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It’s spring in Toronto and the Hollywood movie crews are back. This is where art meets commerce full force. Instant communities are created, like summer camps for adults, with the cast and crews working long hours and always under pressure.
Over the six weeks of production the cast and crew lives, loves, hates, wins and loses together on and off the film set. Inspired by the authors’ own experiences, Below the Line goes behind the scenes and tells the the stories of on-set romances, ambitions, cynics and even artists.
We all know the celebs by first name, (even if we don’t want to admit it) but who are the other guys? The Canadians working the crew, the the location scouts, caterers, make-up artists, grips, gaffers and armies of assistants. Who are these people who bring the stars their breakfast, park the trucks and paint the set the director’s favourite shade? On budget sheets and cost reports they are the “below the line” crew members; these are the forgotten names on the screen after the audience has left the cinema.
Below the Line is a complete film set experience — including script pages, call sheets, camera reports and invoices to really get the reader down and dirty in the trenches of the industry.
Ben Woolfitt begins each day by drawing. Using graphite, silver and metal leaf and selected objects for frottage, Woolfitt plumbs the depths of his unconscious as he draws on each page of his books. Although best known for his large-format paintings, Woolfitt has completed hundreds of drawings which showcase his signature process: taking a pre-existing sign — a piece of bamboo, for example — and imbuing it with subjective energies through the act of recording and accentuating its impression on the page.
The drawings in Ben Woolfitt: Rhythms & Series are charged with rich psychological meaning; they speak where language fails. Distributed randomly in his drawing books, Woolfitt’s work transforms the linear structure of the bound volume into a nonlinear repository of his sensations and feelings, offering a special glimpse into his psyche.
Ben Woolfitt: Rhythms & Series contains more than 65 reproductions of Woolfitt’s distinctive drawings along with an interview with the artist by AGO curators Kenneth Brummel and Alexa Greist.
The poignant and very human drama of a 1914 maritime disaster that claimed the lives of more passengers than the Titanic
On May 28, 1914, the RMS Empress of Ireland began her 192nd trip across the Atlantic from Quebec City, Canada, en route to Liverpool, England, carrying 1,056 passengers and a crew of 423. In the early hours of May 29, fog descended on the St. Lawrence River, and the ocean liner was rammed by the Storstad, a Norwegian coal ship. In the fourteen minutes it took for the Empress of Ireland to sink, there was time to launch only four of the forty lifeboats, and rather than women and children first, it was everyone for themselves.
Over a thousand people died that night, claiming the lives of more passengers than either the Titanic or the Lusitania, and the tragedy stands as the worst maritime disaster during peacetime in Canadian history.
Investigative journalist and author Eve Lazarus draws on a trove of historical documents, including small-town newspaper reports, the Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry, and first-hand accounts passed down through personal letters and family lore, to tell the story of the wreck and its aftermath through the eyes of the survivors. Through these records, as well as interviews with experts and descendants of the passengers, Lazarus recounts the story from both a Canadian and a Norwegian perspective and investigates why many of the accounts regurgitated in newspapers and books for over a hundred years are wrong. The result is an absorbing and utterly stirring narrative that uncovers tales of heroism and sacrifice, human endurance, and modern-day shipwreck hunters.
Beneath Dark Waters is an epic chronicle that restores the Empress of Ireland – largely forgotten in the shadow of the Titanic disaster – as well as its survivors and victims to their rightful place in maritime history.
With black-and-white photos.
Beneath My Scars is an emotional and intimate account of Maskerine’s escape from an abusive partner and the path that led her to safety. With unflinching honesty, she opens up about the isolating and paralyzing impact of domestic violence, shedding light on the complexities of leaving an abusive relationship. From a young age, Maskerine’s feminist ideals and sense of justice were deeply ingrained, and her experience only fortified her resolve. Despite the numerous hurdles she faced, she emerged with a determination to turn her pain into a purpose. At thirty, after fleeing her home and leaving behind a lifetime of connections, she found love, safety, and a calling in establishing a transition house to support other women in similar situations. Her story challenges the common question, “Why doesn’t she just leave?” and instead prompts us to ask, “Why does he do that?”
This powerful memoir is not just a testimony of survival but also a story of resilience, belonging, and the transformative power of breaking the silence. Maskerine’s narrative is a beacon of hope, illustrating how she transformed her scars into a roadmap for others to find their way to safety and self-discovery. It is also a poignant tale of the enduring love between a mother and her son, whose birth became the compass guiding her to a new life filled with meaning and purpose.
This is a story of a life saved.
Beneath Springhill is the incredible story of Maurice Ruddick, “the singing miner,” an African-Canadian who survived nine days underground during the historic Springhill mining disaster of 1958. This multi-award-winning chamber musical recalls the events during the disaster, the effect it had on Ruddick’s family, and the racial tensions in the town of Springhill. The play is a celebration of hope, courage and community. Music by Susan Newman and Lyrics by Rob Fortin.
In Beneath the Coal Dust, author Wayne Norton digs deep, exploring the fascinating and sometimes sobering stories of the mining communities in the Elk Valley and the Crowsnest Pass. In this new collection, Norton chooses mainly a micro view, focusing on the stories that are specific to this isolated and unique geographic region. These tales span from the notorious red-light district of Fernie to women’s ice hockey in the 1920s, to the civic financial crisis caused by the Home Bank collapse, the regional history of breweries and prohibition, and the experiences and amazing fortitude of both Chinese and Syrian immigrants in what was a predominantly white settler town. This is a book about the local past, intended for those interested not necessarily in the broad sweep of national history, but rather in the smaller stories that are specific to this remote and historically rich area. And instead of dealing with the core regional narrative surrounding the coal industry, these explorations reveal some of what has been neglected and hidden “beneath the coal dust,” as the title suggests.
Beneath the Statue is an inventory of the tactics of the weak, the methods of the contained and the imprisoned, and the weapons of those who cannot fight. Each story is like its own small island on a vast sea, an isolated world where things work differently. Yet among the family dramas, political machinations, the surreal dreamscapes, and the nightmares come to life, what rises again and again is the urge to struggle on, the need to fight even when it feels impossible.
The eagerly anticipated fourth medical thriller in the award-winning series
Epidemic investigator Dr. Zol Szabo hopes an extended cruise on the Indian Ocean with his girlfriend and his son will salve the wounds of the rough times they’ve been weathering at home. As they set sail coddled in unaccustomed luxury on the Coral Dynasty, things below deck are a little less sunny for the ship’s physician. Dr. Noah Ferguson reckons that bandaging the wounds of the crew’s seedy missteps is just part of a job that comes with a fair share of loneliness, but he’s increasingly frustrated that the most rewarding aspect of his practice must remain unspoken. When a mysterious microbe cuts a lethal swath through the crew’s quarters, Noah enlists a reluctant Zol, who must put his vacation on hold to investigate the illness before it consumes everyone on board. As the body count climbs, it becomes apparent that everybody carries a secret in international waters. Miles from land, the captain makes the rules, and anything inconvenient gets tossed overboard to disappear beneath the wake.
The Wright family was sharecropping in Alcott, New York. After years of plowing fields and hanging tobacco, they had an opportunity to own a small farm in southern Ontario. Beth, their only daughter, has just turned twelve. The neighbors warn the family not to go into the woods behind their property. They warned anyone who entered the sacred land has never returned, not even animals. After a harsh winter, Beth believes she can set the rabbit traps on her own and steps into the forest. Lost among the endless maples, she follows a small flickering light to a cabin where she meets a kind and gentle man named Isaac. He leads her safely out of the forest. That fond memory of meeting Isaac would always be tucked away in her mind. Ten years have pass and Beth has married, but with the death of her parents and with her divorce finalized, she returns to the homestead along with her two young sons. When a young child has gone missing, Beth steps back into the forest. But things have now changed; she begins to see dark figures moving behind the trees. She escapes and meets a mystical woman in white buckskin. In an instant, Beth is standing at the front door of Isaac’s cabin. As she steps inside, she sees the Spirits of two elderly women weeping and a medicine man tending Isaac’s wounds. Isaac believes the dog attack was from a man he had seen only minutes before.
Fastidious and fussy shoe salesman by day and secretive aspiring film screenwriter by night, Oswald Eichersen’s dreams of success are as grandly inflated as his self-esteem is hopelessly deficient. Just outside Eichersen’s place of work, street person Terence Lomy has sat encamped for two years—an indelible fixture on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign round his neck with the word “hungry” scribbled on it in a hapless hand. One day, on an irrational impulse, having ignored the beggar for years, Eichersen gives Lomy a hundred dollar bill, setting into motion a series of ironic and completely unanticipated events that will change both of their lives forever.
But it’s not only Eichersen and Lomy that are changed by this irrational act of generous empathy. Through a hilarious series of bizarre encounters in the porn theatre that Lomy—a beguiling trickster who dares to claim it is actually he who has something of value to offer Eichersen—has chosen for a series of “rendezvous” with his benefactor, Eichersen finds himself in an unwanted relationship with a reformed hooker, as sexless a companion as his former longtime girlfriend with an irritating fetish for small dogs. As he helplessly witnesses his entire life disintegrate, only to be co-opted and appropriated by everyone around him, Eichersen ends up abandoned and penniless, on the lam for a murder he didn’t commit, absurdly preparing a lecture on Benevolence for the sole patron of the dark and dingy theatre of his nightmares.
Full of excruciatingly comic twists and turns of both fate and manipulative, perhaps even malicious intent, this dark comedy of “trading places” resonates with a cascade of uncomfortable truths about how we see (or don’t see) the people we live with every day.
Benevolence premiered at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto on September 24, 2007.
Cast of 2 women and 3 men.
In the wake of the horrific double-murder suicide, four noted wrestling writers grapple with the life and death of Chris Benoit in this book by Steven Johnson, Heath McCoy, Irvin Muchnick, and Greg Oliver, all respected investigative journalists committed to looking at this terrible event with integrity and passion. All four authors have been interviewed extensively about the Benoit situation, including by CNN and Fox.
The book will discuss the subject from distinct perspectives:
Bent at the Spine offers a ‘pronoun’-ced frolic where the “you’ is a disconnected third party – the reader is left in the position of an eavesdropper, or a listener, or a karma-surplus author. Its relentless interrogation resonates at an invigorating pace: cultural difference, different bodies, diffident accents, deafening rhymes. Sometimes rapturous, often vulvy, the poems audaciously teach “you” how to read them, allowing the last-minute-cram-session to be a delving, a plunging, a repeating discovery.
Rollins’s Get in the Van meets Bidini’s On a Cold Road in an original fever dream
While touring Europe, Eamon McGrath wrestled with one of the biggest questions on the mind of any touring artist: should you suffer for your art? The pain and heartache that goes along with a working musician’s lifestyle must serve as a means to some kind of cathartic end, McGrath argues — otherwise that torment served no purpose. In Berlin-Warszawa Express, McGrath fictionalizes experiences from his life and the lives of his peers to seek out meaning and significance in the tumultuous and emotional experience of living on the road.
From boozy techno-fied weekends in Berlin, to punk squats in Prague, to the alleyways and barrooms of Vienna, McGrath chronicles the dramatic changes in emotion and culture occurring on both sides of the train window in this raucous debut.
Albert Einstein noted that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed from one form to another. Kat, a middle-aged marketing executive from Vancouver, ponders the truth behind Einstein’s law as she tours the antiquities of Italy. In Pompeii, volcanic ash remains in the shape of a woman bear witness to her futile escape of the rage of Mount Vesuvius. Kat, a widow with blood on her hands, contemplates the ancient woman’s destiny and her own. To escape the consequences of past choices, Kat abandons her travel companion and sometime accomplice. She links up instead with Franco, a street artist painting in the Roman twilight near Bernini’s sculpture of an elephant. Becoming Franco’s patron is the easy part. Kat learns that Einstein’s theory holds in everyday life. She cannot escape past decisions. Murder undetected remains murder after all.
Beside the Ocean of Time
The eleventh installment of Canada’s annual volume of essays showcases diverse nonfiction writing from across the country. Culled from leading Canadian magazines and journals, Best Canadian Essays 2019 contains award-winning and award-nominated nonfiction articles that are topical and engaging and have their finger on the pulse of our contemporary psyches.