Results tagged “war”

On September 10, 1939, Prime Minister Mackenzie King officially declared war on Germany. Toronto was impacted by the war almost immediately. Drawn by patriotism, adventure-seeking, or just the lure of a job after nearly a decade of the Great Depression, thousands of young Torontonians spilled into recruiting stations and from there into manning depots. In Bill McNeil's Voices of a War Remembered (Doubleday Canada Limited, 1991), Torontonian Ella Trow recalled how every family was touched by the Second World War. "My brothers and my husband went into the services," she wrote, "and most of my friends were in the same boat."

2009 kicked off with promise in the air, a tonic sense of the future around which Western civilization warmed itself. Despite a snowballing economic catastrophe unseen since the 1930s, the world staggered onward, still high from the incredible euphoria of Barack Obama's ascendancy to the presidency. With the expiration of the Bush Era inevitable, we all held our breath, collectively waiting to exhale.

                                     

As the war in Afghanistan enters its eighth year, more Canadians oppose the war than at any time since the country entered the conflict in 2002 (according to polls). Last Saturday, several hundred protesters gathered in Queen's Park to send Stephen Harper a message: bring the troops home. The protest was part of a pan-Canadian day of action organized by The Canadian Peace Alliance. Protests took place in sixteen cities across the country.

                 

On September 23, war resister Jeremy Hinzman—who has spent four and a half years living and working in Canada as a conscientious objector—is due to be deported back to the United States where he faces a dishonorable discharge, court martial, and sentence in a military prison, the equivalent of a felony record. A protest was held by the War Resister Support Campaign (WRSC) in Toronto and other cities across the country Saturday to rally support and raise awareness that the government continues to deport war resisters despite, as we previously reported, public and Parliamentary support for them to stay.

A visiting Ralph Nader said that expatriate Americans living in Canada should tell other Americans about how great our health care system is. He then explained that there was no difference between Barack Obama and John McCain and that people should vote for the 74-year-old vanity candidate because…well, he didn't actually explain that part, but we're sure he has a reason.

To Corey Glass, Pierre Trudeau's Vietnam-era proclamation that "Canada should be a refuge from militarism" must ring a little hollow in 2008. Two summers ago, the 25-year-old Iraq War veteran left his post with the U.S. Army, resisting re-deployment to the catastrophic five-year occupation. Since August of 2006, Mr. Glass, like others seeking refugee status, has been a resident of Toronto, calling the Parkdale community home. This week, with his bags packed and ready, Glass was "shocked" to learn that his deportation order—due to expire today—was stayed, granting him temporary refuge in Canada.

Well, there have been a lot of films made about the ongoing conflict in Iraq and its effect on soldiers, and here’s another one! Stop-Loss is probably the glossiest, most-Hollywood looking attempt so far (no mean feat, considering Paul Haggis has had a shot already) and it remains to be seen if anyone in America really wants to be reminded that its sending its army off to fight a war that the majority of them didn’t want, especially when in many cases the soldiers don’t want to go. Haggis’s attempt at examining the psychological fallout of the Iraq war In The Valley of Elah absolutely sucked a big one at the box office, and honestly we don’t see this having much of a bigger impact, even though Ryan Philippe is generally considered nicer to look at than Tommy Lee Jones.

Toronto principal in controversial controversy over explicit poems he wrote and posted to his website. This is of course the first recorded case ever of somebody getting in trouble for something they wrote on the Internet, and the scandal has sent shock waves through the online community. "Wait, somebody actually this shit?" said Patrick Metzger. "Dammit, I better re-emphasize that my erotic snuff story about Geri Halliwell is purely a work of fiction!"

Marjorie Chan's A Nanking Winter is a show about the 1937 genocide of the citizens of Nanking committed by the Japanese army. The atrocity, which claimed the lives of at least 300,000 Chinese, is an often-overlooked tragedy, and Chan's story focuses on a young woman named Irene who has written a book exposing the truth about the massacre. Chan's play is inspired by Iris Chang and her book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, which was a best seller in 1997. Chang suffered from depression and, in 2004, she took her own life. The first act of A Nanking Winter is set in the home of Irene and her Japanese husband on the eve of her Rape of Nanking-esque book's release. She is visited by her flighty sister, her publisher, Julia, and a mysterious guest that Julia brings along. The second act thrusts the action back into the past and explores the lives of two women, both named Mei, struggling to survive in the middle of the Nanking massacre.

Michael Frayn's play Democracy, currently playing at Tarragon, is not always easy to follow. For some reason, this doesn't particularly matter. The second political drama set in Berlin in Tarragon's current season chronicles the rise and fall of Willy Brandt, West Germany's charismatic leader from 1969 until 1974, and is crammed full of politicians, spies, treaties and references to the nuances of Cold War-era Germany that may occasionally go over your head. But it never for a second stops being absolutely fascinating. Frayn is known for his tightly-packed scripts, most famously for his smash-hit farce Noises Off, but also for his other political work, Copenhagen. This one focuses on the relationship between Brandt and his favourite aide, Gunter Guillaume, an East German ex-pat who also happens to be a spy.

The coolest movie opening this week is Be Kind Rewind, which is a treasure trove of Things White People Like, as it stars Jack Black and his black friend played by Mos Def, and is directed by Michel Gondry, and has lots of irony, seeing as how it is about a couple of people who erase all the videotapes in their video store and then make their own mocking versions of the movies they erased. In all seriousness, though, it looks pretty funny, so possibly people who are not white will like it as well!

While some may scoff at modern rituals surrounding Valentine's Day, simple expressions of love and sentimentality held a deeper meaning in Toronto towards the end of World War II. Tucked amidst the newspaper coverage of the Yalta Conference this week in 1945 were stories on how Torontonians expressed their admiration towards each other and loved ones fighting overseas.

Photo of d’bi.young.anitafrika and her son, Moon, courtesy of Women’s Press.

A protest outside the Toronto office of Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty Thursday drew attention to the housing crisis in Canada, demanding that resources spent on military action in Afghanistan be diverted to provide an additional 1% of the federal budget for social housing.

Reg Hartt, everyone's favourite dude with a movie theatre in his basement, is promoting the new(ish) film version of off-Broadway tittilator Naked Boys Singing by screening a mini Queer Film Festival at the Cineforum over the next few weeks. Each Thursday night for the next four weeks, he'll screen Naked Boys (which is exactly what it sounds like) at 9, with a different gay movie as a lead-in at 7.

Palace of the End, Judith Thompson's most recent play, is not only her most political work, it is also her best. As most auditioning actors in this country have discovered, Thompson's greatest strength has always been her monologues, and in this piece, she uses that strength to its full advantage. In fact, she dispenses with character interaction altogether and breaks her show into three long monologues, each spoken by someone who has been greatly affected by the political situation in Iraq from Saddam's rise to power to the present. Interestingly, while Thompson has created the text for the show, she has not created fictional characters. Though they are not credited as such in the program, the following becomes clear: Maev Beaty's "American Soldier" is none other than Abu Ghraib's favourite dishonourable dischargee, Private Lynndie England; Julian Richings' "British Microbiologist and Weapons Inspector" is WMD whistle-blower and Thom Yorke muse David Kelly; Arsinée Khanjian's "Iraqi Mother" is the less notorious Nehrjas al-Saffarh, a woman who was tortured along with her children during Saddam's reign and died in the first Gulf War.

Films! Films films films films. Sometimes it’s hard to get this column started, so we just sit in front of a blank word document and type the word "films" until it doesn’t make any sense to us any more. But by then, we’ve got started typing, at least, and so we continue.

If you're up for a little subversion on Thursday night from 5–7 p.m., check out our old pal Fauxreel's talk, Resistance in the City, at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at U of T (7 Hart House Circle). Done in association with Signals in the Dark: Art in Shadow of War, an exhibition opening that evening, Fauxreel will "talk about his work as a street artist and give a mini-demo/workshop on techniques and tactics for transforming mass media into a critique of itself."

The Falconer report on violence in Toronto schools talks of a "culture of fear," saying that many students bring weapons to school, and many crimes go unreported. Some of the basic recommendations to fix things include more social workers and after-school basketball, fewer suspensions, more diverse teaching staff, and gun-sniffing springer spaniels to roam the halls.

In some households, hockey is a key element during the Christmas break. Skates under the tree. That long-desired California Golden Seals sweater from Santa. Fans that cannot be pulled away from the TV during holiday games and tournaments. Christmas songs recorded by a favourite player.

Really not much on in terms of Christmas films this week. The Bloor is showing National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (which is about as far away from a Christmas classic as we can imagine without being a film about aliens from another galaxy that have never heard of Christmas) and White Christmas. We’re still happy to recommend Enchanted (we just saw it, and it was absolutely lovely), but for those of you who want to see something specifically related to Christmas, the Revue has come to your rescue with the help of Dion Conflict, who will be showing Christmas Kitsch-A-Roo at 9:30 p.m. If you’re familiar with Dion Conflict’s Hunk-A-Junk screenings, you’ll know what to expect—a variety of utterly bizarre found shorts—but they’re normally excellent fun and the Christmas theme means some really weird stuff is going to show up. Hopefully he’ll be showing the legendary Santa Claus' Punch and Judy, which really has to be seen to be believed.

Following the release this year of Neil Young's 1971 Massey Hall concert and a third tribute album comes Chrome Dreams II. Featuring ten new songs and covering a range of musical styles, there is something for all of his fans on this recording. "Where Living With War and Everybody’s Rockin' were albums focused on one subject or style, Chrome Dreams II is more like After The Goldrush or Freedom, with different types of songs...

This Friday, November 16, we (Newmindspace) will be hosting our very first lightsaber battle! This summer at Burning Man, we witnessed a 10,000-person lightsaber battle put on by a camp called Watto's Junkyard, easily the largest lightsaber battle since the Jedi Civil War. However, with our limited resources, we realized that without a large donation from a rich weirdo (which are plentiful in San Francisco), we would probably not be able to get the plastic, LED-lit, colour-changing expanding kind without some sort of fundraising "starter battle" first.

It is a peculiarity of our city that its grandest monument was erected to honour a largely forgotten and misunderstood war. Yet, the life of the South African War Memorial—the tall granite column overlooking the intersection at Queen and University—reveals a great deal about how the city’s priorities and values have evolved over time. Although University Avenue terminated at Queen Street at that time, it acted as a stately boulevard connecting the new government buildings...

Hannah Moscovitch's play East of Berlin is familiar territory for Tarragon's extra space. Remember Rosa Laborde's Léo, which was remounted last season? Well, here's another show in the same space that's set in South America, has political subject matter, spans the life of its main character, and features only two other actors, a man and a woman, both of whom he has sex with. This may be a bit of a tangent, but Torontoist...

Trampoline Hall, the lecture series/literary salon with a reputation for being playful and inventive, is upping its quirk factor slightly this week in two ways.

October 16 is the day that the Walt Disney Company was founded (1923), the day that Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act in response to the October Crisis terrorist kidnapping (1970), and the day that President Bush signed into law the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (2002). It is also, though you may not know it, World Food Day, as deemed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. World Food Day has been celebrated in more than 150 countries since 1979, and since 1981, each year has had a theme. This year's theme is The Right to Food; that is, "the right of every person to have regular access to sufficient, nutritionally adequate and culturally acceptable food for an active, healthy life. It is the right to feed oneself in dignity, rather than the right to be fed."

This weekend, Toronto will be a rockin' city, as the 2007 World Rock Paper Scissors Championships cut into town.

Anyone who grew up in Toronto has been on at least one school field trip to historic Fort York. You've smelled the horseshit, eaten the biscuits, and probably watched some corny performance by someone in a costume telling you how things used to be in the olden days. So it might be tempting to dismiss Crate Productions' new play The Fort at York as an educational play, or worse, historical reenactment. This would be a mistake. The site-specific play, directed by Tara Beagan and Chris Reynolds (pictured), is set the night before the War of 1812's Battle of York, which decimated the original fort, but the focus is on personal relations rather than military ones.

Earlier this week, The New York Times ditched their Times Select subscription thing, a move that saw content previously available for about $8 a month––like some well-liked columnists, for instance––unlocked and made free for everyone. Best of all, though, was the huge amount of material from the newspaper's archives that was set free, dating all the way back to 1851.