Stop the Acronym Pandemic!
The straw that broke the camel’s back was an AHS staffer at the RAH who didn’t know what CASA stood for. It’s enough to drive you CRZ. As is this recent political news story: WTF LPC FTW JT XOXO CPC FUBAR RIP NDP SOL LOL! Does anyone know what’s up with the TPP? To what […]
Edmonton Expo a Magical Place
For one weekend, the streets of Edmonton were barren of nerds. Did they get beamed up into some Star Trekian rapture? No. Did they all move to Vulcan and start coffee shops and grow ops? No (not all). Did they decide en masse to go underground into a series of catacomb based lairs where video […]
SHEER POETRY: Story slam man
The rise in popularity of poetry over the last decade has been spurred on by the idea that storytelling can be a competitive sport – and Edmonton has been up to the challenge. One such “Story Slam” is taking place Thursday, Oct. 22 at the Artery, part of LitFest, Edmonton’s non-fiction festival – yet another […]
Hip hop knowledge is power
The meeting attracts about 20 young men and women from all races and walks of life. They take turns telling stories, asking questions, airing complaints. Some get emotional. I keep expecting a guy to stand up and say, “Hi, my name is Dave and I’m addicted to hip hop!” Because this is not a support […]
SkirtsAfire to burn glass ceiling
Whatever you think of grouping artists by gender first and by their art second, consider the all-female SkirtsAfire “herArts” festival – playing March 6-9 at venues around Alberta Avenue – as “theatrical affirmative action.” The stats on theatrical sexual equality in Canada are “grim,” says festival director Annette Loiselle, citing a 2008 study done by […]
MUSIC: Mixtape Club launches with Vonnegut tribute
It didn’t take Jesse Northey long to become ensconced in Edmonton’s music scene. He’s only been here two months. The University of Lethbridge recording program grad quickly landed jobs mixing sound at the Artery, one of our coolest music venues, and as an engineer at Riverdale Recorders, whose clients include some of Edmonton’s coolest bands. […]
A noggy take on an old Christmas poem
‘Twas the night before wombat and all through the snerse, Not a weeful was starping, not even a cherse, The weppels were hung by the stabbage with hair, In the clam that snat eelix would carter the snare. And nox in her keppitch, and meal in my lap, Was flopping and keeling like mice in […]
LITERATURE: 40 Below an Edmonton winter experience
Edmonton has to be the only city in the English-speaking world where residents complain about the weather ALL YEAR LONG. In most social circles in other places, weather talk is small talk. Here, it’s a passion up there with politics. Oh, sure, it’s nice here in the fall, according to Ian Tyson, but the only […]
Can a novel just be a novel?
For the star of Come Barbarians: The Hollywood Blockbuster, author Todd Babiak doesn’t hesitate to cast Ryan Gosling – playing the suave but troubled security agent Christopher Kruse, who falls into a pit of political skullduggery at the hands of the Corsican mafia. “He can own this thing,” Babiak says of Gosling. “He could bring […]
INTERVIEW: Dan Savage makes punditry cool
On Christians and the whole gay marriage thing, Dan Savage says, “Jesus Christ Himself condemned divorce, yet we’re not amending state constitutions to prohibit people getting divorced. It’s hypocritical of these people to say that they cannot come around on the gay issue because of the Bible when they ignore so many other parts of […]
Nerds to rule at Edmonton Comic and Entertainment Expo
It’s that time of year again. You can feel it in the air – a radiant mass nerdliness as we head into the annual autumnal weekend of the Edmonton Comic and Entertainment Expo! Don’t judge us. Geek is the new chic, don’t you know. Seriously, why wait for Halloween to dress as your favourite fantasy-sci-fi-comic-book […]
WAR OF THE WORDS: Controversy at Edmonton Poetry Festival!
Poets, especially Canadian poets, can be a fractious lot. There have been recent public battles between various prominent Canadian poets, mostly notably between Jan Zwicky and Michael Lista on the relevance of criticism. Heated words like “illiterate” and “incompetent” and “stupid” were deployed in a war waged on the pages of the National Post. Veteran […]
