Tiff Top

Tip-top tiffin box

I just love everything about my new tiffin box. It’s made from the cheapest pressed tin imaginable, but it’s so grandly embossed–a takeout container with style. It comes from Vietnam, rather than India. I found it for $15.99 at a housewares emporium called Tap Phong Trading on Spadina in the last vestiges of Toronto’s old-school Chinatown. I was searching for cool stuff for a picnic shoot for the spring issue of King West when I came across it, and then I just had to bring it home!

Marchesa Madness

Even the models' hair was worthy of applause

Everything about Suzanne Rogers’ special ptresentation of the Marchesa Fall 2011 collection was over-the-top fabulous, from the incredibly lush show (I expected run-of-the-mill prom gowns, but these dresses were remarkably special and beautifully complicated) to the hosts (Fergie, aka, Sarah, Duchess of York was the honorary chair), to the attendees (le tout Toronto society, fully bedecked as if for a Hollywood red carpet event, super-beautiful model Yasmine Warsame, and of course lily of the fashion world Marchesa designer Georgina Chapman, who is married to Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein, so he too was there, looking slimmer and more appealing than his photographs). Continue reading…

Un-Martha

The Un-Bible of the Moment

My brilliant sister-in-law Christiane Lemieux isn’t only the Founder and Design Guru-in-chief of the fashion-forward bedlinens and home furnishings line Dwell, she is also now a published author. Her wonderful and very au courant coffee table tome “Undecorate” –which you must run out and slather over immediately–was just launched in NY and LA last week. And the book, which makes the case for personal, idiosyncratic, damn-the-rules style in decorating, is already creating a lot of buzz, particularly among the design establishment.

Listen to none other than Martha Stewart’s decorating editor’s ruffled feathers in this piece from the Wall Street Journal:

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703858404576214554003291400.html> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703858404576214554003291400.html

You know you are onto something big when you have Martha’s knickers in a knot!

Methivier must-see

Renie Spoelstra's "House with Car"

Appleby-Barr’s “Punchy at Bat”

Popped into a really marvellous show at the Methivier gallery last night, featuring two artists with very different visions that were both quirky and compelling. 

Renie Spoelstra is from Rotterdam and this was her first show in Canada. Her charcoal drawings are mystical, almost ghostly apparitions of empty, uninhabited places like suburban driveways that she captures on video and then renders in wonderfully thick marks of smudgy charcoal.  Some of the works were enormous and wall-sized, like the gorgeous vaguely ’70s “Car”. Others were smaller but no less evocative, and by the time we walked in, they were almost all sold out. Says Spoelstra, in the notes for the show “Ultimately what I seek is the essence of existence”. Wow. 

And then in the back of the gallery, were Stephen Appleby-Barr’s campy delightful near-miniatures, meticulously painted with candy box backgrounds. Referencing the great works by the likes of Manet and Velazquez, Appleby-Barr paints figures posed in historical costumes as soldiers, voyageurs and cricketeers, but with cute little rabbit and kitty heads. 

On till April 2, it’s a great March break from the relentless grey humourless sleet outside.

My new obsession

Victorian Pharmacy

Here’s a tip for those searching for harmless oblivion after a taxing day: my new favourite tv program, Victorian Pharmacy. Naturally a BBC production, and recently picked up by TVO here, Victorian Pharmacy is exactly what it sounds like. Set in a Victorian styled pharmacy, it’s a sort of historical documentary where the oddly Victorian looking Nick Barber, Tom Quick and Ruth Goodman dress up in Victorian clothing and play at being real pharmacists of the 19th century, devising quack cures for ailments, brewing them from raw, often dangerous materials and bottling them for “sale”. The whole set-up is completely bizarre and quirkily fascinating. Highly recommended viewing for amateur hypochondriacs, or those simply fascinated by goofy cure-alls like Pink Pills for Pale People.

Dinner in Edun

Ali & friends: Wendy Natale, Leanne Delap, Ali Hewson & me

I had to admit, when I met the absolutely lovely Ali Hewson (wife of Bono, activist entrepreneuse behind the fair-trade fashion line Edun) at a dinner hosted last night by Holt Renfrew, first that I had googled her, and then that we both had big bad birthdays coming up a day apart. “So you’re the 22nd, then,” she guessed, high-fiving me across the table. I asked her whether she was planning a party and she said no, just a lot of really fun trips spread out through the whole year, which sounded exactly like what I would do too, if I were married to Bono. (Although I am planning my own slightly smaller scale year-long celebration too). When asked how she was coping with the thought of the big bad birthday itself, the lovely Ali said, smiling, “I figure I might as well enjoy it as I certainly won’t ever be this young again”. Continue reading…

The gist of Rist

My new guru

It is unusual to sob uncontrollably at the closing credits of a documentary. Particularly at a documentary about a contemporary artist. Even more so at a documentary about an artist whose work bubbles over with fizzy pop colours and irrepressible child-like energy and enthusiasm. But that is precisely what I found myself doing at the Canadian Art Foundation’s truly wonderful Reel artists film festival at the premiere of The Colour of Your Socks: A Year with Pipilotti Rist.   

Continue reading…

Grano gossip

Prize winner

Scored a primo seat at last night’s Grano series dinner at a table with the very witty and charming Nobel prize winning chemist John Polanyi, his artist wife Brenda Bury, political columnist Andrew Coyne, media lawyer Julian Porter and the lovely and talented author Anna Porter, who just days ago won the $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen prize for political writing for her latest work, “The Ghosts of Europe”. 

“I was rather surprised to beat Doug Saunders, his book was so big,” said Porter, “but then mine was no picnic. I had to slog all over Eastern Europe in the dead of winter. The next book I write will have to be set somewhere in Italy–in the summer.” 

Walrus editor John Macfarlane looked trim and tanned from a recent jaunt to Egypt “before all the action”. When I confessed to society gal Victoria Webster that I nearly fell over after seeing photos of her living room in House & Home magazine because it looked so much like mine, she told me that she had just recently redone it.  ”It’s sort of Brazilian-themed now, all big bright fuschias and orange”.  Strategist supremo John Duffy was busily . When I asked him if he was already in gear for a spring election, he quipped, “which one? Here in Ontario we are definitely looking at two.” 

When informed that I wrote about style, my new Nobel prize winning friend Mr Polanyi asked if I had ever been to Rideau Hall. “The art on the walls is really just apalling. I don’t know who was responsible, but they really ought to be out of a job.” Apparently the state of research and design in the country is also in need of another look. “The only projects that get funded are those that will result in some sort of product that can be taken to market in two to three years. Nobody wants to pay for the kind of work that I do, which is longer term, foundational work.Without it, the well for new ideas will ultimately run dry. Right now, I am in the midst of trying to convince the people at Xerox that the work I am doing will advance the future of photocopying.”

King west online!

Here she is

Just thought I would let you now that if you haven’t managed to come across an actual issue of the very pretty second issue of King West just yet, the mag has gone virtual. Check it out at http://www.kingwestmag.ca/issue2/

And stay tuned for the next issue because it’s already in the works!!

Ships ahoy!

Das Boat

Just back from a lovely relaxing week in the Caribbean where I had the opportunity not only to chill out under a big blue sky and float in a big blue sea, but on a ferry into the neighbouring island of St. Barth’s, observe this giant bath toy: Russian billionaire Andrey Melnichenko’s “A”–a $300 million dollar mega-yacht designed by Philippe Starck, which at 400 feet in length, outpisses even the largest of fellow oligarch Roman Abramovitch’s four palatial vessels, the 377-foot Pelorus–making the designer sub the largest private yacht in the world. Continue reading…

IDS chit-chat

Mariel Hemingway charming a stone

The Interior Design Show 2011 has wrapped and it was a big fat fabulous year. The hall was packed with exhibitors (sold out for the first time, according to my sources) and in contrast to the past couple of lean, mean years there was a lot of new exciting stuff on the floor. 

My vote for singularly most weird contribution was that of Cambria stone surfaces, who mysteriously had Mariel Hemingway in their booth as a spokesperson. What pray tell, did the poor “Manhattan” star have to do with stone countertops, or for that matter, stone flooring? I seem to recall some episodes of substance abuse in her past (or was that Margaux?)–was it possibly a hidden stoner, or stoned reference? Either way, attendees who lined up for a closer look were charmed. Continue reading…

Whither the suit?

In honour of the 150th anniversary of the men’s suit (as we now know it), celebrated Canadian novelist and man of style, Russell Smith, and I appeared on CBC’s ‘Q’ with the ever-delightful Jian Gomeshi to discuss matters sartorial.

Have a listen here:\”The suit at 150\” on CBC \”Q\

Dire controversy

The offending song

The tempest in a teapot initiated by the recent Canadian Broadcast Standards Council ban of the 1985 Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing” from Canadian airwaves is worthy of attention for one key reason: in the current political climate, clearly women’s rights fall somewhere well beneath gay rights in the hierarchy of human rights issues. Continue reading…

Crazy for Coconut

Fry with it, use it as a hair conditioner or spread it on muffins!

As everyone who has been stuck in the Northeast knows all to well, this has been one hell of a dry, cold winter. And it’s only January! 

Well I have found the cure, and it was a lot more affordable than a plane ticket to the Caribbean. Continue reading…

El Must-See

The man and his work

I don’t know if you have had the opportunity to pop into the Royal Ontario Museum’s Institute for Contemporary Art wing recently, but please don’t miss the chance to see their current exhibition, El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to you About Africa, which, happily for those of us who want to see it again and again, has just been extended to February 27th, 2011.

El Anatsui is a much-celebrated Ghanaian born artist who weaves beautiful tapestries and sculptures out of bits of trash–typically the vividly hued metal rings and caps from liquor bottles. His work, which seems to glow from within, has been shown at the Venice Biennale, draped to great effect, over the ancient facade of a Venetian palazzo, brilliantly bridging the spheres of art and artifact and sharp political commentary with pure shining objects of beauty. Continue reading…