AFTERNOON TEA

Writer: Paul Taylor

Who says Alice should have the best tea party in town?

These fabulous tea sets from English designer Christine Misiak will have you living in a Wonderland all of your very own. Inspired by Misiak’s love of tea, her collection of tea sets revives that age-old regalness to drinking tea, lost through today’s coffee-shop-chain lifestyle. Misiak, who could be described as a plastic surgeon of the design world, takes old, neglected Oliver Twist tea sets and rejuvenates them into elegant, one-off pieces. Very “Pimp My Ride”-esque.

RUBBISH ART

Writer: Melanie Kramers

Buenos Aires, home of sleek design and fashionable people, has a less salubrious alter ego: cartoneros, slum dwellers who travel into the city centre each evening, uncomfortably squeezed into the backs of rusty, barely roadworthy trucks. On downtown street corners, in close proximity to the wealthy upper classes and tourists parading in and out of smart restaurants, impoverished families spend the night ripping open malodorous rubbish bags, in search of cardboard and paper they hope to sell for a miserly 30 centavos (roughly nine cents) per kilogram. It’s hard to imagine salvaging anything positive -let alone aesthetically pleasing-from these disgusting heaps, but that’s just what Eloisa Cartonera, a publishing house with a social conscience, has done. Their novels and poetry collections are printed on recycled paper, purchased from the cartoneros at six times the going rate. The pages are manually photocopied and the corrugated cardboard covers designed and hand-painted by the cartoneros themselves. It’s a labour of love, with no two volumes alike. The community project’s lofty aims are multiple: to assist the cartoneros financially, help them acquire new skills, offer a possible route out of their penurious existence, and, perhaps most importantly, give them the opportunity to dispel prejudices by proving themselves as artists.

MINI BREAK

Writer: Simon Morgan

For me, the destination is only ever a premise, a context for the real discovery. Wherever, whenever I travel with my beloved, it’s she I come to explore and better understand. A weekend away from the job, the kids, the parents, the phone, the car, the family, and the bills means a chance to monopolise each other as when we first met. An opportunity to marvel at my chosen one in new environs—to replenish the reasons we’re together and affirm myself into the bargain.

VIVA LA VIDA

Writer: Karen Bliss

Let me just say that Coldplay is doing everything right in launching its new album, Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends. The entire album can be heard for free on the band’s MySpace page, prior to street date, June 17. (It’s selling for $9.99 on amazon.com, an enticing price; $12.99 Canadian.) Giving people the opportunity to hear it first generates excitement and goodwill for where the real money is made-the tour, which was announced around the same time.

I have a weird relationship with Coldplay. I LOVED Parachutes. Who didn’t? And then the follow-up, Rush of Blood to the Head, was just as good. But something strange happened with the third album, X&Y. I went to see one of their shows at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto (March ‘06), and it was so over the top. They were shooting it for a DVD, and everything was so exaggerated. It was annoying. I mean, here’s this band that writes gorgeous, subtle pop songs, and there’s frontman Chris Martin running around. The lights were kept on and Martin was even elevated above the piano so that the cameras could get good shots. It was a sudden turn-off, and I immediately didn’t care about them anymore. I even recall balloons, or maybe I’ve just imagined the worse possible scenario now.

But they did the right thing for this album. They took their time, hired producer Brian Eno (a master at ambience—just listen to his work with U2), and stretched out as composers/artists. Coldplay’s now got rhythm. There’s exotic instrumentation from Middle Eastern to African and Spanish. It just takes their winning direction to a unique place. They couldn’t have kept doing the same thing. It would’ve been Death To All Their Fans.

ART

Writer: Daniel Gibbons

If there’s any word guaranteed to incite rage and insecurity, surely ‘art’ is the safest bet. It’s not just a matter of what constitutes art and what does not (although that in itself is often enough to start fights in the street), but also whether a formal definition of art should exist at all, whether it’s unfair and discriminatory. If class warfare is all that ensues we feel as though we got off lightly.

I’ve been accused of elitism before and I’m quite sure it will happen again, so I’ve got nothing to lose by planting myself firmly in the camp of those who think that art really does matter, and that there are and will always be criteria for what counts as art. Let me get something straight, I’m not one of those people who’ll tell you I could have painted that myself, or that it’s not art if it’s not an oil painting of a stag standing proudly in the Scottish Highlands. But your angst-ridden monologue recorded on your webcam and uploaded to YouTube? No, sorry, that really isn’t art and you are not an artist.