Mozart meets “Mamma Mia!” [NY Times]

Last Saturday was an afternoon of Hollywood-laced opera as myself, my mother, and my partner went to see The Giacomo Variations at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto. Starring John Malkovich as Giacomo Girolamo Casanova himself, the performance also featured actress Ingeborga Dapkünaité, Soprano Kirsten Blaise, and Baritone Simon Schnorr.

Under the direction of Michael Sturminger, Malkovich, as the Venetian author and adventurer Giacomo Casanova, and Ingeborga Dapkünaité will perform scenes from Casanova’s 1790 memoir, “Histoire de ma vie.”

As Casanova reminisces about one of his close friends, Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, audiences will hear excerpts from some of Mozart’s best-known operas, Cosi Fan Tutte, Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro, performed live by a Wiener Academy Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Martin Haselböck. [Playbill]

As the famous lover nears the end of his life, Casanova looks back on his affairs while composing his stories to perhaps be published in a book.

With the small cast of four portraying the present and past, the audience is taken through reflective moments, silly scenarios, and uncomfortable encounters (at least uncomfortable to the squirmy people sitting in my area, some of whom left during intermission…Was the constant undressing and fake penis too much for them?! Because it didn’t get any more “decent” in the second half, let me tell you!).

Anyone who was expecting a typical theatrical experience isn’t familiar with Malkovich and his body of work. If you’re interested in unique artistic experiences, this is one not to miss!

* Also note that John Malkovich basically helped save a man’s life on the Thursday before. So awesome!

Exciting news! (Seems like there’s a lot of that lately…and let’s just keep that going! Coolio?!) We’re launching new columns over at Canada Arts Connect Magazine including one I’ll be writing myself, Ask the Artistic Pro.

Here’s the blurby bit:

Do you have a question regarding your artistic career? Are you looking for a resource, an opportunity, or a connection? Ask the Artistic Pro! Desirée Ossandon is an artistic professional who has been working for over ten years writing, creating, performing, and navigating the tricky path that creative careers demand. Also the founder, CEO, and Editor-in-Chief of Canada Arts Connect and Canada Arts Connect Magazine, Desirée has the experience and network to provide (and track down!) the answers you need to succeed in your own career. Send your questions in 250 words or less to ArtisticPro@CanadaArtsConnect.com.

Please send in your questions so I can get the column rolling with awesome, interesting, and helpful answers!

I’m thrilled to say that myself, my partner Ryan, and Canada Arts Connect will be joining Necessary Arts Company work/studio space in downtown Guelph, ON starting June 1st.

It’s a very cool space with other artistic types working away, so I’m hoping it will allow us to focus on the projects we’re continuing/launching with Canada Arts Connect while being in a space that’s filled with creative energy.

If you’re in the area, the opening party is TONIGHT (Friday, May 31st) starting at 4 p.m. 5 Douglas Street (Gummer Building), Unit 1, Guelph, ON.

Check out more details in this post on Canada Arts Connect Magazine.

Yayoi Kusama: one of few women to have had a major retrospective at Tate Modern. Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images via guardian.co.uk

As CWILA and VIDA work hard to compile lists “to count the rates of publication between women and men in many of our writing world’s most respected literary outlets” and “address the need for female writers of literature to engage in conversations regarding the critical reception of women’s creative writing in our current culture”, I came across this article:

Women in art: why are all the ‘great’ artists men? [guardian.co.uk]

How many female artists featured in the top 100 auction sales, ranked by price, last year? Gemma Rolls-Bentley, an independent curator, decided to find out. One day, not long ago, she sat down with the 2012 list, “and spent a couple of hours writing M next to the artists. I got to the end and there wasn’t a single F.” Some of those artists were alive, some were dead, all were highly valued – considered “great” or “genius” – and all were men.

*sigh* And…

…83% of the artists in Tate Modern were men, along with 70% of those in the Saatchi Gallery.

Yeesh. And…

…she was also struck by the low proportion of public art created by women. In east London, of 43 public works of art, 14% were created by women. In Westminster and the City of London, of 386 public works of art, the proportion created by women is just 8%.

Seriously?! Ugh! And…

Given that many of those commissions date back years, these numbers reflect women’s marginalisation in art history – it’s often estimated that only around 5% of the work featured in major permanent collections worldwide is by women. The National Gallery in London, for instance, contains more than 2,300 works; an information request made by the women’s activist Tim Symonds at the start of 2011 revealed that only 11 of the artists in that enormous collection are women.

Gaaaaah! Where is the disconnect? Where are women getting lost along the way?

So here’s my question…

How can I, as the leader of a community that includes artists & writers & musicians & actors & creative professionals of all kinds, help change this situation?

• My writing team is largely women and Canada Arts Connect Magazine is open to submissions.
• Canada Arts Connect has plans to launch a mentorship program which will see experienced creative professionals helping emerging ones and will hopefully be able to encourage/support more women.
• My own writing has often explored women in the arts/creative professions.
• I’m a member of CWILA (you can be too!) and I do my best to spread the word.

But…what else? The article suggests “to encourage the art world to consider gender balance much more frequently and freely.”

Ideas on how to do that? Suggestions very much welcome!

I need to learn the words to “All The Days” NOW! I really, really, reeeeeeally want to sing along to this new release from HAERTS, “a band from New York hailing from Germany, England, and the United States.” It’s a song that I not only want to listen to over & over & over, but when I hear it I just want to close my eyes and daydream.

The band consists of Nini Fabi (love. her. voice.), Ben Gebert, Garrett Ienner, Derek McWilliams, and Jonathan Schmidt, and has me totally hooked.

Listen. Love it like I do.

Find HAERTS online:
Website
Twitter
Facebook

Canada Arts Connect is giving away tickets to the Royal City Roller Girls Home Opener on June 1st! Wanna win some? Check out the giveaway on Canada Arts Connect Magazine NOW!

GIVEAWAY: Tickets to the Royal City Roller Girls June 1st Home Opener in Guelph, Ontario!

“Cuando los lagartijos corren.”

When I was young (I can’t remember exactly how young), I borrowed my older sister’s copy of Tiger Eyes. I fell in love and never ended up giving the book back.

“A 17 year-old girl sets out on a journey from heartbreak and confusion to transformation as she discovers love and life after tragedy in ‘TIGER EYES.’” [Tiger Eyes Movie FB info]

I’ve read the story so many times and with each read I would feel just as connected to the characters and just as touched by their stories as I did the first time.

I can think of a number of reasons why I might have related to Tiger Eyes, but the fact is that it became very important to me.

I felt (in the way that readers do) that Davey (the main character) would have been my close friend. Wolf (the other main character)…well, I loved Wolf as I suspect many others did and as I suspect I still will when I reread the book as I intend to a.s.a.p

I remember being 11 or 12 and finding a tiger’s eye stone in a store and HAVING to purchase it.

In my last year of elementary school and my first year of high school, many of my art class projects were somehow related to lizards and many of them incorporated or were inspired by the phrase “Cuando los lagartijos corren” – When the lizards run. It’s a meaningful line in the book. It always stuck with me. To this day, it’s one of the first things I recall when I think of the story.

I still have that copy of Tiger Eyes. It sits on my shelf beside my bed with other treasured books.

So obviously, when I heard a Tiger Eyes movie was being made, I was beyond excited.

The film adaptation of the coming-of-age tale Tiger Eyes is co-written by Blume and her son, Lawrence Blume, who is also directing. “For years and years people would tell me they wanted to do something but they never know what they wanted to do,” Judy told Entertainment Weekly last year. “I wanted someone to feel passionately about it.”

“I’m embarrassed to say it, but every time I see the movie I cry my eyes out,” said Judy Blume of the movie.

Starring Arrow’s Willa Holland (Kaitlin Cooper — you in there, girl??) as Davey Wexler, a 15-year-old whose mom moves their family from New Jersey to New Mexico after her husband/Davey’s father’s murder, and Tatanka Means as Wolf, a young man she meets in the canyon and is bitchy to at first but then they become bff — and maybe something a little more. [Jezebel]

The trailer for the movie has now come out and I’ve watched it. I cried. Perhaps if you don’t know the story, it won’t seem very emotional. But if you know the book, even the short glimpses of storyline are enough to wrench your heart.

I couldn’t be more excited to see this movie. And I’m sure I’ll end up owning it and really hope that I’ll end up treasuring it as much as my copy of the book.

I’ll just be sure to keep a box of tissues beside me every time I watch it.

“Life is a good adventure.”

Want to find out more about the movie and follow all of the developments?
Check out the Tiger Eyes movie website.
Follow the Tiger Eyes movie on Twitter.
‘Like’ the Tiger Eye movie on Facebook.

In theaters, Video On Demand, and iTunes June 7th, 2013.

The Canadian Women in Literary Arts (CWILA) – of which I’m proudly a member – is kicking off its fundraising for this year’s count and they’re looking for your help.

From CWILA:

Right now, we don’t have enough funds to administer our Count for 2012, but your financial support can make the difference.  Please spread the word.

Who we are

CWILA is a non-profit group of 350 writers, critics, visual artists and academics devoted to working for better, more equitable critical culture in Can Lit. Alongside our work in feminism and the literary arts, CWILA members are active in arts curation and advocacy, environmentalism, queer rights, indigenous rights, and other political issues.  We are in the process of incorporating federally as a non-profit and applying for charitable status.

Do you know of anyone whose work and values align with CWILA’s? Please encourage them to join and support us.

Our organization has three main goals: 1) to track statistics on gender representation in reviewing; 2) to bring relevant issues of gender, race and sexuality into our national literary conversation; and 3) and to create a network supportive of the active careers of female writers, critics and their literary communities.

Our major projects

Our major projects include the annual count, the Critic-in-Residence program, interviews with women in Can Lit, a forthcoming program designed to connect critics with under-recognized books published by small-press publishers, and a national conference on critical culture to be held at UBC in the fall (funding dependent).  We have received a small grant from the Institute for Gender, Race, and Social Justice (GRSJ) at UBC to create a research network but we still need your help.

Our impact

On June 13, 2012, we published our findings at www.cwila.com and within 24 hours the website went viral, with over 8,000 unique visitors in the first month, traffic coming from around the globe and media coverage in national and international newspapers, including The Guardian, The Globe and Mail and The Montreal Gazette. The site also received commentary from online sources, foundations and organizations like The Canadian Encyclopedia Blog, Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, and The Poetry Foundation, and from literary journals such as The Capilano Review, Room, Jacket2, LEMON HOUND and Quill & Quire.

While all of that media attention has been helpful, what really matters is that we’ve heard from writers, editors, publishers, scholars, critics, arts administrators and artists from across the country that CWILA has made a difference. And we’ll be able to measure more of that difference when we produce the Count for 2012 with your help.

Please support our organization by either sending us a cheque made out to CWILA OR by clicking on the link below to give on-line:  www.cwila.com.

Thanks for your support!

Be sure to pop over to www.cwila.com to find out more about the awesome work CWILA is doing. And don’t forget to help them out with a donation if you can! Thank you!

Thanks to Patricia Tomasi for including a quote from me in her article, From push-over to taskmaster to greatest boss ever: Managing myself in a dream world on canada.com.

In today’s tech age, it’s easier than ever to create the job of your dreams, which incidentally, turns into the life of your dreams. Case in point: Desirée Ossandon, CEO & Editor-in-Chief of Canada Arts Connect who quit her job three times to pursue a life of passion.

“I’m always open to new opportunities, so I’ve taken a few positions over the years at wonderful artistic organizations, but in the end I leave them behind to come back to what I really love. It’s not easy to give up the stability that a ‘normal’ job offers, but getting to live your dream is definitely worth it!”

Read the rest here.

I can’t express to you how happy I am that this film now exists.

The Punk Singer: The Documentary about Kathleen Hanna is a look at the life and career of one of the heroes of Riot Grrrl and punk. The film also addresses why she has pulled back in recent years.

I can’t overstate how much I admire Kathleen Hanna. Her work and her music have meant so, so much to me over the years.

I have to see this. I have to see this.

…I have to see this.

The first question that the mention of a documentary about Kathleen Hanna prompts is usually, Why hasn’t one already been made? Credited as a founder of the third wave of feminism and Riot Grrrl – Hanna has been a seminal radical activist, musician, and cultural icon for over twenty years. She’s also been a lightening rod for controversy, and a famously private person. Five years ago, she disappeared from the public eye, and is only now re-emerging. The Punk Singer combines twenty years of archival footage and an intimate look at four consecutive seasons of Hanna’s present life, to tell the story of what happened, and who she is now.
[The Punk Singer FB]

http://www.twitter.com/punksingerfilm
https://www.facebook.com/thepunksinger

It would be impossible to discuss Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s work without touching on how beautifully he captured the nature of his subjects.

This short animation by 18bis of his poem, “The Me Bird,” does justice to the lovely images presented by Neruda in an alternative medium.

Pablo Neruda’s poem, “The Me Bird,” is the Chilean writer’s ode to a “bird of a single feather.” The words are gorgeous enough, but Brazilian design and graphics studio 18bis took it upon themselves to create a stunning layered animation that brings the short work to life… (The Huffington Post)

Find out more about the making of the film and 18bis at The Huffington Post.

If you haven’t seen Amanda Palmer’s TED Talk, “The Art of Asking”, watch it now (below). If you have seen it, you should probably watch it again.

Don’t make people pay for music, says Amanda Palmer: Let them. In a passionate talk that begins in her days as a street performer (drop a dollar in the hat for the Eight-Foot Bride!), she examines the new relationship between artist and fan.

Alt-rock icon Amanda Fucking Palmer believes we shouldn’t fight the fact that digital content is freely shareable — and suggests that artists can and should be directly supported by fans.

Amanda Palmer’s TED Talk, “The Art of Asking”

Amanda Palmer’s TED Talk, “The Art of Asking” (TED.com)

Movie adaptations of novels can be a great addition to stories that are already well loved. But we can all name examples of films that have done a brutal job of bringing a book to life.

Despite The Catcher in the Rye being one of the most beloved books of all time, J.D. Salinger was of the opinion that it should never be made into a movie.

Next Movie has posted a letter written by J.D. Salinger explaining why…

In 1957, Salinger penned a very thoughtful letter to a producer named “Mr. Herbert” on the issue of selling the adaptation rights to “Catcher” and explained that the merit of his novel, as he saw it, was the narrator’s inner dialogue — the “novelistic”-ness of the novel, as he put it.

Salinger wrote, “the weight of the book is in the narrator’s voice, the non-stop peculiarities of it, his personal, extremely discriminating attitude to his reader-listener, his asides about gasoline rainbows in street puddles, his philosophy or way of looking at cowhide suitcases and empty toothpaste cartoons — in a word, his thoughts. He can’t legitimately be separated from his own first-person technique.” In other words, a movie would totally screw up making Holden a screw up.

We often assume stories are just stories, translatable from one medium to another. But that’s not always true. Some stories are better told through the written word. Some are better suited to being witnessed through film. And some are more suited to being told in person, looking into the eyes of the storyteller themselves as there voice reaches your ears directly.

Could a movie possibly capture and properly express Holden’s “voice, the non-stop peculiarities of it…— in a word, his thoughts” in the same way the book does?

Salinger went on to say that even if some of Holden’s inner turmoils could be translated into working dialogue, an idea which he wasn’t very comfortable with, such a film is “essentially unactable.”

“It would take someone with X to bring it off, and no very young man even if he has X quite knows what to do with it. And, I might add, I don’t think any director can tell him,” he declared.

Who could possibly play Holden? Iconic characters are notoriously difficult to take on and it’s incredibly easy to critique an actor’s portrayal of a character that we already feel we know.

Find out more here at Next Movie.

*   *   *

I don’t agree with all of these, but I definitely agree with some:

• 50 Best Book To Movie Adaptations (TotalFilm.com)
• The 20 Greatest Book To Film Adaptations……. (IMDb)
• Best Movie Adaptations (323 books) (Goodreads)
• 25 best book to film adaptations (The Telegraph)

• 50 Worst Movie Adaptations (TotalFilm.com)
• The 10 Most Badly Bungled Classic-Book-To-Film Adaptations (Flavorwire)

• best and worst movie adaptations (Goodreads, Games and Debates)

*   *   *

What other books do you feel should never be made into a movie? Why?

What books would you like to see made into a film? Who would you want to direct it and play the main character(s)?

In 2008, I started a little blog called Canada Arts Connect. CAC is now a booming national business with members, listings, programs, and an online magazine with columnists and guest writers who cover all areas of the arts (i.e. visual arts, music, literature, dance, theatre, film, TV, fashion, craft, design, and more).

To find out more about how Canada Arts Connect came to be and got to the point that it is, check out The Story of Canada Arts Connect.

And as always, if you’d like to know more or connect, please feel free to contact me at info@DesireeO.com or DesireeO@CanadaArtsConnect.com.

March marks the 5th anniversary of Canada Arts Connect! Woooooooooooooooo!

If you still don’t know about my biz (and why don’t you, may I ask?!! ;)), it began as a little blog and is now a national arts community that includes memberships, listings, upcoming programs, and an online magazine.

Check out Canada Arts Connect here and Canada Arts Connect Magazine here.

A big, huge, gigantic THANK YOU to everyone who has supported CAC! You’re all awesome! Be sure to keep an eye out for what we have coming up next!

Check out Canada Arts Connect & Canada Arts Connect Magazine now…
Main website: http://CanadaArtsConnect.com
Magazine website: http://CanadaArtsConnect.com/magazine
Twitter: http://twitter.com/CANArtsConnect
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/CanadaArtsConnect