Honest to Vanity Fare

So… it’s the Oscars and we here at Vanity Fare are trying something new: live blogging! Aren’t you excited?

We’ve seen most of the movies, we certainly have our opinions… Stay tuned.

We’re taking this as our philosophy, by the way:

“Movies, and by proxy the Oscars, are a way to talk politely about impolite things.”

(David Carr, this morning’s NYT )

8:33: Jon Stewart just said “Vanity Fare!” Ok - so maybe he was referring to the magazine, but still - a sign.

8:39: Our best picture pics? Without a doubt, without a second thought, without any more prevarication, There Will Be Blood. And Allison? No Country For Old Men. But I can see Juno winning in an upset to rival Crash’s topping Brokeback Mountain. Ugh - don’t get the Juno hype. Ok but not as epic and challenging and deliciously over-the-top as TWBB.

8:46: Have you seen Once? So endearing and lovely and and and! Glen Hansard was fantastic, especially during the singing (which makes sense, for a singer. I watched the commentary and appreciated the director’s insight - “Instead of choosing actors who could half-sing, I chose musicians who could half-act.”) Look:

8:52: Okay, Animated Feature is up… I hope Persepolis wins! Go Marjane! Andrea didn’t think Ratatouille was that great, but I enjoyed it. I just want to see someone other than Pixar win this year….

8:54: Damn.

8:55: Yeah, I just thought Ratatouille wasn’t that strong - conventional story arc with a bunch of fancy food terms thrown in for good measure. But food bloggers ate it up.

9:11: Holy Botox alert! (Francesca Lo Schiavo for Sweeney Todd)

9:13: Best Supporting Actor Award. There’s no contest here… it should, and will be, Javier Bardem for No Country for Old Men. That scene in the gas station? Or with Woody Harrelson in the hotel? Creepy brillance. With an honourable mention to his hairdo - the ultimate helmet head.

9:19: Also, he cleans up well.

9:26: How good is this 11-year old girl? (the August Rush performance). She exudes more maturity than both of us combined.

9:28: Ok, so I’m totally looking forward to the Animated Short category. A kid that I went to school with is nominated (go Josh!!), so I’m definitely rooting for him. (Allison)

9:35: Aw man.. they didn’t even show Josh in the audience! I was really hoping they would. (ETA: actually, you could see the back of his head, a couple of rows in front of the winners.) I have fond memories of sitting in our early morning lectures and talking about Radiohead. And how jealous I was of the fact that he got tickets to see them at the Opera House waaay back when. Still though, it’s an amazing feat that he was even nominated.

9:36: Just like I have fond memories of hanging with Daniel Day Lewis in history class, chatting about our dream of running off to Italy and making shoes. And babies. (Andrea)

9:38: YES! Tilda Swinton won! I thought she was great in Michael Clayton. I think everyone was expecting Cate Blanchett to win, so what a huge upset.

9:45: Is it just us or does Jon Stewart look like he’s just been kissed? (Perhaps by the Unfunny Monster?)

9:47: James McAvoy makes me weak in the knees.. Oh, those Scottish men. (Allison)

9:48: Oh the Coen brothers took home Best Adapted Screenplay. Looks like it might be a No Country night. (Sarah Polley and Away From Her would have been nice. How can you go wrong with Alice Munro?)

10:04: So perhaps we’re not the most qualified pundits to judge Best Actress as we’ve only seen Juno, but for what it’s worth, Marion Cotillard looked very Best Actress-y in her trailers. Or maybe, as a chronic eyebrow plucker, I sympathize with her overplucking tendencies. And she has quite an impressive non-French accent. But Julie Christie…

10:07: What’s with the Forrest Gump music?

10:09: Because Forest Whitaker is presenting?

10:13: And the eyebrows win out. (Why, why must everyone cry? Is an Oscar really that spectacular? God, you’d think these people discovered a cure for cancer. Or a new painless plucking method.)

10:18: Oh Once!

10:20: And he’s using the same guitar as in the film!

10:27: Can you believe this? They’re now together and…. he’s 37, she’s 19!

10:37: What is it with old people and scarves? (Robert Boyle, Honorary Oscar) Something to do with draughts? Oh wait - Allison and I are both wearing them… Obviously an indication of wisdom. And genius.

10:49: Yes, Once won! Despite Enchanted’s 60% chances. Such a sweet song and scene… Totally deserving. And he’s so red!

10:51: Apparently Jon has now been kissed by the Obnoxious Monster.

10:52: That’s it, the whole broadcast has just become worth it: Steven Spielberg uttering the words “male menopause.”

10:56: Oh my, they let Marketa back on stage to give a speech. Ahh… Oscar has a heart. Along with golden buns.

10:59: Just as Andrea remarked, “I can’t believe There Will Be Blood hasn’t won anything,” the film wins Best Cinematography. And DDL wasn’t even there.

11:00: Probably in the washroom fixing his earrings (and polishing the shoes he just made me).

11:08: Such a joke that Jonny Greenwood wasn’t nominated for Best Score (technicality my ass). Blew everything else off the sheet. (Oh how good was that metaphor?) Though Atonement’s score was quite good, best of a nearly empty barrel. (And it just keeps getting better).

11:23: Best Original Screenplay… Allison votes for Lars and the Real Girl. I think Juno might win… Somewhat deservedly. Okay, so the opening was horrendous, but it got better. Eventually. If only for the part where Michael Cera says, “Actually, I try really hard.” Me too, Michael, me too.

11:26: And we now know who the sharper knife is.

11:30: Helen Mirren is such a classy lady.

11:31: Okay, so here we go. Best Actor. I think we both agree that Daniel Day Lewis is a shoo-in for this category.

11:34: Yes! He was a force of nature. A force of nature! (No associations with that Ben Affleck/Sandra Bullock flick). His performance was completely over the top and completely hypnotic.

11:41: So, Coen Brothers or P.T. Anderson?

11:42: Coen Brothers it is.

11:43: Nooooo! (Andrea)

11:45: No Country for Old Men is so going to win. And I’m tired and ready for bed.. so. Let’s hear it.

11:46: Andrea thinks that any other year, No Country would have deserved to win, but not this year. She thinks P.T. Anderson was robbed. I’m happy with the results though.

11:47: Robbed! The Academy is just not ready to embrace brillance. Which is exactly why I’m staying in Toronto. And, hey, it’s not even midnight - not bad, Oscars, not bad.

All in all, we enjoyed our first forray into live blogging. Hope you did too.

I thought so

Didn’t we say this about Baldwin St. way back when?

That’s right, Vanity Fare out-scooped Canada’s newspaper of record. God, we’re good.

JKWB

Had a delicious meal at Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar the other night and wanted to share some photos. Since all the dishes are small tasting plates, they recommend ordering 2-3 dishes per person.

We started off with these two dishes…

This grilled halloumi plate was delicious. The peppery wild arugula worked really well with both the cheese & the sweet, roasted beets. (I can’t get enough of beets!)

And here is their take on poutine, a classic Canadian dish. Their Yukon Gold fries were served with lamb merguez sausage, goat cheese (?) and thinly sliced green onions.

This was the olive wood-smoked whitefish, served on a bed of warm potato salad. It’s a really light dish and if you like smoked salmon, then you’ll probably enjoy this as well.

And here we have the entrecôte of beef served with northern woods mushrooms. Brock found the meat a little tough (it was served on the rare side, which I actually prefer and I didn’t mind the “chewiness” so much) but the sauce and mushrooms were really good. We sopped it all up with some sourdough bread.

I was impressed with how their menu changed daily (I visited their website today and saw a couple of items that had already changed from the other night) and I thought the service was spot on as well. It would be great to go back with more people, so we’d be able to order a larger variety of dishes off their menu.

-Allison

Behind the Scenes..

…at the Grand Finale of this event in Toronto last night. Enjoy!

-Allison

Return of the Fab Five

Let it never be said that we at Vanity Fare cram only blue ribbon cheesecake into our cultural pieholes. We enjoy the high, the low, and sometimes, if large, goldfish-catching eyes are involved, we even have a soft spot for the middling. Not that there’s any confusion where on the spectrum this entry by loyal contributor, Allan, falls. Come on down to the ditch; we can dance under the glitter together.

No, not The Beatles - there’s only three of them left anyway. I mean that other famous singing quintet. You won’t find them in your spice rack but Scary, Ginger, Baby, Sporty, and Posh (oh that sweet, sexy Posh) have recently reformed in a second bid for world domination. Arriving in Toronto for four shows, the Spice Girls are back (oh yeah, they’re really, really back!) to spread their message of showing lots of cleavage and some good old Girl Pow-ah. Hi ci ya, hold tight!

Our tickets said 7:30 PM but no Girls were sighted by 8:30 PM. The crowd was getting antsy despite the best attempts by Britney and her ilk on the Air Canada Centre’s speaker system to soothe us. Finally, the lights went dark and the audience erupted in a thunderous roar. The giant video screens showed each of the Spices over the years as the screams became louder and louder. Then, like ascending Venuses, they rose above the stage on separate platforms. This was the first time all the Spices had ever sung together in this city and it was an impressive sight to behold. Years of nostalgia were distilled into The Power of Five now on stage.

Starting with their hit song “Spice Up Your Life”, the Girls were in their element and the crowd was right there with them singing along with the catchy lyrics. Yes, everyone was doing the “Stop” dance when it came time for that. They sang all their hit songs and then some. Highlights included the Girls (minus Ginger) leading their male dancers on leashes during “Holler”, a reprise of their now legendary Brit Awards performance of “Who Do You Think You Are” complete with Geri in a Union Jack mini-dress, and each Girl getting her own solo performance. Scary fearsomely brandished a bullwhip during her rendition of Lenny Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way” while Ginger had the whole place jumping with her cover of “It’s Raining Men”. Posh’s “solo” consisted of strutting silently yet fiercely down the catwalk in a sexy dress complete with wind machines to the music of Madonna and Rupaul. Hey, she’s no Celine and she knows it. It was very campy, and very, very Posh. Tyra Banks would be proud.

But all good things must come to an end and the Spices finished their encore with a re-mixed version of “Spice Up Your Life” amid lasers, lights, and giant cannons spewing glitter throughout the ACC. Yes, giant cannons spewing glitter. To say the concert was over-the-top is a severe understatement. There’s your run of the mill over-the-top and then there’s giant cannons spewing glitter. AND IT WAS AWESOME!!!

-Allan

Always a blogsmaid: 2,000 words on why you should just go ahead and read something else

Pay no attention to the title. Drew, our newest and self-deprecating-est VF contributor, shocks and awes with his searing and syphilitic pirate-mentioning portrayal of life in East Nowhere, Mass. Flattery, our Star Wars-loving friend has discovered, will get you everywhere. Or at least into our annals, with heavy underscoring of the second ‘n.’

I feel a certain obligation, dear reader, to inform you here at the outset that what follows contains nothing of what you’ve come rightfully to expect from a posting under the Vanity Fare banner: nothing voguish or metropolitan or exotic or epicurean or bon vivanty or readable. There will be no reportage from the great cities of Asia, the Mideast, or Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe; indeed, this is correspondence from an entirely different and altogether un-golden part of the horse. For you see, dear, charitably persistent reader, the grim truth of the matter is that I live, with my parents, in East Nowhere, Massachusetts, in a town best known for Oprah almost but eventually not buying a house here one time, and am perpetually too stone-broke to afford return trips to any of the Bay State’s more blogworthy localities. But in spite of this being the place where I park my laptop, you can also add life in No-Oprah, USA to the growing litany of things this post is turning out not to be about—although I caution that you might not know it at first. No doubt by this point, dear, unrelenting reader now showing troubling signs of masochism, you find yourself cerebrating on at least one of the following excogitations: what, then, is the stupid entry about already, and why would someone so obviously unqualified be contributing to Vanity Fare in the first place? Believe it or not, the long answer to both of these questions is exactly the same.

The short answers, respectively, are Saturday night of January 27th, and because I don’t screen my calls.

Now, I use “Saturday night” in the loosest possible sense of the term (certainly not in a way that implies it to be Live, Fever-inducing, or Alright for Fighting). Understand that the place I live doesn’t even qualify as a one-horse town because the one horse we had actually died of boredom. Normally I would have spent this particular evening at home watching The Matrix Revolutions on HBO again and laughing to myself about how terrible it is—a process I refer to as “working on my screenplay”—but fate, and my parents, had other plans. Other dinner plans, to be specific, in the form of a very VF-appropriate dinner party they were hosting (there would be spicy shrimp gumbo and crèmes brûlées!), around for which I was told, in no uncertain terms, not to stick. And with my lately-acquired obligations to this blog sitting heavily on my shoulders like a fat parrot on a syphilitic pirate, I walked out into the night, flipped the middle finger at my cruel and uncaring parents inside the house where they let me stay for free, got into the car that they let me use, and just started driving. Surely there had to be somewhere here in Podunk with a brow and a health inspection grade high enough for me to enjoy a bloggable repast! Somewhere …

Somewhere …

Somewhere …

I eventually settled on much-reputed strip mall hash house T.C. Lando’s, well known in these parts for diner fare that’s equal parts last meal and lethal injection, as well as for its convenient Dunkin’ Donuts-adjacent location. (Rumours of the restaurant’s affiliation with heterosexual Star Wars character Lando Calrissian remain unconfirmed but highly true-sounding.)

Packed to the walls with dinner rushers taking-out their greasy spoonfuls, there were not only no places to sit, but when it came time to order, my performance definitely suffered under pressure to keep the line moving. The chicken parmesan sub I ended up with is, I think, an unfair indictment of the menu as a whole: nicely spiced chicken, but a tepid tomato sauce, gluey cheese, and bread that tasted essentially as if someone were describing the concept of bread to you in a language that neither of you spoke very well. Plus I had to eat it in my car. But enough people passed by while I waited near the counter with food that looked and smelled like the real deal that I wouldn’t hesitate to come back and try something a bit less shoot-from-the-hip. Maybe on a Wednesday around ten in the morning.

Now, as any seasoned VF reader would be quick to tell you, on a full actual stomach is the perfect time to go about cramming one’s cultural piehole by taking in, say, an art show, a gallery viewing, or a game of Jenga. Unfortunately, both the children’s museum and the skateboard park were already closed by then, so in order to get my recommended dosage of the fine arts for the evening, I would have to press on to a neighbouring town. Conveniently, the art world there seems to have taken a lesson from the “Girls! Girls! Girls!” school of advertising:

Yes, the arts don’t come much finer than in this county firetrap, one of the main ports of call for moviegoers in my town ever since our own movie theatre was shut down and turned into a liquor store, which I think pretty well sums up just how seriously folks have to take their escapism in order to go on living here. Though its billings tend to take bronze a bit both critically and commercially, there was, this Saturday night, unalloyed gratification awaiting patrons of the Arts in the form of indie-tastic Oscar comedy beard Juno, showing on Screen 2. Over on Screen 1, however, those of us who’d already gone to see Juno back before it was cool were, along with 200 decibels worth of teenage girls, treated to a little oversight in the Geneva Convention entitled 27 Dresses.

I’m sorry, that last comment should maybe be taken with a grain of estrogen. Indeed, for the sake of my bloggerlistic integrity, I will go so far as to credit the film as a perfectly serviceable specimen of the romantic comedy, one that even held out a few tantalizing modica of hope that it might be cribbing from something savvier than The Big Book of Tired Chick Flick Bullshit. But alas. And what was with James Marsden not needing special ruby quartz lenses to restrain his uncontrollable mutant optic blasts? Talk about your continuity errors!

But I’ll tell you what really stuck in my craw about this cloying but basically digestible confection. The film’s hook is that Katherine Heigl’s protagonista Jane has acquired a montage-sized collection of each-worse-than-the-last-one dresses by having served as a bridesmaid (though really more a de facto backstage Maid of Honour, considering all the work she evidently puts in each time) in the weddings of twenty-seven of her girlfriends. By all accounts, this isn’t just sublimated bouquet envy on her part, though: at worst, Jane can be perceived as kind of a doormat and an unrepentant romance junkie; but in a good light, she’s more of a patron saint of weddings, repeatedly martyring herself in order to enable what she believes to be the most important day in each of her friends’ respective life. And decry as we might her basic premise, or the extremeness of her measures, her attitude at least strikes me as above reproof. Here was a refreshingly positive angle on the usually heartsick sentiment behind the movie’s inevitable tagline, “Always a bridesmaid”—rather than a mark of Cain, it’s a badge of honour, and of real friendship. How disappointing, then, when it became clear that Jane’s emotional journey in the film would be on a path of increasing selfishness, pettiness, and vanity (of the most assuredly unFare variety), such that her own wedding at the end of the picture, with all her friends lined up in the same ridiculous dresses she was once made to wear, plays more as an act of revenge and humiliation, rather than the estimable triumph of good karma it should have been. Seriously, it ended up feeling like a rom-com screenplay written by Ayn Rand, give or take 1500 pages.

But before 27 Dresses came apart at the seams, it did manage to germinate in me a single significant notion. I want at this point to impress, dear, but one can only assume Guantanamo Bay-detained reader, that I am all too well aware of the manifest pointlessness of this entire blog entry: way back more than a thousand words and three Dunkin’ Donutses ago, you’ll remember, I even warned you that what followed would be stodgy and unbohemian and utterly devoid of that characteristic Vanity flare. This is effectively because my life is incredibly boring, as demonstrated not only by the manner in which I spent my most exciting Saturday night in months (slop and a flop), but how I spent the week that followed (writing about it for three-and-a-half drafts). I think you’ll agree it’s a life, like so many, that should never see the light of the internet—but I’m afraid that ended up being all the more reason to inflict it upon you. Know, however, that this sadism wasn’t voluntary on my part: you see, it was a mutual friend of ours who asked me, innocently but insistently, to write something for her foody-artsy-travelly blog, with total disregard for my unhyphenated lifestyle. But then, many desperate and ponderous hours after my sub-par chicken parm sub and the Heiglian diarrhetic,* it dawned on me what an account of those paltry events could, in fact, be made to amount to; and with sudden nobility of purpose, I set out to write that account with all possible speed, which ended up meaning I took four days longer to finish than was supposed to. And with the so-called happenings of Saturday night, January 27th now recorded for you in all their considerable monotony, I only hope the effect is complete.

* For why this is the cleverest thing you’ve ever read, click here.

Because this post is like a bridesmaid dress. It’s ugly and unstylish and made out of cheap material. It’s probably too long and definitely too frilly. It’s an embarrassment to have to display in public. And yet, in spite of that, that, that, that, that, and that, I elect to wear this dress, and wear it with pride. Because above all, this post should clearly be seen for the glaring anomaly it is, setting into stark relief all the things about Vanity Fare that get you to read it and keep you coming back to it. For me personally, aside from learning things like how to spell “Mountain Dew” in Arabic, that’s the chance to see friends of mine leading lives of culture and risk and discovery and sodality and that they’re eating well—all of which makes me feel much better about not really being a part of those lives most of the time. So on the once in a lifetime occasion (as I’m sure we all hope it proves to be) when one of them calls up and invites me to come up to the front of the blog—well, yes, I accept; and then I try to make my presence implicitly all about the wonderful thing she’s created and set up and accomplished—by cobbling together the meagre scraps of my own life’s fabric and piecing them into the ugliest dress that will still keep me in the wedding party. And see: doesn’t pristine, elegant, exciting VF look simply radiant by comparison?

That’s the thing about friendship, dear reader—sometimes it’s a tall, bearded man wearing a dress.

- Drew