How to pick it

Look for a firm skin with no soft or mouldy parts or bruises. Don’t worry if the colour isn’t uniform or if there are some barnacle-like splotches on them. A squash doesn’t need refrigeration – it can last for weeks when stored in a cool dark place.

How to cook it

“Your choices are either roasting or boiling,” says Kalisperas. “But when you boil it, it becomes really soggy and hard to work with unless you’re puréeing it into a soup. Even then you have to add a lot of flavour to it.”

That’s why he prefers roasting (for the home cook, it’s 400°F for 45 minutes to an hour). “When roasted, it becomes more flavourful since the natural sugars caramelize. I’ve never tried a raw squash, but I imagine it’d just dry your mouth out.”

Squash: 4 ways

Buttercup squash tart

The buttercup squash is best characterized as a little green pumpkin with the occasional splotch of bright orange on the skin. When you splice it open you’ll see that seeds take up most of the inside, so if you want to make a soup, Kalisperas says it’s better to opt for the butternut squash, which has a higher flesh-to-seeds ratio.

The chef roasts and purées the squash with eggs, garlic, salt, and pepper to make a savoury custard. He then pours it into a mini-piecrust, bakes it and then finishes it with a horseradish cream.

“The cream was made by whipping 35 per cent cream and ground horseradish, but if you don’t want to do that at home, you can just mix sour cream and horseradish,” he says.

Sweet dumpling squash crostini

“If you’re entertaining and want something quick and simple, a crostini is the way to go,” he says. “I wanted to move away from a bruschetta since it’s fall, so I replaced tomatoes with squash.”

The roasted squash is simply peeled, puréed, mixed with grated parmesan, salt and pepper and spread on pieces of grilled bread that’ve been brushed with olive oil and salt. Kalisperas then adds slices of lardo (cured pork fat), puts them back into the oven for 30 seconds to slightly melt it, and finally garnishes them with more cheese, some basil leaves and drops of a nice balsamic vinegar.

The slightly melted pork fat blankets the squash for a salty finish, and the basil and vinegar add a fresh pop to the first bite.

Stuffed acorn squash

The peculiar ridges of the acorn squash make it look like a Christmas ornament, so why not show off its cool shape by serving it whole?

Kalisperas slices it in half, removes the seeds and rubs it with salt, pepper, curry powder and grape seed oil.

“Don’t use olive oil when roasting a squash,” he says. “Use a grape seed or canola oil because olive oil will begin to smoke when you’re roasting it at high temperatures.”

The roasted squash is then stuffed with an earthy mixture of wild rice and foraged mushrooms like hen of the woods and cinnamon caps. A curried yogurt drizzle adds a contrasting tartness to the mushrooms and rice while some fried Brussels sprout leaves on top add a crispy garnish.

Pepper squash dipping sauce

The starchy nature of squash lends itself well to making thick dipping sauces.

“Remember to add a bit of butter or cream when puréeing squash or else it won’t be as smooth,” Kalisperas says. “This squash caramelizes really nicely when you roast it, and after blending it, toss in some blue cheese and a bit of maple syrup for a squash dipping sauce.”

Kalisperas pairs this sweet and cheesy sauce with sweetbreads, but you can try it with chicken wings or fries.

All photos by David Laurence

Don't miss: What about the leftover pumpkins?

Jake Gyllenhaal has flirted with unlikeable characters in the past, but his performance in Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler is something truly revelatory.

As Lou Bloom, a skeletal, hollow-eyed predator who stalks the Los Angeles night with a video camera in search of footage of violent crimes he can sell to local newscasts, Gyllenhaal is eerily convincing. You can see his eyes, but there’s nothing behind them. Spouting canned self-help jargon any time he’s cornered, he’s a sociopath who’s found his calling: charging people money to show them awful things that don’t bother him in the slightest.

“He is our first responder, do you know what I mean?” the actor tells me the day after the movie’s world premiere at TIFF. “It’s funny that someone like him exists, and it’s terrifying, because it speaks to that moment in yourself when you go, ‘Am I gonna click on that? Am I gonna look at that video? Or am I not?’ And whether you do or you don’t, that moment in you? That is Lou Bloom. He is the ultimate entrepreneur, and his is the ultimate success story for today.”

“Dan [director Gilroy] is saying that we believe success is, work hard enough, you get away with it – and that’s goodness. But that’s not the case with Lou, and I don’t think Dan is saying that’s the case with the majority of people who have a certain type of success. And that’s a fascinating thing.

“All of the things we’ve been taught: ‘Visualize a goal. Go as hard toward that goal as possible.’ Well, it doesn’t take into account those who don’t have empathy.”

Gyllenhaal, fortunately, has plenty of empathy. That’s how he figured out who Lou was.

“Acting can be a selfish, immature art, but I also think it can breed empathy if you decide to really prepare and research,” he says. “It’s about looking at yourself, parts of yourself, that are making decisions like Lou Bloom. There are pieces of all of us that have those qualities, and I think that’s interesting.”

So does Gyllenhaal see Lou Bloom as a monster? The actor won’t say, exactly.

“I look [objectively] and go, ‘Okay, is this guy a sociopath?’” he says. “And then I’ve gotta throw that out and enter [his] world.”

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

When the call came in that the University of Glasgow had voted to divest its £128 million endowment from fossil fuel companies, I happened to be in a room filled with climate activists in Oxford. They immediately broke into cheers. There were lots of hugs and a few tears. This was big – the first university in Europe to make such a move.

The next day there were more celebrations in climate circles: Lego announced it would not be renewing a relationship with Shell Oil, a longtime co-branding deal that saw toddlers filling up their plastic vehicles at toy Shell petrol stations. “Shell is polluting our kids’ imaginations,” a Greenpeace video that went viral declared, attracting more than 6 million views. 

Are fossil fuel companies – long toxic to our natural environment – becoming toxic in the public relations environment as well? It seems so, galvanized by the “carbon tracker” research showing that these firms have several times more carbon in their reserves than our atmosphere can safely absorb.

Internationally, there are hundreds of active fossil fuel divestment campaigns on university and college campuses, as well as ones targeting local city governments, non-profit foundations and religious organizations. And the victories keep getting bigger.

In May, for instance, California’s Stanford University announced it would divest its $18.7 billion endowment from coal. And on the eve of September’s UN climate summit in New York, a portion of the Rockefeller family – a name synonymous with oil – announced that it would be divesting its foundation’s holdings from fossil fuels and expanding its investments in renewable energy.

Some are skeptical. They point out that none of this will hurt oil or coal companies. Different investors will snap up their stocks, and most of us will keep buying their products. Our economies, after all, remain hooked on fossil fuels, and affordable renewable options are too often out of reach. So are these battles over fossil fuel investments and sponsorships just a charade? A way to clean our consciences but not the atmosphere?

The criticism overlooks the deeper power and potential of these campaigns. At their core, all are taking aim at the moral legitimacy of fossil fuel companies and the profits that flow from them. This movement is saying that it is unethical to be associated with an industry whose business model is based on knowingly destabilizing the planet’s life support systems.

Every time a new institution or brand decides to cut its ties, every time the divestment argument is publicly made, it reinforces the idea that fossil fuel profits are illegitimate – that “these are now rogue industries,” in the words of author Bill McKibben. And it is this illegitimacy that has the potential to break the stalemate in meaningful climate action. Because if those profits are illegitimate, and this industry is rogue, it brings us a step closer to the principle that has been sorely missing from the collective climate response so far: the polluter pays.

Take the Rockefellers. When Valerie Rockefeller Wayne explained her decision to divest, she said that it was precisely because her family’s wealth was made through oil that they were “under greater moral obligation” to use that wealth to stop climate change.

That, in a nutshell, is the rationale behind polluter pays. It holds that when commercial activity creates hefty public health and environmental damage, the polluters must shoulder a significant share of the costs of repair. But it can’t stop with individuals and foundations, nor can the principle be enforced voluntarily.

As I explore in my book, This Changes Everything, Fossil-fuel-based companies have been pledging for more than a decade to use their profits to transition us away from dirty energy. BP has rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum” – only to back off renewables and double down on the dirtiest fossil fuels. Richard Branson pledged to spend $3 billion of Virgin’s profits finding a miracle green fuel and fighting global warming – only to systematically lower expectations while sharply increasing his fleet of airplanes. Clearly, polluters aren’t going to pay for this transition unless they are forced to do so by law.

Up until the early 1980s, that was still a guiding principle of environmental law-making in North America. And the principle hasn’t totally disappeared – it’s the reason why Exxon and BP were forced to pick up large portions of the bills after the Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters.

But since the era of market fundamentalism took hold in the 1990s, direct regulations and penalties on polluters have been superseded by the drive to create complex market mechanisms and voluntary initiatives designed to minimize the impact of environmental action on corporations. When it comes to climate change, the result of these so-called win-win solutions has been a double loss: greenhouse emissions are up and support for many forms of climate action is down, in large part because policies are perceived – quite rightly – as passing costs on to already overburdened consumers while letting big corporate polluters off the hook.

It is this culture of lopsided sacrifice that has to stop – and the Rockefellers, oddly, are showing the way. Large parts of the Standard Oil trust, the empire John D. Rockefeller co-founded in 1870, evolved into Exxon Mobil. In 2008 and 2012, Exxon earned about $45 billion in profits, which remains the highest yearly profit ever reported in the U.S. by a single company. Other Standard Oil spinoffs include Chevron and Amoco, which would later merge with BP.

The astronomical profits these companies and their cohorts continue to earn from digging up and burning fossil fuels cannot continue to hemorrhage into private coffers. They must, instead, be harnessed to help roll out the clean technologies and infrastructure that will allow us to move beyond these dangerous energy sources, as well as to help us adapt to the heavy weather we have already locked in. A minimal carbon tax whose price tag can be passed on to consumers is no substitute for a real polluter-pays framework – not after decades of inaction has made the problem immeasurably worse (inaction secured, in part, by a climate denial movement funded by some of these same corporations).

And that’s where these seemingly symbolic victories come in, from Glasgow to Lego. The profits of the fossil fuel sector, made by knowingly treating our atmosphere like a sewage dump, should not just be seen as toxic – something from which publicly minded institutions will naturally distance themselves. If we accept that those profits are morally illegitimate, they should also be seen as odious – something to which the public itself can make a claim in order to clean up the mess these companies have left, and continue to leave, behind.

When that happens, the pervasive sense of hopelessness in the face of a crisis as vast and costly as climate change will finally begin to lift.

This column was originally published in The Guardian.

Naomi Klein’s most recent book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, was published in the U.S., UK and Canada in September. thischangeseverything.org

news@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto

The barbershop king

Beejay Diona, Hollow Ground, 1053 Bloor West, 416-551-8929

A self-taught barber who’s been cutting hair since he was a teen, Diona is one of Hollow Ground’s co-owners and the go-to guy for a straightforward cut that looks hot. He does long hair, short hair, ethnic hair and particularly prides himself on his straight-razor shaves. Diona isn’t gender-exclusive either – he’s behind some of the city’s best female head shaves.

Photos by Tanja Tiziana Burdi

The houdini of hair colour

Violet Volovik, Bob + Paige Salon, 239 Danforth, 416-850-9719 bobandpaige.com

Volovik doesn’t mess around: she’s a semi-finalist in the Canadian master colourist category in this year’s Contessa Canadian Hairstylist of the Year Awards. In addition to rocking the world of hair shows and competitions, where styles can admittedly be a bit avant-garde for the average person’s taste, Volovik excels at creating perfect colour for everyday wear. From subtle highlights to an electric pop of colour, she can give you the look minus the damage.

Photos by Tanja Tiziana Burdi

The makeover magician

Darren Kwik, Cheveux, 955 Queen West, 416-361-1016, darrenkwik.com

Kwik’s makeovers are the physical manifestation of the saying “go big or go home.” If you need a major style overhaul, this is your guy. He can cut, colour and work with extensions to give your hair new life. Does change make you nervous? Take a deep breath and relax with coffee, tea or wine served to clients on site. You’re in good hands.

Photos by Tanja Tiziana Burdi

The scissors nerd

Greg May, Greg May Hair Architects, 88 Scollard, 3rd floor, 416-920-8892, gregmayhair.com

May applies design principles he learned from his dad, an architect, to the mop on top of your head. The former creative director of the Holt Renfrew Salon opened his own shop in 2003 and since then has become a go-to stylist for celebs and fashion editors. The man knows his way around a pair of scissors and has even designed his own line. Of course, he’ll readily explain all this to you once you’re in his chair. May knows what a client wants and doesn’t stop until he gets it just right.

Photos by Tanja Tiziana Burdi

The brow boss

Kira Thompson, the Brow House, 80 Scollard, 647-351-7078, thebrowhouse.com

The formerly NYC-based makeup artist realized her true calling when the rich and famous started flying her around for private brow appointments. She moved back to Toronto and founded the Brow House 10 years ago. An appointment with Thompson goes far above and beyond your typical wax or threading appointment – neither of which she does, by the way. She claims both methods are inaccurate at best and damaging at worst. Thompson prefers tweezers and uses them with superior precision to ensure perfect symmetry and shape for your face. She also offers brow tints, lash perms and personalized makeup tutorials. Coming soon: brow extensions.

Photos by Tanja Tiziana Burdi

The murder of a young Canadian reservist and the Parliamentary shootout that followed was shocking because of its seemingly out-of-the-blue nature. 

But rather than viewing the tragic events last week as a wake-up call to seriously examine Canada’s negative role on the world stage and its war in Iraq, we got references to the “loss of innocence” and pronouncements that “things will never be the same.” 

The events have understandably had a congealing effect on Parliamentarians who shared a trauma together. 

But the shooting is already being used as an excuse for greater militarization and as justification for the war against ISIS, not to mention for “strengthening” our laws in the area of “surveillance, detention and arrest.” 

Coincidentally, last Wednesday was also supposed to be the Harper government’s opportunity to unleash a new round of legislative measures designed to give CSIS and the RCMP even more freedom to monitor people overseas and take part in extraordinary rendition programs. After last week’s events, what opposition leader who wants to appear prime-ministerial would feel comfortable saying no to such an agenda? 

We don’t know much about the shooter, but media have been quick to point out he was a recent convert to Islam.

When Prime Minster Stephen Harper addressed the nation, his discourse was unchanged from his bellicose rumblings spoken before the Parliamentary vote to bomb Iraq and Syria: “Canada will never be intimidated… redouble our efforts… savagery… no safe haven….”

While Canadian soldiers have been told to stay indoors and not show themselves in public in uniform, Muslims or those perceived as ones may have second thoughts about being out in public, too. 

I have to wonder if this direct experience of fear and trauma will force us to examine our own addiction to violence as the solution to conflict. 

Matthew Behrens coordinates the Homes Not Bombs non-violent direct action network. A longer version of this column appeared at rabble.ca.

news@nowtoronto.com

Don't miss: Horror on the Hill

Dan Gilroy has done a lot of work as a screenwriter, not all of it especially memorable. (His credits include Freejack, Chasers, Two For The Money and The Bourne Legacy.) So when it came to making his directorial debut, he was careful to try to make something that would stick with people. The result is Nightcrawler, a moody thriller opening this week starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a Los Angeles tabloid videographer who trolls the city for footage of car crashes and violent crime – and discovers that his total lack of humanity makes him great at his job. It does indeed stick. Nightcrawler became one of the breakout hits of TIFF and one of this fall’s most-anticipated releases. I sat down with Gilroy a few hours before the world premiere.

See Listings.

What was the starting point for the project?

I’d been thinking about it for a long time. I was very interested in the crime photographer Weegee. He lived in New York City and was the first person to put a police scanner in his car and drive around to crime scenes. But I couldn’t figure out a way to tell that story – it’s a period story, and it had already been done with Joe Pesci [in 1992 as The Public Eye]. 

Then I moved to Los Angeles a number of years ago and heard about these nightcrawlers. Shortly after that I came up with the character of Lou Bloom and I suddenly saw a way to plug the two together so that it had relevance to me.

Was it the compulsion that connected them for you? 

I wanted to update the Weegee story. They were driving around Los Angeles at a hundred miles an hour [and] they didn’t have cameras like Weegee had. They had video cameras. And then cinematically we were looking at screens within screens – like when [Lou] enters the crime scene and we’re focusing more on his viewfinder than the wider shot. That was interesting cinematically.

The movie’s vision of Los Angeles isn’t what we usually see. It’s utterly unglamorous. Lou isn’t interested in celebrities and never goes anywhere near a red carpet or a fancy hotel. He’s all about crime and blood.

Los Angeles is usually portrayed as a place of social decay and I very much see it more as a place of struggle and survival. There’s just a wild, untamed spirit. It’s a place of mountains and deserts and coyotes and oceans and earthquakes. So Robert Elswit, the wonderful director of photography, and I were trying to show an L.A. that did not have a man-made component. We were much more interested in a sort of natural beauty. 

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

I convinced Matthew Collins, celebrity hairstylist and co-owner of Brennen Demelo Studios (316 Adelaide West, 416-301-1072, brennendemelo.com), to teach me three easy-to-craft ponytails that look like pro updos. The guy has a four-month wait list, so I figure giving away a few secrets won’t hurt his bottom line too much.

The 4-D braid ponytail

1. Start with slicked-back ponytail.

2. Separate hair into four sections.

3. Take two sections and cross them vertically.

4. Take the other two sections and cross them horizontally.

5. Continue the pattern of crossing vertically then horizontally.

6. Secure with elastic and loosen the braid with a comb.

The sci-fibumpy ponytail

1. Start with slicked-back ponytail.

2. Backcomb a section of the ponytail, then comb softly over the surface to make a smooth bump.

3. Secure with elastic.

4. Use the end of your comb to pick the bump into a more rounded shape.

5. Repeat with more sections of your hair until you have the desired number of bumps.

The knotted ponytail

1. Start with slicked-back ponytail.

2. Take two small pieces from the back and tie a knot around the ponytail the way you would begin to tie your shoes.

3. Gather two more pieces of hair into the original two pieces and repeat the tying motion.

4. Repeat until you’re happy with the look.

5. Secure with an elastic at the base of the knots.

Photos by David Hawe

The interplay between guilt and mercy is at the centre of Kate Cayley’s The Bakelite Masterpiece. Its lesson is that forgiveness, both for oneself and another, is difficult to obtain.

Though its narrative is simple, the play is eloquent, subtly shaped and offers a formidable confrontation between its two characters, a painter and an army officer.

More specifically, the painter, Han van Meegeren (Geordie Johnson), is a forger and the officer, Geert Piller (Irene Poole), an art historian investigating appropriated artworks. It’s postwar Amsterdam, and van Meegeren is charged with selling a previously lost Vermeer painting to Hermann Goering. Piller accuses him of being a Nazi collaborator.

In his defence, van Meegeren says the work was his own, created using the modern plastic Bakelite to give the painting the look of age. The canvas was an artistic means of humiliating the gullible Nazis, making them look like fools in the eyes of the world. He’s not a traitor, he argues sardonically, but a patriot.

The play is a series of interviews between the two antagonists, linked by the painter’s monologues in which he expounds his philosophy of art and life. How can he prove that he painted the Vermeer, he asks? He’ll paint another in the 17th century painter’s style, using Piller as his model.

Director Richard Rose’s production has a focused power that allows the characters to reveal themselves in carefully modulated scenes.

Johnson’s reprobate blends sarcasm and cynicism with his philosophical worldliness and pride in having tricked the world. He may fear death – he could be shot or hanged, depending on Piller’s judgment – but has no problem comparing himself to Lucifer, whose arrogance he sees as one of curiosity: can the Supreme Authority be deceived?

Poole’s Piller is the more layered figure, revealing more and more about her background and needs as the contest with van Meegeren heats up. Watch the flash of emotions across her face as she studies van Meegeren’s new painting.

Piller’s explosive outbursts are the more effective for their rarity. We come to realize that this Dutch resistance worker hopes for a new Holland, a new world, now that the war is over. Van Meegeren tries to convince her that, given human nature, perfection is unobtainable.

The painting that van Meegeren sells Goering depicts the Biblical tale of Christ and the woman taken in adultery, which ends with her exoneration when none of those around her will cast the first stone. Over the course of the play, both historian and painter stand in the position of the accused woman, looking for some kind of forgiveness and understanding of what they’ve done.

There’s an element of grace in the play’s open-ended conclusion, but it’s granted with an awareness that our shared humanity and doubt about our actions and motives can make life difficult to bear.

Charlotte Dean’s bare-bones set of table, chairs and painting implements is placed against a canvas-like backdrop, and André du Toit lights the action with an awareness of Vermeer’s soft shafts of horizontal illumination.

All signs point to Prince playing a secret show at Massey Hall tonight. A tweet from his band 3rdeyegirl kicked off the speculation early this morning, saying: “4^th day of November, we need a purple high: OTNOROT CALLING…” It was pulled down shortly after.

According to internet rumour: tickets will be $10, there will be two shows, and wristbands will be handed out at 6 pm.

Massey Hall hasn’t confirmed or denied the show, but a lineup is forming already. No wonder – the funk-pop icon, who used to live in Toronto in the 00s, hasn’t played our city in three years. 

Get there now!

UPDATE: Bummer. Further to reports from CP24 this afternoon that the show would not, in fact, go on, Massey Hall confirmed to NOW at 4 pm that there would be no Prince concert on Tuesday evening. 

The first Wednesday of the month means a new Doc Soup is served at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema; November’s premiere is Last Days In Vietnam. And if you think you’ve seen all there is to see about the Vietnam war, well, here’s 97 minutes that you haven’t.         

Directed by Rory Kennedy (Ghosts Of Abu Ghraib, Ethel), Last Days In Vietnam looks at the absolute chaos of the final weeks of America’s presence in the convulsing nation. The war effort was collapsing into incoherence, half a million civilians were trying to claim refugee status so they could escape through the U.S. embassy in Saigon, and Americans were doing everything they could to save individual lives.

Four decades on, Kennedy and her crew have collected stories from Americans and Vietnamese who were there, matching them to archival footage to construct a narrative that’s as close to definitive as possible.

It’s a fascinating story of institutional denial and personal commitment, both of which are somehow bound up in the personal arc of Graham Martin, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam who refused to acknowledge the deteriorating state of the war, but finally reversed himself to marshal a last-ditch effort to evacuate hundreds of people.

Last Days In Vietnam screens at 6:30 and 9:15 pm Wednesday (November 5) and again Thursday (November 6) at 6:45 pm. At press time, the early Wednesday show and Thursday’s show had gone rush; tickets for the late Wednesday show were still available here.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto