Category: Amusing Musings

Taco, taco, burrito, burrito! Taco-flavoured kisses, baby!

Find yourself at the intersection of food, music and culture in this fun-filled spicy celebration.

Kick off the Hot & Spicy Festival’s 15th anniversary with a bang as Toronto crowns the best tacos in the city! This Mexican dish has officially invaded the GTA, but the Festival needs your help to determine which taco reigns supreme!

Top chefs from across the city will share their own spin on this tasty snack. Purchase a sampler platter of these creations and you’ll get to determine the winner!

Take in the ambience of the Festival’s pop-up taqueria – savour tacos, music and other delicious treats. It’s a perfect kick-off to a weekend full of celebrations!

Click here for the complete event listing.

This event is FREE!

DATE:
Friday, July 20, 2012 | 6:30PM – 9:00PM

WHERE:
235 Queens Quay West, Toronto Ontario

Ole!

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From 30 June to 26 August 2012, The Power Plant Gallery’s summer exhibition is bringing together artists and practices that create and engage tools to effect change and reconsider social behaviour. Tools for Conviviality includes works that are interactive as well as mechanisms towards self-help, political shifts, ritual devices, potential weapons, and means for critique.

CURATED BY MELANIE O’BRIAN, CURATOR & HEAD OF PROGRAMS

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Abbas Akhavan, Raymond Boisjoly, Geoffrey Farmer, Claire Fontaine, Kyla Mallett, Swintak / Don Miller, Reece Terris, Oscar Tuazon, Ulla von Brandenburg, Franz West

This exhibit addresses social and individual agency in contemporary art and life, and takes place both inside and outside the gallery proper through a re-conquest of space, the reassessment of information acquisition and a politic of being more present in the world around us. Here, contemporary art is offered as a tool with which to propose alternate tactics.

Tools for Conviviality borrows its title from Ivan Illich’s 1973 philosophical text of the same name, using the reference as a framework to consider artists’ engagement with, and resistance to, contemporary strategies and dialogues. Citing a need to develop new instruments for the acquisition of knowledge by the individual, Illich’s treatise sought to dismantle the institutionalization of specialized knowledge and the dominance of technocratic elites in industrial society. The tools that most interested Illich, and are reflected in the works shown in the exhibition, have links to self-organization, wiki models, democratic space, and forms of communal activity. The engagement that the works in Tools for Conviviality propose has a strong grounding in the histories of the last five decades including conceptual art, performance, Actionism, relational aesthetics, utopian ideologies, and countercultural and grassroots movements. In many of these works, a methodology of looking back in order to move forward is at play.

Raymond Boisjoly’s new exterior text-based work considers The Power Plant’s location within a cultural and geographical history. Works by Abbas Akhavan and Claire Fontaine include homemade armaments, while Franz West’s interactive Adaptives reconnect viewers with their individual visual and tactile experience of objects. Geoffrey Farmer’s changing iterations of a continuous work finds an extension in a new interactive project around the half-formed figure, and Ulla von Brandenburg’s related engagement with stage and props results in a film installation that approaches the power of ritual. Kyla Mallett’s appropriated constellation-like diagrams are pulled from a self-improvement manual, Oscar Tuazon’s sculptural work brings an industrial aesthetic to utopian and playful architecture, and Swintak/Don Miller’s new work created for the exhibition grafts both an experiential and spatial location from the countryside into the gallery. Reece Terris’s new work examines the tools needed to maintain social and professional relationships.

The artists in the exhibition situate themselves within old and new strategies, using tools to ask us to look anew at the social and physical spaces around us.

Above taken from www.thepowerplant.org.

For a review of the exhibit by Toronto Standard’s art critic, Sholem Krishtalka, click here >

Bon art,

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That’s right – Sarah is coming to Molson Amphitheatre tonight to perform in accompaniment with Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Everyone sounds better with an orchestral back-up. Not that she needs it!

One of her oldies but goodies:

At a recent iYellow Wine Group media event, I was able to sample eight incredible wines from famous Chianti winery, Gabbiano. One of the oldest vineyards in the region, Gabbiano epitomizes terroir.

The wines included:

Whilst all the wines we tasted were strong (although I didn’t really care for the white), my Top Three were without a doubt: Belleza (dry, with a bouquet of earthy manure, yum), Alleanza (bold like a Cali zin) & Solatio (at $16.95, a great entry to non-table reds).

You can presently buy the Chianti, Chianti Classico and the Pinot Grigio at the LCBO; others available by consignment only.

Cin cin,

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On Friday June 22nd from 7pm – 1am, my favourite resto-bar in London, the infamous Kettner’s (where Oscar Wilde used to hang out), will be hosting a deco trip down memory lane with The Candlelight Club.

On their website, the CC describes themselves as: a clandestine pop-up cocktail bar in a secret London venue, a stunning, tucked-away den with a 1920s speakeasy flavour, completely lit by candles. Each party offers a one-off cocktail menu, with special themes, plus dancing to live 1920s jazz bands and vintage DJing.

The Kettner’s event promises the decadence and debauchery of Weimar Germany, with both floors of their beautiful events spaces transformed into a desperate world where economic collapse and political mayhem waltz drunkenly with bold new art and bolder social mores. Come to Herr Kettner’s Kabaret to drown your sorrows with delectable cocktails and champagne, feast on a specially created five course gourmet menu, sway to jazz, flirt with cabaret singers and quaff Absinthe like there’s no tomorrow… because there probably isn’t!

The Kabaret Lounge line up includes the wicked dulcet tones of Dusty Limits with ivories tickled by pianist Michael Roulston, burlesque from Ruby Deshabille and Suri Sunatra, all comically hosted by the mistress of the ukelele Tricity Vogue.

In the Ballroom there will be live music from the Boomtown Swingalings, a jazz six piece playing hot American rhythms, along with vintage DJ’ing from Swingin’ Dickie and dance lessons from our masters Robert and Claire Austin.

At the Pernod Absinthe Fountain The Green Fairy will soothe and inspire your troubled soul with samples and a master class from our Absinthe guru. Our close up magician will be delighting and amazing with his prestidigitation and you can have a glamorous portrait taken at the Cafe Foto.

Tickets

Dining Tickets £85 – includes a welcome cocktail, a sumptuous five course dinner, exclusive cabaret performances, half a bottle of wine and all the entertainment. (Groups of four people or more can purchase at the group price of £75 per ticket.)

Non-Dining Tickets £25 – includes a welcome cocktail and all the entertainment.

Dress Code: 1920s Berlin, moustachioed dandies, dizzy flappers, monocled counts, decadent aesthetes, firebrand radicals, apoplectic Teutonic military officers, predatory cross-dressers, itinerant jazz musicians, black or white tie.

Call 020 7292 0529 or email [email protected]

With The Great Gatsby influencing fashion in Toronto and across the pond, get inspired by this fashion story in Women of Influence Magazine and its behind-the-scenes video.

Deco-on,

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