Archive for the 'photography' Category

That Night in Toronto has a Bad Day

Published
by
Katherine
on October 26, 2008
in TNIT, Visual art, art, city, film, music, new media, photography and theatre
. 1 Comment

Click above for the video……

Hey y’all,

So Blair and I have been super busy and we have plans coming up, so you will see an episode soon enough!  In the meantime, check out the video above.  It is the first one that I did on my own, and with the slowness of my computer, might be the last for a while.  I went to the launch of the second issue of Bad Day Magazine at Studio Gallery .  You can check out the art until mid-November there, so please check out the gallery’s website for hours and such things.

I have been working nuts hours these days, but I still got to see Scratch at Factory Theatre.  If you are a woman/girl/lady person, you must see this play.  It will bring you back to when you were a pre-teen/teen and no one ‘got’ you, and you were really going through lots of ’stuff’.  If you are a man/boy/gentleman person, you should see it too.

For next week, there is tons going on…. almost every night is booked.  I’ll try to take pics and stuff and tell you about it next week.

Monday - Fu-Gen Theatre’s Gala

Tuesday - Rest (maybe make a bean salad for lunches)

Wednesday - The night I have been waiting for!!!!   Trouble the Water as part of the first Doc Soup of the season (as you will find out soon viewers, I am the hugest fan of Hot Docs Fest and Doc Soup series) then….  SHARON JONES and the DAP KINGS at Kool Haus!  Blair will be there too, but I am sure Sharon won’t let us take pics.  If you don’t know Sharon Jones, click on her name anywhere on this blog and the internets will take you to her.  She is a massive talent - soul to the limit!  Best band ever too!

Thursday - I have rehearsal, but there’s lots going on in the city

Friday - I am seeing The Black Rider at Tarragon but for the rest of you it is Halloween.  (you will also learn that Halloween is not my scene and I do everything I can to avoid it.  I hate halloween.)

See you dudes next week -

k

Episode 13 - October 4-5, 2008

Published
by
Blair
on October 7, 2008
in Visual art, city, dance, film, music, new media, photography and theatre
. 1 Comment

12 hours. What a night! We started our journey at 6:30pm at City Hall and our heads didn’t hit the pillow until 6am the next morning …

There is so much to cover from this years Nuit Blanche in Toronto. So much in fact that it’s best if you watch the video! :) But here are some of the highlights that we saw on our travels:

Zone A:

  • Stereoscope, City Hall
    An amazing installation turning the windows of City Hall into a giant ping pong game and lighting canvas
  • Our interview with Mayor David Miller
  • Conversation #2, 900 Wellesley Street
    12,000 books laid together to create a beautiful sculpture. The different coloured spines even created moasic images wrapped around the sculpture.

Zone B:

  • r u part of the art?
    An interesting mobile installation - subscribe to a texting service and receive updates throughout the night with various things to do like sing the song from The Muppets (Menamena do do dee do do …). We didn’t see many other people doing it, but it was fun to randomly do stuff during the night.
  • Le Labo, Distillery
    A very calming video/sound installation (for the first while we were there) at Le Labo or Le Laboratoire d’art - a “francophone media and integrated arts lab offering opportunities in production, training & showings.”
  • Higgs Ocean, Distillery
    While they weren’t part of the ‘official’ Nuit Blanche schedule, this installation in one of the alleyways of the Distillery, was a highlight for us as it featured many elements from our youth - Lite Brite, a Big Bird lamp, and old films on video projectors! Unfortunately we couldn’t find any info on the group online - so if you guys see this posting, let us know where to find you!

Zone C:

  • Overflow, Liberty Village
    A smaller scale installation by Michel de Broin of a waterfall coming out the window of a 3 storey building and crashing into discarded furniture on the ground.
  • Imagine Peace, Liberty St. & Jefferson Ave.
    Yoko Ono continues to spread the message of peace with this installation. The public is given tags to write a wish on and the hang on the trees lining the street creating weeping willows of wishes, as it were.
  • I Promise It Will Always Be This Way, Lamport Stadium
    At 5am, watching mascots run wild to mid-90’s techno music was a lot of fun - and a great way to end the night.

We took tons of photos that night and we’ll be posting them in our Facebook Group as well as setting up a flickr home soon for you to view.

What were your highlights? What did you think of the 2008 Nuit Blanche?

Be sure to check out our friends over at Dear Toronto and their coverage of Nuit Blanche!

Follow our journeys through the following ways:

Special Pre Toronto Nuit Blanche Edition

Published
by
Blair
on September 30, 2008
in TNIT Info, Visual art, city, dance, film, literature, music, photography and theatre
. 2 Comments

4 days left until at 6:52pm on Saturday October 4th, Toronto awakens for an all night contemporary art thing called Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. If you haven’t been yet … where have you been!? For the past two years, the popularity of this phenomenal free chaotic art frenzy has exploded - hundreds of thousands of Torontonians take to the street and experience art in Toronto like never before.

For those of you who have never been, Katherine and I have put together a little guide - 7 tips on how to survive Nuit Blanche and make the most of your night.

We are prepping for an all night vlogging thing and we want you to be a part of it. We’ll be heading from Zone B to A to C on our bikes. If you want to join us along the way and be a part of our evening, email us at info@nightintoronto.com and we’ll let you know where we are. You can also send us some tips if you know of a great installation we should feature on TNIT!

After we catch up on our sleep, we’ll be posting a vlog from each zone so be sure to sign up to our RSS feed to see the results! Oh, and we’ll also be teaming up with our friends at Dear Toronto to do some cross vlogging - should be a lot of fun.

Enjoy!

- Blair

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A gorgeous sunset in Toronto

Published
by
Blair
on September 26, 2008
in city and photography
. 2 Comments

I was working late when a colleague pointed out the window at the gorgeous colours. I ran up to thw rooftop to take some photos on my phone. It was a beautiful sunset in Toronto. Here are some shots to look at.

- Blair

Episode 11 - September 13, 2008

Published
by
Blair
on September 14, 2008
in Visual art, food, music and photography
. 0 Comments

We’re back!

Yes, it was a little touch and go there for a while after our last vlog, but we’re back on the air - this time in HD! Woot! Thanks to our brand new Canon HG10, you’ll be able to enjoy TNIT through the magic of HD - it’s almost as if you are actually there with us! (Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration …)

On Saturday, Katherine and I decided to check out the Queen West Arts Crawl, a favourite weekend event amongst many Torontonians. What’s different about this vlog is that we filmed it BEFORE 5pm! That’s right - this is not about a night in Toronto as much as it is about a day in Hogtown. As that was the case, it only made sense that we grab a bit of brunch because c’mon - it’s Saturday morning!

We made our way over to Squrily’s which neither of us had been to before (for brunch). It’s an incredibly eclectic restaurant in its décor. There’s a lovely patio in the back where we sat (well, we sat on the edge of it because there was a great big red couch that Katherine wanted to rest up). The brunch was delicious and pretty darn cheap, if you ask me. Only $20 for the two of us (incl. tax and tip!).

Then it was off to Trinity Bellwoods Park to take part in the artist fair and to take a peak at some of the amazing artists who live in this fair city.

You’ll have to watch the episode to see how it all went down. :)

We’d like to say thanks to Megan Hamilton for providing her song “Detroit” as the music for this episode! If you’ve got some music that you think would work well for for TNIT, drop us a line!

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What we talked about in this episode:

Photo of Trinity Bellwoods Park by Katherine Grainger.

Episode 7 - July 23, 2008

Published
by
Blair
on July 27, 2008
in food, music and photography
. 3 Comments

Katherine’s leaving the east end for the west end of the city and in homage to her tenure as an east ender, That Night In Toronto takes you through some of her favourite spots along Queen St East between Broadview and Logan Ave.

The night started off at the Dark Horse Espress Bar (not Café as Blair keeps referring to it), located at 682 Queen St. East (just west of Broadview). It’s a great place to meet up and have a coffee or tea. The atmosphere is relaxing and inviting. The large communal table with all the daily and weekly papers is one of our favourite reasons for visiting. And they display local artists’ work on the walls.

Speaking of art, Queen St. East has a great network of artists called the Artists’ Network of Riverdale (due to suspicious activity, Google has advised against visiting the site as it may harm your computer … we’re not sure what’s wrong - but hopefully the problem will be remedied soon). One of the galleries we walked by is the Hangman Gallery which is a great space to visit and support your local artists.

One of Katherine’s hang outs is Kubo Radio (894 Queen St. East) - a great restaurant sharing the joy of Asian cuisine. The vibe is cool and funky, the food is delicious and the $5 martini’s on Wednesdays is a REAL treat to get over the mid-week blues (the martini’s are made with sake … mmm mmm good!).

Our evening ended off at The Opera House where we took in a performance of She & Him - the group formed by actress Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward. A quick and quirky bio on the group:

The She & Him story begins when in 2006 , renowned one man band M. Ward, recorded a duet with a girl named Zooey Deschanel. A delightful recording session, the experience lead to a dialogue between the two about collaborating further. This, in turn, led to Deschanel admitting to secretly making dozens and dozens of home demos and hoarding them like acorns for the winter. Sick and tired of being stingy and secretive about music, Deschanel realized that if songs were acorns then this was indeed her wintertime: she sent the recordings to Ward and these demos became the basis for their first record, entitled Volume One.

Here’s a little sample of their music (and music video)

The concert was fantstic! We had a great time chillin’ and hanging with some friends we saw at the concert. Overall it was a very good night.

Katherine had one last surprise to show Blair before they left for the evening … to find out what it was, watch the video. ;)

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What we talked about in this episode:

Photo taken of the Toronto skyline by Blair Francey.

Formats available:MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

Episode 2 - June 19, 2008

Published
by
Blair
on June 23, 2008
in film and photography
. 5 Comments

Hey everyone,

We’re in widescreen! I figured out how to film on the video camera in 16:9 ratio … yay!

Last Thursday Katherine and I headed out on the town to see if we drink up some more culture in Toronto. We had it all planned out and it started off really well at Prefix. We grabbed some food and then chaos ensued …

Okay, not really chaos, but we certainly had to improvise. You’ll have to watch the episode to figure out what happens!

We’re really ecstatic about the response we’ve had from our first episode. There are so many events coming up in the summer, I doubt we’ll have any trouble finding new events to attend. But if you know of an event coming up that you think we should take a look at, contact us and let us know! We’ll try and fit it into our schedule!

Formats available:MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)
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Episode 1 - June 10, 2008

Published
by
Blair
on June 15, 2008
in film, music, photography and theatre
. 9 Comments

Our first vlog!

Katherine and I are really excited to show you our first attempt at putting our first video blog together!

On June 10, 2008, we began our night at the Mille Femme exhibit at Brookfield Place, biked up town to see Black Watch at Varsity Arena, stopped off at Hart House to observe Slow Dance, grabbed a bite to eat at Queen and Spadina before rockin’ out at The Horseshoe Tavern with Sebastien Grainger And The Mountains.

Here’s how much we spent tonight: approximately $47.

Unfortunately we couldn’t take any footage of the Black Watch performance - lucky for us though, there’s a great preview on YouTube - check it out here:

We hope you enjoy the first of our vlogs about culture in Toronto. Do you know of an event or exhibition or show we should check out? Give us a shout!

Did you see one of the events we saw? What did you think of it? Leave a comment!

Also check out us out at iTunes!