Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Dancer Piotr Stanczk in The Winter’s Tale. Photo by Karolina Kuras. The recent opening of The Winter’s Tale at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto was preceded by an announcement that the performance would be dedicated to the victims of the Paris attacks, which had occurred just one night before. The National…
We like cats too. Online activity is ceaselessly tracked. In publishing, this has become an acute dystopia. Yes, we read what we read for a variety of complex, nuanced reasons, arguably now more than ever, for the cognitive economy forces intimacy on its consumers, with social media asking us daily to consider what our…
Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever is a a classic of children’s literature, having sold millions of copies to parents looking for a fun way to teach their children simple vocabulary. The book was first published in 1963 and then updated in 1991. Interestingly, one of the reasons for the update was to show a…
Rapper Angel Haze spent a lot of her childhood homeless and she moved into her first house when she was 16. The time Haze spent in that house in rural Virginia served as the inspiration for her latest project, Back to the Woods. After she broke ties with her major record label—and her high-profile girlfriend—earlier…
A couple of weeks ago, Jean Francois Painchaud was just another Canadian animator – working for the PBS kids show Wild Kratts by day, making sexually explicit GIFs by night. Little did he know, when he sat in front of his computer at 10AM last Monday, that things were going to change. Jean Francois had been…
extra_image: The outpouring of love that exploded when I Facebooked about Anita Sarko’s suicide the other day was so astounding, I bet it would have saved her life if she’d been around to witness it. The truth is, Anita had been a ground-breaking DJ and feisty writer (including for Paper back in the day), but…
I was listening to a filmmaker, Harmony Korine (Spring Breakers, Kids) talk about coming up with original stories, and he made one interesting point about why it seems more and more difficult: technology is taking away the opportunity for drama. That’s a biggie for opera, where every emotional state and difficult decision is heightened by…
If you think the posters Mondo releases are cool, wait until you see the ones they can’t. For every poster that makes it to print, several alternate versions are canceled, for a slew of different reasons. Once a year, Mondo pulls back the curtain on its most beautiful failures. Mondo is the poster and collectable…
LONDON — The secretive artist known as Banksy said he is dismantling his latest exhibition and shipping its pieces to provide shelter to refugees and migrants camped out in France. Banksy opened “Dismaland” in August, a so-called “Bemusement Park” in the English seaside town of Weston-super-Mare featured a decaying castle and model boats full…
When it comes to street artists, Shepard Fairey is about as establishment as it gets. Even if you don’t know his name, you’d probably recognize at least a couple of his images: the much-imitated “Hope” poster that came to symbolize Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and the “Obey” series that features the enigmatic face of…