Melora Koepke

In the Great Hall of LAX’s new Tom Bradley International Terminal, time dances – literally – on a giant clocktower. Every hour on the hour, the Time Tower, a four-sided, 22-metre screen plays Dance Time, a Busby Berkeley-esque dance number in which the legs of smiling showgirls create a fleshy kaleidoscope inside the clock’s whirring gears. […]

TORONTO – Besides being one of the leading lights in China’s so-called Fifth Generation of filmmakers, Zhang Yimou is also, for moviegoers of a certain vintage, one of his country’s best-loved historical storytellers. His period films often contemplate pivotal moments in China’s past, told from conflicting points of view, offering ways of remembering a past […]

TORONTO—IF YOU THINK you know what water is, you don’t. Watermark, Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky’s documentary shot in 5K ultra high-def video, brings us on a trip to the hyperreal extremes of what water can be at its most powerful, plentiful—or absent. Burtynsky and Baichwal shot 200 hours of footage in far-flung locations around the world, places […]

MONTREAL – Though we live in an age where information is constant and ubiquitous, how much do we really know about our own neighbours? The artists and philosophers at SenseLab, a “laboratory for thought in motion” at Concordia University, think that finding common ground is more important than information exchange. Through Three Mile Meal, its […]

This is one from the vaults; my first glossy feature and first National Magazine Award win. Being in Vancouver again makes me think about how much has changed since this was published-  and how nothing has. “Beyond the search for the corpus delicti—beyond headlines about the “pig farm killer,” the accused Robert Pickton, and the […]

MONTREAL – The giant windowed storefront of Boucherie Lawrence is situated on a stretch of the upper Main where high-end designer shops are lined up next to sparse art galleries and mid-century modern furniture stores. The row of window-facing counter stools in its well-designed, airy interior, with meat-specific wall art and a wide pine “merch […]

When Zelda Abramson contacted me on a housing-swap website for academics on sabbatical to inquire about subletting my apartment, I gave her a list of its ups and downs. On the pro side, it’s a typical century-old triplex on Waverly St., which means original fixtures, Mile End cachet and a great quartier. On the con […]

By the time I’m at the foot of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, I haven’t slept in five days and I’m running on bocadillos and adrenalin. The circadian rhythms of touring like a musician are new to me; when you’re travelling on this kind of schedule, your experience of time and space becomes intensified, amplified, […]

Running my hands over the smooth and
 nubbly turrets of green nopales, the cactus pads that Chuck Hughes is trying to de-needle on camera like an habitué, I follow along as he picks up the items on his grocery list: yerba santa, an aromatic that tastes like nutmeg and mint, and huitlacoche, bulbous black mushrooms that cling […]

In September, I went to a friend’s farm in Aquitaine, France, and the first thing I saw when I entered the converted pigeonnier, on the big French farmhouse table, was an advance copy of The Art of Living According to Joe Beef: A Cookbook of Sorts. Then, in October in San Francisco, a cookbook store […]