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Tag: Toronto

Burton Kramer Film Trailer

A trailer for a short film by Greg Durrell about Canadian graphic designer and painter Burton Kramer to be released in Spring 2012:

Durrell has also published a book about Kramer’s design work called Burton Kramer Identities.

(via Swiss Legacy)

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Francis Ford Coppola at TIFF

You know, what was top of my mind when I was making [“The Conversation”] was I wanted to make the film as beautiful as “Blow-Up.” You know, I had seen “Blow-Up” by Michelangelo Antonioni and I said boy, that’s the kind of film I – those were the kind of films I want to make. I – something that’s unique and it occupies its own kind of thing, and I made “The Conversation.” I sat down to write that after being so enthusiastic about seeing “Blow-Up.” And throughout my career, I have seen great films that have just filled me with pleasure and said, I want to make a film like that. And I think that’s OK for young people to do, you know, because it’s impossible. You set out to imitate something you thought was beautiful but in the end you can’t. You’re going to end up with what you have to say, you know?

Broadcast by NPR’s Fresh Air, director Francis Ford Coppola discusses his career with Cameron Bailey, the co-director of the Toronto International Film Festival, and answers questions from the festival audience:

NPR FRESH AIR: Francis Ford Coppola Reflects On His Career mp3

You can read the transcript of the interview here.

AND if you’ve never seen Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation, you really should make time to watch it…

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Midweek Miscellany

Expanded Original — Geoff Dyer, author of Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, on Penguin Modern Classics and the paintings used on their covers:

The use of different paintings meant each book was a “modern classic” in its own particular way. A side effect was that books I was reading for an education in literature doubled as an introduction to art history… Since then the happiest moments in 35 years of museum-going have occurred when I’ve seen these Penguin Modern Classic paintings on a gallery wall. Especially since the cover often showed only a detail of the original. Seeing the works themselves revealed exactly what had been lost, though I invariably saw it the other way around, with the painting as an expanded version of the Penguin original.

Sci-Fi Diet — Mike Doherty interviews Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan, in Caplansky’s Delicatessen in downtown Toronto:

“My cholesterol is in the science-fiction realm,” he says. You’d expect him to be gargantuan, like Misha Vainberg, the gourmand oligarch from Absurdistan who’s always asking his manservant to make him meat pies, but Shteyngart is a slight fellow, with big black-rimmed glasses and a perpetually amused mien. He’s an ideal dining companion, if you’re not a rabid vegetarian, his speech a mixture of astute cultural observations, probing bons mots and moans of contentment.

That Synching Feeling — James Meek, author of  The People’s Act of Love, on e-books and social reading:

Once there were private libraries; then there were public libraries; now there is the ghost library, where poltergeistic fellow readers may not only be reading the same book as you at any moment but actually underlining the page of the book you are reading seconds before you get to it. They may be next door; they may be in Kamchatka; they may be anywhere, so long as they have Kindle and wifi.

And finally…

An epic twopart interview with John Hodgman, whose new book That Is All has just been published, at the AV Club. It is totally worth it, if only for the extended rant about children, mortality, the apocalypse and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:

I did a little math, and was like, “Wait a minute, Cormac McCarthy is like 75 years old! And he has a 12-year-old son! No wonder he wrote this book!” I’m like, “Cormac McCarthy, you jerk, you’re not talking about the apocalypse, you’re talking about your personal apocalypse, because you’re an old man who’s not going to get to see his son grow up. That’s what this book is about. And for you, it feels like the end of civilization, and an intolerable world, and you can’t say goodbye to a son that you can’t guide through this awful world that allows you, an old person, to die.” I’m like, “How dare you, Cormac McCarthy, put me through all that when you’re the one going through this personal apocalypse?”

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Address Change

If you’re in the habit of sending me catalogues or review copies, it is time to update your address books — please drop me a line  and I will send you the details.

And, yes, sadly I am losing the view.

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Midweek Miscellany

An Expressionist Newsreel of a Bad Dream — Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw on the classic Martin Scorsese movie Raging Bull:

The effect is to combine stunning scenes of brutality and self-destruction with a lethal, even outrageous sentimentalism and self-pity. It’s all captured in dreamlike, pin-sharp monochrome cinematography, stark images reproduced like a Weegee crime scene. The result is operatic and mad and compelling.

The fight sequences themselves, with the camera swirling and swooping around the ring, and the soundtrack sometimes gulping out into silence and sometimes moaning with weird half-heard animal noises, are unforgettable: an inspired reportage recreation in the manner of a Life magazine shoot, which also looks like expressionist newsreel footage of a bad dream.

Also at The Guardian, Justin McGuirk reviews Gary Hustwit’s new documentary Urbanized:

Urbanized is a brave and timely movie that manages to strike almost exactly the right tone. For a sense of the scale of the urban problem, simply look at Mumbai, a city of 12 million people that is set to be the world’s biggest by 2050. Already, 60% of its population lives in slums with such poor sanitation that there is only one toilet seat for every 600 people. The municipality is reluctant to build toilets for fear that it will encourage more migrants to come. “As if people come to shit,” retorts the activist Sheela Patel in the movie. Quite.

The 10% — CNN looks at the business of women in comics and Womanthology, a comics anthology funded by Kickstarter:

“Think about it from the publisher’s point of view,” [former DC associate editor] Asselin said. “Say you sell 90% of your comics to men between 18 and 35, and 10% of your comics to women in the same age group.  Are you going to a) try to grow that 90% of your audience because you feel you already have the hook they want and you just need to get word out about it, or b) are you going to try to figure out what women want in their comics and do that to grow your line?”

(My advice: go with “b”)

And on the subject of comics… Art Spiegelman talks about MetaMaus (what else?) with The Observer:

In his ramshackle SoHo studio – a sort of comics library with a membership of just one, it consists of a dingy bathroom, a kitchenette, a drawing board, the odd dusty plant and about eight million quietly groaning books – Spiegelman lights yet another cigarette… He then gives himself over to crowing delightedly. “I’ve met a number of editors over the years,” he says, eyes rolling. “And all of them claim to have discovered Maus, when all they really have the right to claim is that they rejected it.”

And finally… While Toronto is busy drawing Tintin, Simon Kuper looks back at the life and work of Hergé for the Financial Times:

The war seems to have forced Hergé inward into his own imagination, and Haddock is one of the best things he found there. The captain’s alcoholism and swearing would be staple jokes of all subsequent Tintin books. Pretty much all writers on Tintin note that the main character is a cipher, a humourless two-dimensional boy scout. “A blank domino,” Hergé’s friend, the philosopher Michel Serres, called him. Tintin therefore requires company. Prewar, he only had his dog, Snowy. Haddock… was much more interesting. Even Hergé seems to have come to prefer him to Tintin.

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Trip Print Press

In this short film, Nicholas Kennedy proprietor of Trip Print Press in Toronto talks about the process of printing with letterpress and running a print shop:

(via Tania)

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Midweek Miscellany

A short interview with Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and C, in The Guardian.

Heart of Darkness — William Deresiewicz on Harold Bloom and his new book The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life:

I started to develop the Heart of Darkness theory of the Yale English department. Conrad’s novel is about colonialism and racism and the shadowed reaches of the human heart, but it is also a dissection of bureaucracy. My first clue came when I realized that my chairman was a perfect double for the manager of the Central Station, that creepy functionary who has “no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even,” who “could keep the routine going—that’s all.” But what clinched it was the recognition of the role that Bloom played in the paradigm. Bloom was Mr. Kurtz… Bloom, like Kurtz, ignored the rules and was strong enough to impose his own. Bloom, like Kurtz, was the shadowy genius who had sequestered himself in his private domain and was managing to produce, by methods however “unsound,” more material than all his colleagues put together… Bloom, like Kurtz, was a legend, a rumor, a vaguely malevolent presence (or absence) to be spoken of in awed and envious tones. What was not to like?

Paying For It — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on paywalls and the transformation of the newspaper business:

The newspapers that will survive, and perhaps even thrive, in the years to come will be those that are able to offer the most distinctive products and to tailor those products to a variety of consumption modes, spanning payment methods and devices, in a way that maximizes revenues and optimizes readership. And because an online news site is not a perfect substitute for a printed paper for either readers or advertisers – I cancelled my paper subscription a couple of years ago but ended up resubscribing after realizing that I was missing something – print editions will likely remain a crucial element in the mix indefinitely.

Browsing or Browsers? — The Economist neatly summarizes the effects of digitization on publishing:

Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is the gradual disappearance of the shop window. Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins, points out that a film may be released with more than $100m of marketing behind it. Music singles often receive radio promotion. Publishers, on the other hand, rely heavily on bookstores to bring new releases to customers’ attention and to steer them to books that they might not have considered buying. As stores close, the industry loses much more than a retail outlet. Publishers are increasingly trying to push books through online social networks. But Mr Murray says he hasn’t seen anything that replicates the experience of browsing a bookstore.

And on a related note, The Toronto Review of Books,  edited by former bookselling colleague Jessica Duffin Wolfe, launched this week.

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Whither the Library?

Going to the library is one of my earliest memories. I don’t remember much about the books, but I remember the building — its steps and its smell — and I remember the funny pinkish orange library tickets for children. I think I could take out three books at once.

I also remember that the library was not that close to where we first lived. We must have gone on the bus. It was surely an adventure for me, but a pain for my parents.

We’re more fortunate now. My family and I can walk to the library. It takes about 5 minutes — longer if we are distracted by a friendly dog or the need to jump off a wall.

I borrow picture books and music for their kids; books, comics, DVD and CDs for me. I request most of things from the library website. I can do it whenever something comes to mind or I read about it online. The books (and it is mostly books if I am honest) come from libraries across the city and I get a call at home when they arrive at my branch. I don’t know how many books I can borrow at once — I’ve never hit my limit (not for lack of trying, however) — but I must have at least 7 or 8 things out at the moment. It is an amazing service.

Our library is always busy — no matter the time of day — with people of all ages and from all walks of life. Some, like me, are borrowing books, movies or music. Others are reading newspapers and magazines. Some are making use of the programs that the library runs. Some are using the only computers they probably have any access to.

But here in Toronto, as in many towns and cities in the UK and US, library cuts are now being seriously discussed by politicians who do not appreciate their value to neighbourhoods and who apparently wouldn’t recognise Margaret Atwood on the street. It is hard to imagine they have visited to a library recently, let alone made use of its services.

On yesterday’s CBC news show The Current there was a lengthy and interesting discussion of libraries and their future. Contributors included librarian Ken Roberts, local councillor Sarah Doucette, and Julia Donaldson, the UK’s Children’s Laureate and author of The Gruffalo:

CBC RADIO THE CURRENT: Whither the Library?

If you live in Toronto, you can sign an online petition in support of the public library system here.

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Backlit | Ingrid Paulson


Toronto-based designer Ingrid Paulson has designed these four covers for a new paperback reprint series called ‘Backlit’ to be published by ECW Press this fall.

Lovely stuff.

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Moving Pictures

Continuing today’s theme of being late to everything, I just finished reading Moving Pictures by Kathryn and Stuart Immonen.

Published in 2010 by Top Shelf, the book was heralded on a lot of best of the year lists and it’s been sitting in my ‘to read’ pile for months.

I’m sorry I waited so long. It is wonderful…

Dave Howard interviewed Kathryn and Stuart Immonen about the book for The Torontoist last year.

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Pencil It In

In this really nice short video for The Toronto Comics Art Festival, local cartoonists talk about their tools of choice:

(via Drawn!)

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The Bookbinder | Made in Toronto

A lovely short film about bookbinder Don Taylor made by Tate Young and Ian Daffern for the new online daily Toronto Standard:

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