Author Archives: Jake Pitre

Nature versus nurture. It’s hard to say how much influence each has on who we might become, but for some of us, the way we are brought up has surprisingly lasting implications. Consequences that last a lifetime, impressions that might recede then return, adding inspiration to the way we live or how we express ourselves.

“Our household is our Republic; our politics is our appearance.”
— Anna Maria Lenngren

Malin Dahlström and Gustaf Karlöf are political romantics. After speaking with them over Skype, it became clear that they are some of the most empathetic and kind people in pop music. They don’t want to be considered political, but sometimes their opinions can’t help but bleed into their art as humans just trying to talk to other humans, a spirit rather than a manifesto.

We all burn, burn, burn with the desire for fame. But what would we do once we had it? Most pop stars play the game. They know the rules, and they stick to them, mostly. There’s some bending, but only enough to make them stand out just enough to carve their own spot in the ocean of our cultural attention span.

The year is now more than half over, but in terms of the film industry, things are still just getting started. Whether that means catching up on movies into the first few months of the next year or the gluttony of high-calibre releases in the last few months of the year, it’s difficult to properly establish the actual midpoint.

Photography by Jake Pitre We all want to be noticed. We want to create and share, and receive recognition for our creations, if we can. When Rupi Kaur uploaded a picture on Instagram in January depicting a woman lying in bed with blood staining her pants, it didn’t seem likely that it would become the moment when the whole world noticed her.

Will Wiesenfeld is delightful. This is obvious after only a few minutes in his presence. Earlier in the day, he’d suggested via text that we meet at 4:30 at the venue in Toronto he was performing at that night as part of NXNE at The Phoenix Theatre. I texted back, “Make it 4:20 and we have a deal,” nervous about whether he would appreciate the joke.

  The fog descended slowly, the coloured lights piercing through it, shining Will Wiesenfeld’s face with their glow as he thrashed around the stage in a way you might not necessarily expect him to. The thing about music festivals, especially one that mostly takes place at various venues in downtown Toronto, is that sets are universally short and one of many in the area.

Peter Shmelzer and his art have been called provocative, disturbing and immoral. He’s not bothered. “I’m not trying to shock anybody,” he says. “I’m not hateful. There’s a lot of things that I’m not. Look again.” In the era of Pussy Riot and Brett Bailey, the censorship of art is as big of an issue as it was when Gustave Courbet painted “The Origin of the World” in 1866.

Time sucks. It is the relentless phenomenon that creates untold insecurities, anxieties and fears in us all. We are simply clumsy collections of atoms, hurtling toward a certain death, and all we can do is bide our time. We struggle with our relevance, how much we’ve achieved, whether we will be remembered.

There are plenty of terrifying moments in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, one of the best horror films of the last decade. There are a couple of effective jump scares, though the blank look on one character’s face following one of them suggests Mitchell isn’t too keen on them himself. No, the film gets a lot of horrifying mileage out of people just walking toward the camera, perhaps never more brilliant than in a 720-degree pan in a high school with someone walking toward them from outside only to be forgotten about and never confronted.