N + 1
Spring 2011
In the centuries before the invention of the record and the gramophone, music, for listeners at least, was largely a social experience. You either heard it in a concert hall or recital space or beer hall or beside a camp fire, or you didn't. "The closest thing to a private musical experience," as N + 1 associate editor Nikil Saval observes here, "was playing an instrument for yourself" or friends, or silently poring over score sheets. Today, thanks to devices like the iPod, music-listening is largely a private experience at the same time as music itself has become omnipresent and unavoidable (in stores, restaurants, at the skating rink, while we wait on the phone, as a soundtrack for dinner parties, in the dentist's lobby).
Saval deftly explores the social and aesthetic consequences of this astonishing turn of events. He thinks it's largely been a bad thing, promoting isolation and solipsism, reducing music's ability to incite, reflect and reinforce social change, flattening its significance as an art form while encouraging "a total pluralism of taste . . . a curious sophistication-through-indiscriminateness." In effect, we've become "condemned to a lifetime of listening."
Toronto Life
May 2011
Of the 1,115 persons arrested during the G20 mess last June in Toronto, Byron Sonne is the most famous, not least because, almost 10 months after the single largest mass round-up of civilians in Canadian history, he's the only arrestee still behind bars.
T.O. Life contributing editor Denise Balkissoon expertly relates the saga of how this 37-year-old self-employed computer consultant - named, in jest apparently, "most likely to become an international terrorist" in his high-school yearbook in the late 1980s - ended up being a character out of a David Byrne song.
Blessedly, this isn't one of those T.O. Life features where the writer seems to have interviewed everybody except the subject of the article. Balkissoon clearly has communicated with Sonne in-person, by phone and letters and this enriches the piece considerably. From my reading, Sonne had no intention of blowing up the summit, at heart he's tech-savvy nerd/anarchist/prankster who probably should have read more Kafka and Koestler before taunting The Man. Now he's a guy in an orange prison jumpsuit with no beautiful wife, no beautiful house in leafy Forest Hill, a compromised career, facing 15 years in jail.
Meatpaper
Spring 2011
Some people really have trouble with meat dresses. After Lady Gaga wore a gown made entirely of meat to last fall's MTV music video awards, the guy who sewed the dress, Los Angeles designer/artist Franc Fernandez, received death threats. In fact, as he tells Meatpaper editor Heather Smith, he's still getting death threats! For something that was, like, so six months ago!
Turns out Gaga's dress was Fernandez's second foray into meat couture: The year before he'd designed a meat bikini for Gaga's appearance on the cover of Vogue Hommes Japan. For the MTV gig, the star initially just wanted a meat purse, which Fernandez started to work on, then she changed her mind. Fernandez, who's originally from beef-mad Argentina, carved the gown out of about 20 kilograms of meat, "picking out the cuts that looked best for the front," and stitching the ensemble together with super-strong nylon thread. The dress still exists - although, as you might expect, it's gone completely grey. Not to worry, though: To restore its fresh, pink-ish hue, Gaga has arranged for the dress to be "taxidermied and embalmed." Wanna bet the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland may be the gown's ultimate destination?