Today on the Scroll: beholding the starchitect’s most celebrated creation; love in the time of text messaging on the radio; an oversharing artist emerges from the stealth realm of Tumblr; rage against the e-reader; and don’t tell a muscle-bound handyman that print media is dead.
Celebromatic: Lady Gaga Wears Frank Gehry [The New Yorker]: A year after his homecoming at the Art Gallery of Ontario, any building designed by Gehry gets upstaged by hats he designed for a benefit for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles — the magazine even produced a slideshow about it: “Gehry said that he had done the initial drawing on his iPhone, which an assistant then produced: a violet scribble with a black-and-blue iris at the center,” reports Dana Goodyear. “‘Since I’ve never designed a hat before, I was afraid she wouldn’t be able to walk,” he said. “I did have an idea that involved people with sticks holding it up, walking behind her. I didn’t know how far I could go with this thing.’”
If you text I’ll … believe it [Emily Magazine]: Emily Gould, author of the forthcoming And the Heart Says … Whatever, recaps her appearance on CBC Radio One show Q last Friday — a not-unbearable discussion of romance in the age of text messaging, etc. But she was more enthusiastic about sharing airtime with Wesley Yang of New York magazine, who wrote a cover story on the sex diaries of New Yorkers. And, once again, Q producers show their indifference to Canadians who can hold forth on such topics. Mercifully, guest hosting that day was Brent Bambury. “I just listened to the show the whole way through and now I think we all ought to move to Canada,” wrote Gould. “Canadians are — or their radio at least is — so civilized and smart, and also they didn’t give me a hard time about accidentally cursing (or mispronouncing my apology.) Also, free health care.”
Ups and downs of a Tumblette’s life [Metro]: Socialite columnist Rea McNamara casts a quick gaze upon enigmatic local macro-micro-celeb Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother, who has cultivated her own Emily Gould-like following entirely within the clique-ish confines of Tumblr (although she’s also on Twitter). So, of course, you can expect to read about the inevitable aftermath for days and days.
Amazon’s e-reader doesn’t exactly Kindle my passion [Ian Brown, Globe and Mail]: Writing off the experience, brutally: “Reading a broadsheet like The Globe and Mail on a napkin-sized Kindle feels like your mind is in prison, and that the jailer is permitting you one story at a time, one toggle after another, with no pictures, no context, no sense of relative importance, not even much variation in type size.” Still, there is no avoiding the hype after the delayed availability in Canada. Retaliating today with a media release, the Sony Reader, touted as the holiday season’s “breakout success” — albeit by the company angling to sell them.
Mike Holmes launches HOLMES: The Magazine to Make it Right [press release]: Well, when did you last hear of someone who wasn’t a Playboy model autographing copies of a periodical at a newsstand? “This is the magazine homeowners need to help them with their renovations,” Holmes says. “It’s the magazine I was searching for and couldn’t find. So, I had to make my own magazine, and Make it Right.” No need for more celebrity cachet when your cover stories include “The Skylight Revolution: Bring Light into Your Life.”
… and more all day today @mondoville and dailystream@mondoville.com.
