Saturday May 17, 2008
ENTERTAINMENT FRONT PAGE 
Jackie Maxwell and the raiders of the lost plays
In 2004, Jonathan Bank, the artistic director at New York's Mint Theatre Company, arrived in Niagara-on-the-Lake clutching an envelope and heading for an ostensibly routine chat with Shaw Festival artistic director Jackie Maxwell.
The Six Billion Dollar Ham
Seldom does the team inspire more affection than its top player, but such is the puzzling case of Harrison Ford. In Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Blade Runner, the man has quarterbacked two of the most popular franchises, and one of the most adored cult flicks, in the history of the big screen. Yet history, that fickle judge, seems to find him wanting. As a movie actor, he's more tolerated than respected. As a movie star, he's more respected than loved. Even his all-American name, with its presidential stamps, comes with something of a taint - those sickly Harrisons and that klutzy Ford aren't exactly revered, their reputations a lot less hallowed than the office they held. Change office to box
COLUMNISTS
I have seen the future of cinema, and it looks homemade
Viewing the new documentary, Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), which opened yesterday, I felt like I was watching the past and the future at the same time. The past, because I was sitting in a theatre, taking in a film that had secured some big-money distribution, which everything I've read recently assures me is a system on its last legs.
Incarceration, degradation and a welcome panda
''Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard,'' Bob Dylan once sang. ''Some of us are prisoners. The rest of us are guards.''Looking at the number of this year's Cannes entries that deal with incarceration, you have to think Dylan was onto something.
MUSIC
Compers to co-chair RCM drive
The Royal Conservatory of Music will name former BMO president Tony Comper and his philanthropist wife, Elizabeth, as co-chairs of a new $50-million phase of its capital campaign to build academic and performance facilities, The Globe and Mail has learned.
THIS DAY IN MUSIC
May 17, 1963 - Joan Baez headlines the first Monterey Folk Festival in California. CHUM Chart (25 Years Ago)1. Let's Dance (David Bowie) 2. Beat It (Michael Jackson)3. She Blinded Me With Science (Thomas Dolby)
Austrian monks release major-label chant CD
Monks in Austria hailed a ''miracle'' yesterday as they released an album of Gregorian chants under the same record label as Amy Winehouse and Eminem.The Cistercian monks were signed up by Universal Music - beating more than 200 entries from around the world - after they sent in a YouTube video in response to its international advertisement for a choir.
ART
Al Purdy sculpture fired up and ready for its unveiling
It's taken a while, but Al Purdy is ready for his Toronto unveiling.The ceremony on Tuesday afternoon in Toronto's Queen's Park, a few steps from the Ontario legislature, will reveal a sculpture of the great poet sitting and gazing off, half in thought, half in amusement.
Formal beauty in a webcam world
Cheryl Sourkes at Peak Gallery$550-$5,000. Until May 30,23 Morrow Avenue., Toronto; 416-537-8108Cheryl Sourkes has been seeking out, viewing and harvesting webcam images since 2001. As she wrote in a catalogue covering her work from 2001-05, ''Images generated by webcams are fleeting, as transitory as numbers on a clock-face. I grab photos out of live streams, reformat them and prepare them for life offstream.''
The personal is the political is the artistic
The age-old difficulty facing artists who feel compelled to engage with the political issues of their time involves the trick of balancing the political, the personal and the aesthetic. Is the creative personality of the political artist destined to be subsumed among like-minded others (like a sort of artistic Borg embedded in a collective)? Or, equally unacceptable, will it become the captive of an unwanted but perhaps inevitable elitism, where the artist gradually becomes a kind of lonely hero of virtuoso expressiveness?
Museum wins battle
The Barnes Foundation has won the latest round in a legal dispute over a plan to move its collection of impressionist art to downtown Philadelphia, against the wishes of some residents in the museum's current suburban location.
BOOKS
Girls' nights out
FRIDAY NIGHTSBy Joanna TrollopeMcArthur and Company, 328 pages, $24.95Contemporary domestic fiction is rife with novels about groups of strangers whose lives intersect when they meet in pursuit of a common interest, whether that's learning conversational Italian (Maeve Binchy's Evening Class), discussing 19th-century novels (Karen Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club) or intending to commit suicide on New Year's Eve (Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down). The concept is popular because it gives authors multiple characters to create plot within a tidy structure, while providing readers with entertainment and enlightenment in the shape of multiple dilemmas and situations that the characters undergo.
Shatner beams himself up
UP TILL NOWThe AutobiographyBy William Shatner with David FisherSt. Martin's, 358 pages, $28.95William Shatner has been a joke for so long that it is easy to forget he was once taken half-seriously as an actor. With big-screen credits ranging from Judgment at Nuremberg to The Brothers Karamazov, and meaty roles in such iconic series as The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., the good-natured Montreal native for a number of years seemed poised on the precipice of big-screen stardom.
Who needs copyright, anyway?
Canada is locked in an epic and bloody war over copyright, or so we're led to believe. Corporations, consumers and artists fight over new technologies and the content they deliver. I used to believe in this war myself, even fancied myself a bit of a warrior. But recently, the noise of battle has begun to sound more and more inconsequential, like an argument over directions between two people without a map. In fact, there is no great copyright crisis in our culture. The panic is false.
PAPERBACKS
TO THE CASTLE AND BACKBy Vaclav Havel, translated by Paul Wilson, Vintage Canada, 383 pages, $21A witty and revealing memoir from the writer who went from world-famous dissident to president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Communist government there.
Myth, metamorphosis and metaphor
GIRL MEETS BOY By Ali Smith Knopf Canada, 161 pages, $25Once upon a time, we were all young and impressionable and willing to believe in happy endings. As children, we loved the familiarity and comfort of stories, the repetition of important detail by a trusted voice, the revisiting of imaginary episodes which gradually expanded our understanding of the world. As adults, like it or not, we tend to examine our lives against what we learned from those early story templates, particularly when - the cliche fits well here - we've lost the plot; we look to find a new one, something we can wrap around us like a cloak.
Putting science into the dismal science
THE MIND OF THE MARKETCompassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary EconomicsBy Michael ShermerTimes Books, 308 pages, $30I'm about to review a book on economics for you ... no, no, stop, don't turn the page! It's a readable, entertaining book - about lots of things you don't associate with ''economics.'' Like Freakonomics, you'll find no graphs or calculus here, just a wee bit of jargon, and you'll get to read about sex and chimps, the brain wave for shopping, why biology makes us kind and dozens of other unusual topics you never studied in Econ 101.
The only thing we have to fear ...
GIRLS FALL DOWNBy Maggie HelwigCoach House, 266 pages, $20.95Alex hasn't seen Susie-Paul since their days at a dissident Toronto newspaper. Back then, he resisted the demands of his diabetic blood, living always on the edge of a sugar crash, high on the risk and on turbulent Susie-Paul. Now he lives a quiet life alone, his main contact with people through his camera's lens.
The Kurds: a ghostly and embarrassing nation
INVISIBLE NATIONHow the Kurds' Quest for Statehood is Shaping Iraq and the Middle EastBy Quil LawrenceWalker and Company,366 pages, $28.95Thinking of Kurds makes two types of North American feel guilty or embarrassed.
Not Miss Scarlet in the library
KILL ALL THE JUDGESBy William DeverellMcClelland and Stewart,421 pages, $34.99In late 1944, Anthony Pratt, a retired solicitor's clerk living on England's southern coast, invented a family board game that came to be celebrated and is played to this day in more than 40 countries. He called the game Clue.
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
TWEEDLE DEE DEEBy Charlotte Voake, Candlewick, 28 pages, $18.50, ages 2 to 5Green, a lovely spring green, is the dominant colour in Charlotte Voake's new book. Her insouciant watercolour-and-ink drawings, mostly of English oak leaves, or so it appears, accompany the text, which is a sort of cumulative round derived from the traditional folk song The Green Leaves Grew Around.
Requiem for a heavyweight
JUMBOThe Greatest Elephantin the WorldBy Paul ChambersGreyStone, 208 pages, $27.95There's an old joke: An Englishman, a Frenchman, an American and a Canadian are asked to submit essays on elephants. The Englishman's paper comes in titled Elephants and the Empire; the Frenchman's, The Love Life of Elephants, and the American's, Bigger and Better Elephants. The Canadian's is titled, Elephants: A Federal or Provincial Responsibility?
He's bullish on bears
THE BLACK GRIZZLYOF WHISKEY CREEKBy Sid MartyMcClelland and Stewart,282 pages, $34.99''The best thing to do is avoid an encounter,'' reads the headline in a Parks Canada pamphlet on bears and people. Today it may seem like an obvious statement, but in the late 1970s, the distance between bears and humans in the tourist mountain town of Banff, Alta., had become dangerously small. Grizzly and black bears regularly raided the town's garbage dump for food. Tourists flocked to watch the feasting omnivores, snapping photos of them as if they were harmless as chickadees. A similar photo op unfolded downtown when bears fed behind Banff restaurants that refused to bear-proof their garbage bins, despite numerous warnings from Parks Canada.
We're persuaded
The 18th-century novel was a baggy, sententious affair before Jane Austen gave it bones. Pride and Prejudice has a classic three-part structure, one that modern readers respond to effortlessly. In certain other respects, the novel is more typical of its time. Reading it after watching the 2005 film starring Keira Knightley (a lively version that puts the livestock into the phrase ''gentleman farmer''), you're struck by Austen's lack of sensory detail. Dialogue was her medium, and all she needed. The vividness and complexity of the characters, as revealed through conversation alone, is electrifying. Pride and Prejudice makes you believe in the reality of the past, to the extent that you doubted it.
E-VOX POPULI: OUR READERS WRITE
Kyle Thompson from Kamloops writes: I'd suggest a book my Chinese philosophy professor called ''The greatest book ever written.'' That is, the Zhuangzi. Said to have been written by the wise man of the title during the chaotic and violent Warring States period of Chinese history (480-221 BC) when the greatest flourishing of Chinese thought occurred, the Zhuangzi even in translation exudes beauty, wit, biting criticism and serenity. Zhuangzi's contemplations on logic and spirituality ... form the basis for the ideas of Zen Buddhism, which have been so influential in the West since the 20th century, and are profound in their own right. There is also probably no philosophical text that is both so fanciful and serious at the same time, with timeless truths being spoken by butchers and talking trees. Posted May 3, 2008, at 11:01 p.m. ET
BESTSELLERS
Fiction THIS WEEK/LAST WEEK/WEEKS ON LIST/TITLE/AUTHOR/PUBLISHER/PRICE 1 -1The Host, by Stephenie Meyer (Little, Brown, $28.99). 2 110Remember Me?, by Sophie Kinsella (Dial, $30). 3 -1Careless In Red, by Elizabeth George (HarperCollins, $29.95). 4 22Sundays At Tiffany's, by James Patterson and Gabrielle Charbonnet (Little, Brown, $27.99). 5 551A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini (Viking Canada, $34). 6 415The Appeal, by John Grisham (Doubleday, $33). 7 64Belong To Me, by Marisa De Los Santos (Morrow, $18.95). 8 33The Whole Truth, by David Baldacci (Grand Central, $29.99). 9 -6Honor Thyself, by Danielle Steel (Delacorte, $31). 10 94The Miracle At Speedy Motors, by Alexander McCall Smith (Knopf Canada, $29.95).
Flesh and brains
SMASH YOUR HEAD ON THE PUNK ROCKBy Matt BissonnetteExile, 212 pages, $22.95Young Ryan, jock bag slung at his side, is working up the courage to enter the church rectory. It's a grey November in the 1970s. Snowflakes drift from Montreal's ''gutter slush sky.'' Crossing Sherbrooke Street, Ryan narrowly avoids an unwanted encounter with a friend, then retrieves the hidden rectory key, lets himself in, and is soon being spoon-fed with Father Tom's character-building hockey metaphors.
FILM
From Moose Factory to Oka to the MoMA
Alanis Obomsawin is having a very good month. Two weeks ago, the native Canadian documentary filmmaker paid a visit to the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, where she was honoured with the Governor-General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement in recognition of her more than 40 years behind the camera. This week, the Museum of Modern Art in New York kicked off a 12-film series running until May 26 that is the most comprehensive U.S. retrospective of Obomsawin's work ever mounted. And later this month, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts will screen three of her films.
Oooh, Irish immigration to Newfoundland - it just screams 'sexy,' doesn't it?
I've been trying to imagine what the Canada Border Services Agency was expecting when, suspicious that it was pornographic, it confiscated undeveloped footage from the Canadian film Love and Savagery on its way from Ireland to Montreal.
Vardalos to direct film, John Corbett to co-star
Winnipeg native Nia Vardalos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame is set to begin production on her feature-film directorial debut in June.Vardalos wrote the script for the film, I Hate Valentine's Day, which will see her co-starring once again with fellow Greek Wedding lead John Corbett. Already, agents are working to sell the film's international rights at the Cannes film market, given Vardalos's track record. My Big Fat Greek Wedding remains one of the most successful platform releases (i.e., a small film released in an increasing number of cities) of all time, grossing around $369-million (U.S.), according to Variety.
THEATRE
Strong stories, yes - but hold the soap
Body and SoulCreated by Judith Thompsonand the castAt the Young Centre in Toronto UnratedThe press material I received for Body and Soul certainly stood out from the pack. It is indeed rare that I am invited to ''a new play by dove pro-age.'' Dove Pro-Age is not the playwriting offspring of a couple of West Coast hippies named Proust and Burbage, but the brand name of a line of perfumed lotions and potions that women rub on their skin for reasons both reasonable and ridiculous.
STYLE
Ta-dah, the perfect burger
The May long weekend is here at last, which means it's time to open the cottage and, more importantly, to fire up the barbecue.The first thing many of us slap on the grill is hamburgers, and everyone has their preferred method of preparation. Some use breadcrumbs and egg, some put cheese, onions or mushrooms in the meat, while others just experiment with toppings.
TEST COUNTER: CARGO MELT-PROOF MAKE-UP: BEAUTY TO BEAT THE HEAT
The productCargo Melt-proof Make-Up Collection ($39, only at www.sephora.com). The kit includes a bronzer, a mascara and a three-in-one palette for eyes, cheeks and lips.
Smashing global warming with greener design
The goal of graphic design is to make things look good. Really good. So good that we want to buy these things, even if we don't need them.That can be a problem - or perhaps an opportunity.
Go on, track down your gym crush
Dear Mr. Smith,A woman met a man at a gym. They exchanged idle chatter and flirted. The woman did not pursue the man's attentions at that time, because she was not single. Now that she is single, she is thinking of this man, but she has no way of re-establishing the acquaintance since they no longer attend the same gym. He never gave her his phone number, but mentioned his place of work. Can she track him down and call him there, or would it smack of desperation?
LESSONS OF A LIPSTICK QUEEN
LESSONS OF A LIPSTICK QUEENBy Poppy King (Atria Books, $26.99, 256 pages)ISBN: 0-7432-9957-4The next time someone tries to convince you that makeup is frivolous, feel free to tell them the story of Poppy King.
PERSON: PLACE: THING
Person Lindsay LohanSigh. So this is what it's come to for Lindsay Lohan, who was once, lest we forget, a promising young actress. She unveiled her latest project this week: a line of leggings. Yes, the same barely-in-style article of clothing that she is ridiculed for wearing everywhere. The line is called 6126, which could refer to the number of Red Bull vodkas she had last year, the number of film producers that will never work with her again or the number of seconds left until we truly stop caring.
Hillary and Madonna: separated at birth
They're rarely mentioned in the same breath. They've never, to my knowledge, actually stood side by side. They've certainly never been photographed together. Could it be that Hillary Clinton and Madonna are one and the same person?
Bridesmaid revisited
Anyone who has done duty as a bridesmaid will appreciate what quickly becomes a running joke in 27 Dresses, newly out on DVD. Over and over again, the film's protagonist, Jane Nichols, played by Katherine Heigl, hears brides tell her enthusiastically, ''Aren't the dresses great? The best thing about them is you can shorten them and wear them again.''
I want to ride ma bicyclette
Paris is like a bicycle: old-fashioned yet modern, modest but pleasurable, classic and trendy and as clean as it is well-engineered. And like a good bike ride, a holiday in Paris is an instant crowd-pleaser for those who can manage it. The simple fact of doing it can't help but make you smile.
Distillery District gem shines under new chef
Perigee55 Mill St., Toronto. 416-364-1397. Dinner for two including wine, tax and tip, $250.When Perigee lost chef Pat Riley last year, many of us wrote it off, because the kitchen at Perigee was Pat Riley's creation - the idea of cooking as theatre. With the open kitchen in the middle of the dining room fully exposed to the diners, and the diners as recipients of the chef's whims in a procession of tiny perfect tasting dishes - that was Pat Riley (who is now cooking at The Garden @ Eleven).
KANYE WEST 'STRONGER' GLASSES
Kanye West's Glow in the Dark tour rolls into Toronto on Wednesday, but one big part of its vibe has already been here for quite a while: the Venetian-blind glasses he made famous in his video for Stronger.
A place to plot your urban escape
BonaVista LeisureScapes812 Eglinton Ave. E., Toronto416-645-6980www.bonavistapools.comWhatever the reason - high gas prices, the green movement, a desire to downsize or avoid gridlock on the way to cottage country - people are turning their backyards into places to relax and indulge.
NIKE LIBERTY DUNK
An iconic sneaker that has been sported by basketball pros and skateboarders alike seems an unlikely canvas for Liberty's pretty floral prints. Yet the Nike Design team's latest fashion mash-up is a springtime must-have.
Ten steps to getting 'beach babe' ready
Steamy weather may still be a few weeks away, but I had the chance to jump the gun by heading to Miami this week. I was invited to cover Chanel's cruise collection, and when Karl calls, it's hard to resist.
BARFLY: A COSMOPOLITAN WITH A TWIST
WATERFALLS INDIAN TAPAS BAR and GRILL303 Augusta Ave., Toronto416-927-9666If you're walking the charmingly historic streets of Kensington Market, lined with windswept buildings, specialty food markets and niche-cuisine nooks, a stroll by the newly opened Waterfalls Indian Tapas Bar and Grill may cause you to do a double take.
