What if you woke up on New Years Day and nobody had died?
That’s the premise of DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS, the new novel by Nobel Prize Winner Jose Saramago, author of the bestselling novel BLINDNESS (now a movie starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo).
Described as a “philosophical page-turner” in a starred Publishers Weekly review, DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS explores the unforeseen consequences of death taking a vacation. Celebration quickly turns to consternation when families are left to care for the permanently dying, life-insurance policies become meaningless, and funeral parlors are reduced to arranging burials for family pets.
Intrigued? Well, just to whet your appetite a little more, the nice people at Harcourt have made an excerpt of the book available!
Rafael Goldchain’s remarkable collection of photographs, I AM MY FAMILY: Photographic Memories and Fictions, has been causing quite stir!
The book has received a glowing review from the Toronto Star, and the Toronto photographer was recently interviewed by the National Post.
Local CBC Toronto radio shows Fresh Air and Metro Morning have both interviewed Rafael, and he appeared on the CBC’s national arts and culture show ‘Q’ in September.
And last weekend, CBC Newsworld Sunday ran a fascinating documentary-short about Rafael, including an interview with the artist, and video footage of his labour-intensive working process.
If you haven’t had chance to look at the book yet, it is ostensibly a family album of traditional portrait photographs. But, on closer examination, you notice an unconventional twist : the only subject is the photographer himself.
For each photograph Rafael has transformed himself using makeup, wigs, costume, and props (hello stuffed chicken!) into his ancestors, magically capturing a curious likeness with the camera.
I AM MY FAMILY is truly a strange, poignant, and remarkable book!
Click here to watch CBC Sunday’s feature on Rafael Goldchain
Click here to listen to Rafael on CBC Radio One’s ‘Q’ with Jian Ghomeshi
Click here for an interview with Rafael in The National Post
Click here for a review of I AM MY FAMILY in the Toronto Star
Click here for the Raincoast Blog Q & A with Rafael
(Pictured: Andy Barry, host of CBC Radio One’s Metro Morning, holding a copy of I AM MY FAMILY)
Meet Dagmar.
Dagmar is not like other vampires. He’s shy, he’s afraid of humans, and...he’s a vegetarian! But even more than he likes vegetables, Dagmar loves candy. And when he hears about Halloween and all the free candy that humans give out, he knows he has to give trick-or-treating a try, in J.otto Seibold and Siobhan Vivian’s new Halloween hit: VUNCE UPON A TIME. 
This week, for Raincoast’s Halloween countdown, we have a VUNCE UPON A TIME activity kit to get you into the spirit.
I’m still not sure what I’m going to be for Halloween, but a vegetarian vampire wouldn’t be too far of a stretch. Click on this cool Q+A with the authors below.
Only 25 more sleeps to go!
As the Canadian and American elections are both coming up, our pals over at Chronicle have posted a super cute guide to voting, put together by none other than Paul Frank and Julius the monkey.
Download the poster to remind you to get out there and cast your vote!
Also remember to do Step 10 (ie. dessert!). That one is really, really important.
You are cordially invited to the wedding of Frankenstein and his bride!
Now that it is October, it is time to start a Halloween Countdown, starting with FRANKENSTEIN TAKES THE CAKE: Which is Full of Funny Stuff Like Rotting Heads and Giant Gorillas and Zombies Dressed as Little Girls and Edgar Allan Poe. The Book, We Mean—Not the Cake. 
No one ever said it was easy being a monster. Take Frankenstein, for instance: He just wants to marry his undead bride in peace, but his best man, Dracula, is freaking out about the garlic bread. Then there’s the Headless Horseman, who wishes everyone would stop drooling over his delicious pumpkin head. And can someone please tell Edgar Allan Poe to get the door already before the raven completely loses it? Sheesh.
In a wickedly funny follow-up to the bestselling FRANKENSTEIN MAKES A SANDWICH, Adam Rex once again proves that monsters are just like you and me. (Well, sort of.)
But why, oh why did Adam Rex finally make a sequel to FRANKENSTEIN MAKES A SANDWICH? To answer that question, he took to his blog:
A Haiku about Adam Rex
He know Frankenstein’s
the doctor, not the monster.
Enough already.
Effective January 1, 2009 Raincoast Books will take over Canadian distribution for Oxmoor House, whose well-established brands include Cooking Light, Sunset and Southern Living. Oxmoor has more recently been successful in developing strong publishing programs with Williams-Sonoma, Weight Watchers and O: The Oprah Magazine. For the first season with Raincoast, frontlist highlights will include THE COMPLETE BECK DIET FOR LIFE, the latest title by the popular weight-loss author Dr. Judith Beck, WEBER’S WAY TO GRILL by the award-winning author Jamie Purveyance and COOKING LIGHT FRESH FOOD FAST from the registered dieticians and culinary professionals on staff at Cooking Light magazine.
“We are publishing some of the very best books in a select number of high-growth categories,” said Jim Childs, Publisher of Oxmoor House. “We feel that the Canadian market has yet to reach its full potential and we are confident that through our new partnership with Raincoast we can make this happen.”
“Raincoast is up to the challenge,” said Paddy Laidley, Executive Vice-President, Sales and Marketing for Raincoast. “We provide complete fulfillment, sales and marketing services across Canada and the very smart publishing strategy and savvy marketing of Oxmoor House definitely plays to our strengths at Raincoast.”
About Oxmoor House:
Since publishing the first Southern Living cookbook in 1979, Oxmoor House has become one of the North America’s leading lifestyle publishers. Today it offers nearly 250 titles across a variety of subject areas including cooking, entertaining, gardening, home decor, home improvement and health. As a subsidiary of Time Inc. and Time Warner Inc., Oxmoor is part the world’s largest media and communications company.
MORAL CLARITY: A GUIDE FOR GROWN-UP IDEALISTS shows how resurrecting a moral vocabulary—good and evil, heroism and nobility—can steer us clear of the dogmas of the right and the helpless pragmatism of the left. Using examples as diverse as The Book of Job and The Odyssey to demonstrate that morality is not a matter of religious faith but is open to all who are committed to these ideals, believers and nonbelievers alike, MORAL CLARITY provides a framework for forming clear opinions and taking responsible action on today’s urgent political and social questions.
Author Professor Susan Neiman recently chatted with Tom Ashbrook on NPR’s On Point about politics, morality and values.
Click here to listen to the On Point interview with Susan Neiman
ART & SOLE: CONTEMPORARY SNEAKER DESIGN is an amazing book that focuses exclusively on contemporary sneaker design and culture. Celebrating the creative side of sneaker culture, it shows the best and most original rarities/collaborations and previews the latest art and design.
The book also highlights the growing number of artists and designers who base their work on sneakers—from sculptures made from dissected shoes, to oil paintings on canvas, and even the customization of the shoes themselves.
Visual communication magazine Creative Review have posted a great preview of ART & SOLE on their blog. Featuring an interview with Nathan Gale of the graphic design studio Intercity who put the book together and an awesome collection of great of images from the book.
ART & SOLE is published next month
Wait for it…
The much-anticipated HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS by J. K. Rowling will be published in paperback in Canada on July 7th, 2009. The suggested retail price is $17.95 (ISBN 978-1-55192-840-1).
The final adventure in the Harry Potter series, the hardcover edition of HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, published in 2007, sold over 800,000 copies in Canada in its first 48 hours of sales. The entire seven book series has sold over 11 million copies in Canada since 1998.
For more information on the Harry Potter series, visit our Harry Potter page.
Chris Wood, author of DRY SPRING: THE COMING WATER CRISIS OF NORTH AMERICA, has a new essay about the new ‘ecological economics’ entitled “The Business of Saving the Earth” in the latest issue of The Walrus magazine:
To the amusement, no doubt, of long-departed sages, we are discovering yet again that man does not live by iPod alone, that no amount of stuff can fill that gnawing hole in the soul where happiness might take root.
This is causing even some of the hardest heads among us to question whether the metrics on which we have gauged our communal and corporate progress for more than fifty years now, those abstractions variously labelled as the gross domestic product and the bottom line, are leading us toward paradise or perdition. A few visionaries even posit an altogether new measure of how we’re doing, one they have the temerity to call an “index of genuine progress.” If they are right, almost everything we thought we knew about keeping track of our economy, businesses, politics, and relationship to nature may turn out to have been seriously misguided. The good news is that we may at last be on the right track.
None too soon, a group of dissenters has stood back from balance-sheet fundamentalism and adopted a new approach. They call it “ecological economics,” a phrase acknowledging that in terms of social, economic, biological, and environmental matters, we really are all in this together. Canada has been slower to act on this insight than some other countries. But even here the facts are becoming undeniable. Despite our vast landscape, it’s clear we have few fresh fields to plow or lakes to pump. Especially in our most populous regions, we must now learn to work with what we have—perhaps with less.
Plainly we have been counting the wrong things and putting our efforts in the wrong places. What, then, if we counted things differently?
In DRY SPRING, Chris, an award-winning veteran journalist, examines how water loss will devastate countless communities in over the next 25 years. The book introduces people coping with the new weather: ranchers and vintners; fishermen and ship captains; families fleeing homes devastated by fire and rising tides; a “water cop” who monitors excessive sprinkling of lawns; and many others. It visits Vancouver Island, a rainforest experiencing drought for the first time; British Columbia’s burning Okanagan; Alberta and Montana, both parched; the Great Lakes, drying out on the two sides of the U.S.-Canadian border; Las Vegas and northern Mexico, coping with ever-increasing drought, and more.
With a reporter’s eye, Crhis looks at this provocative issue and what it will mean for political relations in North America, and offers inspirational examples of what we can do to preserve our water for future generations.
Click here for ‘The Business of Saving the Earth’ by Chris Wood
Read excerpts of DRY SPRING at the Tyee: “They Don’t Want Our Water“ and: “The Case For Selling Our Water“
Click here for the Raincoast blog Q&A with Chris (- click here for part two - click here for part three -)
Rafael Goldchain is launching his wonderful new photography book I AM MY FAMILY at David Mirvish Books this Sunday, September 21st, between 2pm and 4pm.
Rafael is charming and I AM MY FAMILY has to be seen to be believed (Mirvish are also exhibiting prints from the book in their wonderful space) so, if you are in Toronto this weekend, come along!
David Mirvish Books
596 Markham Street
Toronto, Ontario, M6G 2L8
Tel: 416-531-9975
Martha Stewart is all about the blogging!
Not only have Martha and her team been blogging for more than a year now (for those of us who need more-Martha-more-of-the-time), she dedicated yesterday’s entire TV show to blogs and bloggers.
Recording the show in front of a comically laptop-crowded live audience (all presumably live-blogging the experience), Martha highlighted a few her favourite bookmarks. Amongst her guests were Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes, photo-bloggers and authors of the lovely A YEAR OF MORNINGS. You can see a snippet of the show, including Maria and Stephanie talking about their blog and the new book (towards to the end of the video), in this YouTube clip:
Click here for Martha Stewarts blog
Click here for ‘A Year of Mornings’ website
Click here to see Maria and Stephanie’s new project ‘A Year of Evenings’
We’ve got mail! When I looked in my physical mailbox this morning, I thought that I was still half-asleep, dreaming of balmy breezes and a sea-side hukilau...Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor shape of fruit stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds!
Lonely Planet actually sent the coconut as a gift in celebration of the new MAUI and HAWAI’I: THE BIG ISLAND Guides. Neat! The guides are full colour and include loads of itineraries, cultural content, and pulse-quickenig outdoor activities. Whatever did they think at Canadian Customs? Next time I’m in the tropics, I’ll think twice about sending a boring old postcard.
Lonely Planet has also published the beautiful coffee-table book, THE EUROPE BOOK: A JOURNEY THROUGH EVERY COUNTRY ON THE CONTINENT.
From remote, icy fjords in Greenland to wild street parties in Amsterdam, THE EUROPE BOOK draws together the charms and the surprises of this magnificent continent. 
I’ll start watching my mailbox for coffee, cheese, and wine!
The photographs of Toronto-based artist Rafael Goldchain have been exhibited in Canada, Chile, the United States, Cuba, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Mexico. His work is in private and public collections including France’s Biblioteque National, the Canadian Museum for Contemporary Photography, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts.
Released this week, Rafael’s new book, I AM MY FAMILY: Photographic Memories and Fictions, presents a family album of traditional portrait photographs, but with an unconventional twist: the only subject is Rafael himself. In an elaborate process involving genealogical research, the use of makeup, hair styling, costume, and props, Rafael transforms himself into his ancestors, capturing their likeness with the camera. With each reinvention of himself, Rafael traces the evolution of Jewish culture from tradition to modernity and invites us to engage the history of a family decimated and scattered by the traumatic events of the 20th century. We caught up over email.
What inspired the photographs collected in I AM MY FAMILY?
A desire to address in some fashion the huge memory hole created in my family (and other families) by migration, famine, cultural and geographical displacement, and extinction. I wanted to suggest that identity is in the most crucial ways formed by the depth of familial and cultural memory. Without this vital element our identity can be over-determined by the fleeting trends of contemporary culture. This hole in memory enticed me to start my research and at the same time to imagine that which could not be obtained anymore. A desire to visually address the puzzle of cultures that comprise my identity, and to pass this on to my son led to the family history research and to the re-creation of each ancestor by means of performative self-portraiture.
I found additional sources of inspiration in the lovely anonymous formal portraits found in collections of pre-WWII photographs of Jewish life in Europe. I got interested in the lighting and posing styles as well as in the fashions of the time.
How do you research each portrait?
It depends on the image and what I start with. If I start with an existing family photograph from our family albums, I ask my parents and relatives for information over email or in person. I also search genealogical databases for familial relationships and for familial history. Some research of the time period, geography, and local histories also takes place although I have relatives that are much better at this. The most important part is to set down my thoughts about the image, and anything I may remember. Sometimes there is no photograph and I must create from memory or from archival photographs found in books. Sometimes archival images stimulate the creation of a “fictional” relative. The character in the photograph is interesting and may provide a reference to aspects of Jewish life that my own family album images don’t. In effect I see this project as a means to also create a portrayal of Jewish life as filtered through portraiture.
I Am My Family includes pages from your sketchbooks showing your detailed notes and drawings. Is the research and preparation more than a means to an end for you? Is there an emotional or cathartic quality to the process?
Yes, it is profoundly grounding to set my thoughts and memories on paper in the form of an artist’s scrapbook. Somehow the dense collection of elements—writing, source images, drawings, emails, etc.—is suggestive of the effort to re-member, re-construct a life. But it is also reflective of the difficulty in doing so with only fragments of memory and scant images. The research has been a parallel activity that I have taken up in spurts here and there between academic years. This process, which continues, has profoundly changed my sense of self as an artist and as an individual.
Is absolute authenticity important to you or do you allow yourself some artistic license?
Absolute authenticity is nice but often hard to come by. I have come to regard this book not as a repository of my family research but as work of fiction that responds to the need to remember/imagine our familial past in order to construct ourselves in the present.
Many of the self-portraits in the book represent actual family members, but many of them also represent imagined characters based on archival photographs. I take artistic license in order to generate the illusion of a complete family while at the same time conveying how impossible this would be to accomplish.
When did you decide to use self-portraiture in your work?
About 10 years ago while working on an MFA at York university. I had done portraiture before as part of work done in Latin America while traveling. I decided to use myself as a model as I was accessible and inexpensive. More seriously, since I felt the work I wanted to do was autobiographical it was more honest to use myself as the model. In the end the cast of characters in my real/imagined family all uncannily resemble each other.
Could you explain the physical process of setting up each portrait?
I work on a scrapbook page with startup images and any other material that can be helpful for me and my colleagues. The costumes, hair and makeup are arranged in advance. Lighting diagrammed and setup. A makeup artist works with me and then we photograph. The photographs are made on a 4x5 film view camera with Polaroids and 4x5 cut sheet colour film.
How long does it take?
For the most part it takes a couple of hours, sometimes longer depending on the complexity of the hair and makeup. The process starts weeks earlier in lo0king for the right costume, hair piece, and other props.
Do you get the personality of each person right the first time, or is each portrait the result of trial and error?
The latter. We shoot a lot of Polaroid proofs exploring lighting and pose, and ironing out problems with hair and costume. It is sometimes a long process, however sometimes we get lucky and strike the right combination very quickly.
Do you digitally manipulate your images?
Yes, I find the digital process well suited to the expressive intent of the work. I am able to modify my features and body in many subtle and not so subtle ways and also play with lighting, tonalities and colour. The digital process is an extension of the work done in the studio.
How have your cultural identities—Latin American, Jewish, Canadian—shaped your work?
Yes, this is in a way a puzzle that I am trying to reformulate or unpack through my work. Besides the slightly exotic cultural mix I think it is important to recuperate histories that have remained relatively hidden, and one such history is that of Latin American Jewry. I think that the cultural leap that my ancestors—Yiddish speaking Polish Jews—had to make to adapt to the Latin America of the 1920s and 30s is nothing short of amazing, and not unlike that which many non-English or French speaking immigrants to Canada experience.
Do have a sense of being an exile?
Very much so, but one by choice. Alberto Manguel once wrote about my work being like an exile’s album of images from the country left behind. The title of that work was Nostalgia For An Unknown Land, and that land was Latin America. The land that I am forever exiled from in this book is the Yiddish speaking culture of my ancestors. I should add though that the position of exile is well suited for reinventing oneself in a new cultural context. Perhaps in engaging in imaginative re-enactment I am also reinventing a self I seek for myself at this time in my life.
Do you have a personal favourite amongst the portraits?
No. They are all interesting to me for different reasons. I suppose the more challenging ones at the moment are the ones I am most proud of.
Are the family self-portraits an ongoing project?
The research goes on. At the moment I am taking time to promote the book and the work in it. My research into family history will yield in the future a new project.
What is next?
I am working on moving forward with a documentary project I have been working on for almost 15 years involving family photography as well, but not my original family.
Thanks Rafael!
I AM MY FAMILY by Rafael Goldchain Book Launch
Sunday, September 21st, 2:00PM, FREE
At David Mirvish Books
596 Markham Street
Toronto, ON, M6G 2L8
I don’t know about you, but some mornings it is just about all I can do to get out of bed, get dressed, down 3 cups of coffee, remember to pick up my keys, and get myself to work. Needless to say, I am not what you would call ‘creative’ before 10am. No. If, however, A YEAR OF MORNINGS: 3191 MILES APART, published by Princeton Architectural Press (October 2008), is anything to go by, Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes are exactly that.
One morning in December 2006, Maria and Stephanie each took a picture of everyday objects randomly arranged on their kitchen tables and, without the other’s knowledge, uploaded them to Flickr. Noticing a remarkable similarity between their images, the two agreed to document their mornings by posting one photo a day to a shared blog. The beautiful and serene images they posted to their site, 3191 (named after the distance in miles between their homes in Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon), were always taken before 10am without discussion between the two women.
Two hundred and thirty six annotated photographs from the year-long project, which is no longer available online, are collected in the book A YEAR OF MORNINGS. The ‘photo conversation’ recorded in the book displays the magical coincidences that occurred throughout the project. Arranged by season, the quietly intimate images of the mundane—discarded clothing, a view of a snowy day from the window, a tablecloth—are full of unexpected echoes and striking similarities that defy the long-distance reality of the collaboration. It’s a beautiful testament to the serenity, solitude, and peacefulness that is sorely lacking from my caffeine-fueled morning commute.
Umm… Can I work from home from now on?
(For the record, I would like to point out that I’m usually up at 5:30am, so it is perfectly acceptable for me to have drunk a gallon of coffee before lunch).
Click here for The Year of Mornings Website
Click here for Maria and Stephanie’s new collaborative project ‘A Year of Evenings’
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Check out our NEWEST Podcast for Clancy with the Puck, a hilarious tale of hockey hubris.