I cancelled my Globe subscription. I admit I felt a little guilty about the decision; I have several friends who work at the paper or write for it—I myself have written for it frequently—and really, as a journalist and concerned citizen, shouldn’t I be a faithful supporter, or at least a diligent reader, of what is supposedly our foremost national newspaper? But I didn’t feel that guilty. On my charitable days, I think of the Globe as more of a nuisance than a necessity, a compendium of warmed-over wire copy, ham-fisted charticles and increasingly irrelevant or insipid columnists. And, like all newspapers these days, it’s less comprehensive, an emaciated version of its once robust self (an editor once described her section to me as being “skinnier than a Puerto Rican street dog”). This isn’t entirely the Globe’s fault. No one with an Internet connection needs to read a newspaper to feel completely informed; by the time the Globe lands on my doorstep, I’m already thoroughly immersed in the events of the day, having checked my Facebook, Google Reader and Yahoo accounts, scoured a half-dozen news Web sites and dipped into Twitter, where the Globe writers whose work I do admire often provide a stream of entertaining invective, observations and links that is just as valuable as the stories they produce for the paper—sometimes more so. The very notion of information being gathered and analyzed by a few people and the results of that analysis printed on paper that is then trucked, over great distance and at great expense, to homes, offices, newsstands, convenience stores and metal boxes that sit on the street now seems almost absurdly antiquated. How much more efficient, logical and environmentally sustainable (arguably) for us to get that same information transmitted to the devices that most of us now interact with every moment of the day? Read the rest of this entry »
