explorations in toronto art.

I have a soft spot for year-in-review lists. From the best albums of the year, to the what-kinds-of-exciting-things-did-you-experience surveys that I used to post in my old online journal, I find a certain satisfaction in organizing the year into lists, and ranking them in order of relevance.

Well, more accurately, I get a lot of enjoyment out of reading the results of other people’s lists of the year, organized and ranked. This December there’s been a double-dose, with top-ten lists of the entire decade, too. I realize most of this is a product of the media industry consuming and regurgitating itself, yet I can’t get enough of this fluff, especially in the long airport waits and idle internet reading time I’ve had so much of over the past week or two.

Because it’s no use trying to list my own top albums of the decade  or similar (I’m neither well-informed nor willing enough to add my drop in the bucket), I’ve decided to do this meta-style and gather my top five end-of-year-lists:

1. Torontoist. The originality of their “Heroes and Villains” lists, and the artwork, is what makes these two lists the winners. Though they are unranked, voting remains open until midnight tonight and they will choose a best and worst thing about Toronto in 2009. It is strangely cohesive, though it includes a mix of arts, politics, and general ups and downs. Special mention goes to the Toronto Public Library getting the love it deserves, The Power Plant (which I’m continually intrigued by following my late discovery of it), Yann Martel getting called on his bullshit, and saying no to negativity– somewhat ironic considering the list, but I’m glad they were willing to poke fun at themselves for making a list of Toronto’s villains.
2. The A.V. Club. I’m a sucker for an end-of-year album list that goes up to 25, contains some things I hadn’t heard before but sound promising, and is just really well-written and thoroughly justified. And certainly a sucker for a list that places some of my favourites near the top.
3. Now Magazine (Art Section). Any attempt to make sense of the phenomena that characterized the decade in the art world is OK by me.
4. Books. There are a few ways this can be done. The Globe and Mail breaks it down by genre, Paste gives us the context of the decade and identifies trends (and tops the list with a recent favourite), and Good Reads‘ voting system makes it parallel the bestseller list (and my mom’s book club) very closely.
5. Movies. To the A.V. Club again. Their listing of the top 50 movies of the decade (sadly nameless 00s), is made more interesting by their separate list of the ones “from the cutting room floor,” that didn’t make it on the top 50 list.

It is somewhat of an exercise in futility– I can’t see much usefulness in these kind of lists, other than my voracious consumption of them. I doubt that reviewers, historians, or anyone other than obsessive superfans will read them after January 1. But they are really more about the process of compiling and arranging than the end result, and that’s probably why we keep making them.

Last winter I discovered some secret music.

An acquaintance and I stumbled on a CD release party at the Tranzac when we had actually intended to go to a different concert— the labyrinthine layout of the place caused us to end up in the wrong room, but I’m definitely glad it happened. What took place before us was truly special: two musicians shuffled onto the stage, placed themselves with their instruments, and began to play low-key, dreamy jazz tunes. A perfect harmony of electric piano and lap steel, meandering and settling into patterns, improvising and coming back to themes. A hush fell over the room almost instantly. The evening continued like this.

Before I left, I bought their CD, aptly titled This is Awesome. It took me almost a year to figure out that this duo, Christine Bougie & Dafydd Hughes, had been playing weekly at the Tranzac, less than a five-minute walk from my apartment, ever since. For free. Last night I finally went, and it was indeed awesome. I like the Tranzac because of its intimacy, and I had the feeling of being in someone’s big living room. The music was quiet, there were a handful of people sitting around the room sipping their beers and passing the request-list/tip-jar, so low-key and really just there to listen to nice music. I couldn’t help thinking of how going to shows was such a seeing-and-being-seen kind of activity for me at one time (although to be fair, almost everything can fall into that category when you’re a teenager), so it was refreshing to be in a place, in Toronto no less, where I could just be an anonymous music lover. Needless to say, I will be going back next Monday.

It’s no secret I love Serge Gainsbourg. So imagine my excitement when I found out there is a biopic in the works, set for release in January!

Aside from being a pretty major figure in contemporary pop music, Gainsbourg had a pretty interesting personal life. I’m curious about how the film will portray his relationships, womanizing tendencies, heavy drinking, and some of the more bizarre things he did late in his career. Also, the actor who plays him has an uncanny resemblance to the man himself. Casting Laetitia Casta as Brigitte Bardot, and Lucy Gordon as Jane Birkin, are both spot-on, too.

I’m pretty excited to see it, but I can’t seem to find out what the plans are for releasing it in North America. I can’t even find a trailer with english subtitles.. and he’s definitely not as famous here as Chanel. Keeping my fingers crossed…

Last night I went to see The Dirty Projectors at the Opera House.

I’d become obsessed with their album Bitte Orca for a during the summer, entranced by their harmonies, drumming, and general joyful feeling that went perfectly with summer driving with the windows down. So I was pretty excited for this show.. and I wasn’t disappointed.

Firstly, the opening band, Tuneyards, set a perfect tone for the night. It could be best described as an unexpectedly awesome and strange blend: as though Animal Collective had a female-Tom-Waits/Björk-esque singer, but mostly used looping techniques to build and layer the songs, and had a hefty dose of African-jam influences. It’s always refreshing when openers are not only good, but well matched to the main act.

How else to put it, the Dirty Projectors ruled— their singing was out of this world, they put on a fun show, the Opera House sound was impeccable, and overall the band had a great balance: sound-wise, nobody was drowning each other out; content-wise, they played a good mix of album hits and things I hadn’t heard before, style-wise they were perfectly in sync and professional, but had the fun moments of a band made up of good friends. As a band they are reaching incredible heights very quickly these days, and it was exciting to feel like I witnessed a part of that.

I just saw the video for Grizzly Bear’s song While You Wait For The Others. In addition to being probably my favourite track from Veckatimest, this is one of the most interesting music videos I’ve ever seen.

Why is this video great? Well, for one, it shuns almost all the music video conventions: it lacks the ubiquitous shots of the band looking cool, it’s free of pretty girls in any incarnation, and it doesn’t even include any musical instruments (let along shots of the band playing them.) So even though I’m not a frequent watcher of music videos, this one feels like a breath of fresh air.

pretty maiden, by hannah höch

The video also embraces a Dadaist aesthetic that reminds me of of Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch. Maybe I live under a rock, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this style explored in motion before, even though its collage-y style is perfectly suited to stop-motion, as seen in the video. Though their use of colour borders on the oh-so-right-now look of heavy-handed use of vintage-film photoshop filters, in the context of the video it seems to work. I can also get past the weird-for-the-sake of-being-weird-ness, for one because of how the props work with the rhythm of the song, and also, it’s Grizzly Bear— their videos are famously bizarre, featuring aliens in the desert, flaming heads, and forest adventurers.

Anyway, here’s the video. It’s worth mentioning that the director, Sean Pecknold, has recently done a video for Fleet Foxes’ song Mykonos, and the visual similarities are very clear. And on a sidenote.. the Mykonos video also appears to be directly inspired by Norman McLaren’s Le Merle (1958). But, I’m getting distracted from what I came here to tell you about. I love this video. Enjoy:

thanks to my wonderful film-loving roommate, I was reminded of the Free Friday Films series at U of T. Last friday, when we went, it was a Jim Jarmusch double feature, and the movies were Stranger than Paradise and Night on Earth.

Stranger than Paradise, despite having been made in 1984, had the slow pace and deadpan humour of some 60s New Wave films, especially Breathless. It also shared the endless running around and driving around, the male-male-female trio dynamic, and the unconventional narrative arc of Bande À Part (one of my favourite movies ever.) I don’t know what it is that’s so magnetic about these elements, but the trio I just described is one of my favourite storytelling tropes. In some ways it mirrors my own adolescence, and the more volatile of social situations I have found myself in and around during the past few years. It’s a bizarre chemistry, in any case, that makes for a good story.

It was described to me as “a movie about cool dudes just driving around, playing cards, drinking, and being cool… just doing nothing.” This was a pretty apt description, yet the film held a strange power over me as I watched it. Because the two main guys (the cool dudes) had their own little word to which Eva, the other main character, was an outsider, it was easy to identify with her as she misunderstood, mocked and fumbled her way through getting to know them.

The scenes were sparse and austere, so it was easy to tune in to every detail. Also, this made for some really beautiful shots. Enough said.

Night on Earth, the second movie, was enjoyable in a completely different way. I suppose this is the curse of a double feature (besides the simple fact that it can be hard to sit through two movies in a row), that one will be thoughtful and cold, yet somehow touching; and the other will be sillier, more disjointed.. it somehow spoiled the aftertaste of the first. Still, like some of the classics of new wave and italian neorealism, it tasted even better the day after seeing it.