#simon lewsen

[walrusmagazine]

Blood and Honey: In Defence of the Winnie-the-Pooh Slasher Flick

Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s horror film might ruin your childhood, but it’s a win for creative freedom

A comparison between Frake-Waterfield’s way of using Winnie (which is irreverent and crude) and Disney’s (which is exploitative and mean) helps clarify what’s at stake here. Sure, Blood and Honey is obnoxious, but the obnoxiousness is the point: it’s Frake-Waterfield’s way of claiming the full freedoms allowed under copyright laws. Those laws have been bent out of shape and will likely be subject to future warping, but for now at least they still belatedly make space for artistic freedom. To protect what’s left of this freedom, though, artists must exercise it, and for it to be meaningful, it must include the right to make works that other people don’t like.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

Illustration by Celina Gallardo (celinagallardo.com)

[walrusmagazine]

Orville Peck Rides Again: How the Singer Nods to Queer Country History

Some may reckon that Peck is subverting the genre. Instead, he’s highlighting themes that have always been part of it

Peck is the embodiment of every misfit who ever populated the old frontier. He is the queer collective unconsciousness of the country music tradition. He knows about the longings that ranch hands and rodeo queens carry around with them. He knows that heartache and loneliness are existential conditions: cowboys, after all, have been singing about them for centuries. He knows, too, that the West is large and that there’s space for all kinds of people beneath its tall skies. “I recall somebody saying, ‘There ain’t no cowboys left,’” Peck sings on “Lafayette,” the most rollicking song on the new record. “But they ain’t met me and they ain’t met you.” We’re still here, he declares. We’ve been here all along.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

Illustration by Eric Kostiuk Williams (kostiukwilliams.com)

[walrusmagazine]

What Canada’s Largest Art Heist Reveals about the Art World’s Shady Side

The stolen masterpieces have never turned up—and nobody’s really looking for them

By all accounts, the biggest art heist in Canadian history should’ve been even bigger. Just past midnight on September 4, 1972, a man in a ski mask and climbing spurs accessed the roof of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts by scaling a nearby tree. He then extended a ladder to two similarly masked robbers below. From atop the building, the trio entered the gallery by rappelling with rope through a broken skylight. Once inside, they bound and gagged the security guards at gunpoint and began ransacking the building—cracking frames, shattering vitrines—with the apparent intention of stealing everything of value. The plan, it appears, was to descend and ascend, grinch-like, through the ceiling, during what likely would have been an all-night operation.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

Illustration by Jeffrey Kam (jeffreykam.net)

[walrusmagazine]

Illustration by Denise Nestor (denisenestorillustration.com).

Why Canada’s foreign-affairs minister believes saving NAFTA will help save the world

Read “Chrystia Freeland Wants to Fix the Twenty-first Century” by Simon Lewsen at thewalrus.ca.

[nickkahler]

Toronto can expect that the rich will continue to funnel money into legacy projects and celebrity commissions. Maybe, with their help, we’ll rebuke London with our own Renzo Piano tower, or we’ll get back at Berlin and Denver with a better Libeskind than the ones they (and we) currently have. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a David Adjaye complex, and if we’re less risk averse than Mirvish thinks we are, we’ll roll the dice on Zaha Hadid or Jean Nouvel. The city will develop, if not in livability or regional distinctiveness, then at least in ostentation, grandeur, and height. Then, when the frenzy is over, and we’ve filled our urban curio cabinet with monuments to wealth and status anxiety, maybe we’ll build something for ourselves.

Simon Lewsen, "What Good Can a Gehry Do?" 2014

[nickkahler]

The Gehry brand works because it’s at once reductive and versatile. His signature insight—that you can treat glass and titanium like putty—enables endless creative possibilities, since he molds his materials into hundreds of marvelous shapes. Every Gehry building is unique, but the idea of Gehry—the notion that a city must have one, along with, say, a Trump tower and a W Hotel—is less so. To commission a Gehry is to demand that your city be measured against international standards. It’s not an investment in regional culture.

Simon Lewsen, "What Good Can a Gehry Do?" 2014

[nickkahler]

We can’t reasonably expect that the priorities of the ultra-rich will match those of the city at large, even if the rich themselves say otherwise.

Simon Lewsen, "What Good Can a Gehry Do?" 2014

[nickkahler]

You can measure an architect’s stature by the number of neologisms he or she inspires, and Gehry is clearly a giant: you might say that his signature “logotecture” (i.e. personal-brand-based architecture) has made him the world’s foremost “starchitect.”

Simon Lewsen, "What Good Can a Gehry Do?" 2014