Hot sauce taste test: Locally made condiments a scorching feast of fiery flavour

Free Press food reporter Eva Wasney and drinks editor Ben Sigurdson sacrificed their palates to taste-test some spicy sauces. 

Simpsons scene inspires film treatments on YouTube

One man’s attempt to pass off hamburgers as “steamed hams” has become another man’s magnum opus.

Winnipeg graphic designer Tyrone Deise has achieved YouTube fame for his creative renditions of an iconic Simpsons sketch in which principal Seymour Skinner hosts school superintendent Gary Chalmers for an unforgettable luncheon.

The episode, which first aired in 1996, sees Skinner serving his boss fast food after his carefully prepared roast goes up in flames. Calf stretching and alleged aurora borealis sightings ensue.

Deise, 44, is a hobbyist filmmaker who grew up watching The Simpsons. After seeing the episode memed online, he decided to remake the steamed hams bit in the style of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. He submitted the silent, black-and-white Super 8 film to the local WNDX Festival of Moving Image and uploaded it to his YouTube channel (@TyroneDeise) in 2022, without a second thought.

Organizers and artists gear up for Nuit Blanche’s 15th year of art celebration

Kurt Tittlemier plans to be up early Saturday morning to check on the weather as rain could scupper his smoothly laid-out plans for Nuit Blanche.

From 6 p.m. to 11 p.m Saturday, an estimated 35,000 visitors will explore four art zones in the city centre, viewing more than 100 installations, performance and community events created by individual artists and art collectives.

It’s been a hectic week in the lead-up to the annual contemporary art festival, and Tittlemier, the general manager of Culture Days Manitoba, which produces Nuit Blanche Winnipeg (NBW), has been fielding phone calls, answering emails and troubleshooting countless last-minute issues.

It’s part and parcel of doing the job, and after 11 years with the organization, four as its GM, his passion and dedication have yet to wane. If anything, they’ve grown stronger.

New film documents life, love of Holocaust survivor and artist Joseph Bau

In a world hungry for stories of resilience and hope, a new film arrives with the force of a revelation.

Bau, Artist at War — directed by Sean McNamara and starring Emile Hirsch, Inbar Lavi and Yan Tual — is a testament to the indomitable human spirit.

The film opens in Winnipeg on Friday, offering audiences a chance to witness one of the most extraordinary true stories to emerge from the ashes of the Second World War.

At its heart is Joseph Bau, a gifted artist, master forger and Holocaust survivor whose courage and creativity became tools of resistance.

Whether you prefer niblets or nu metal, we’ve got you covered in the kitchen

Cooking is about balance.

Often, this means combining opposing flavours to enhance the final product. A squeeze of citrus to cut through a rich sauce. A dash of salt to mellow the bitter bite of dark chocolate. Or, hear me out, the subtle sweetness of corn to tone down the flamboyant angst of ’90s nu metal.

Korn, a pioneer of the genre, performs in Winnipeg on Thursday with Gojira and Loathe. The California band celebrated its 30th anniversary last fall and tomorrow’s show at Canada Life Centre promises to be a night of aggressive scatting, driving guitar and dizzying headbanging.

To mark the event, today’s Homemade column pairs reader-submitted corn dishes with tangentially fitting Korn hits from the past three decades.

Winnipegger’s artwork chosen for Walmart’s national Orange Shirt offering

As she walked into the Unicity Walmart department store, Indigenous artist Brooklyn Rudolph-Nicholas felt her excitement levels rising.

She headed towards the racks of instantly recognizable orange T-shirts, smiling as she glimpsed the familiar image on the front.

It was a pinch-me moment: her work was emblazoned on Walmart Canada’s National Day for Truth & Reconciliation orange shirts stocked in stores across the country.

The granddaughter of two residential school survivors, Rudolph-Nicholas made her T-shirt art in honour of her late grandparents.

Protagonist in David Bergen’s taut new thriller is living on the razor’s edge

Like most published books, most of David Bergen’s previous novels have come adorned with blurbs espousing the author’s writerly prowess.

The award-winning Winnipeg author’s latest novel, his 12th, is no different — but in the case of Days of Feasting and Rejoicing, the blurb comes from none other than fêted Quebec crime-fiction writer Louise Penny. No surprise, then, that in his latest Bergen offers his taut take on the literary thriller.

The 68-year-old Bergen launches Days of Feasting and Rejoicing tonight at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location, where the author will be joined in conversation by fellow novelist Joan Thomas as part of Thin Air, the annual writer’s festival presented by Plume Winnipeg.

Feasting follows Esther Maile, an American woman in Thailand with her Canadian friend Christine Case. An incident early in the novel sees Christine drown, with Esther not exactly innocent in the way things play out. After Christine’s death, Esther begins taking over her late friend’s life, all the while making increasingly erratic decisions, while Christine’s friends and family — and local police — begin to suspect something is amiss.

Artists, performers open their doors, and their souls, for Culture Days

Culture Days, a national celebration of local arts and culture, kicks off today and runs through Oct. 12.

There are hundreds of free public events taking place across Manitoba over the next three weeks, including in Winnipeg, Morden, Gimli, Flin Flon and beyond. Nuit Blanche Winnipeg, the city’s annual late-night art party, also falls under the Culture Days umbrella and takes place Sept. 27.

Find a sample of the fun below and visit culturedays.ca for more information.

Central Park Moves: Weekend BeatsCentral Park, 367 Ellice Ave.

Paintings by Gilles Hébert’s lifelong friend Carolee Schneemann recall time spent on Manitoba beach

On My Wall is a monthly feature exploring the pieces Manitoba artists and cultural workers proudly display. Gilles Hébert, interim executive director of Plug In ICA, discusses his paintings by Carolee Schneemann.

Taking Reel Pride in transformation

Reel Pride isn’t entering a mid-life crisis.

At 40, the annual Winnipeg LGBTTQ+ film festival appears as forward-looking as ever — though at the moment, its president, Ray Desautels, is feeling reflective about its arc.

“The festival started at a time when … you didn’t see LGBTQ characters on television, and if you did, they were shown in a very poor light or very stereotypical way,” he says.

“It’s become more, I think, a gathering place for queer people and queer arts … It’s more of an arts festival, not necessarily just strictly the film festival that it used to be. So we’re a gathering place for the queer community and its allies and supporters.”

New documentary revisits Lilith Fair, gives it the overdue kudos it deserves

In the opening moments of Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, a new documentary about the pioneering all-women touring festival co-founded by Canadian icon Sarah McLachlan in the late 1990s, there’s a series of TikTok videos fronted by gen Z women expressing wonder and astonishment that something like that ever even existed.

“There was an all-female music festival from 1997 to 1999 — and I am shook to my core,” one woman says.

Ally Pankiw, the film’s director, is not surprised younger generations have never heard of Lilith Fair.

“It was not celebrated for how massive it was,” says the Canadian film/TV writer and director (Feel Good, Shrill). “It was so commercially successful. It changed so many artists’ trajectories and careers. It raised so much money for charity.

Star-smitten devotee continues to grow his one-of-a-kind collection of all things Liz Taylor

Fourteen years since its namesake’s death in 2011 at age 79, Passion by Elizabeth Taylor continues to be one of the world’s best-selling perfumes.

The scent was originally created by the English-born screen legend, that’s true, but there is some discourse, at least here in Winnipeg, as to how Taylor arrived at the fragrance’s moniker in the first place.

Retired real estate agent Hannon Bell, 75, has spent the majority of his life collecting anything and everything associated with the two-time Academy Award winner. Through the years, news of his encyclopedic knowledge of Taylor has been documented in dozens of publications, including the National Enquirer, People magazine and the Globe and Mail.

In 1974, Bell had a set of yellow T-shirts printed that read “Hannon’s Passion: Elizabeth Taylor” across the front, combined with a black-and-white image of the star.

Everything’s on the table in Winnipeg Jewish Theatre's counselling-session-based thriller

When they were cast as a psychiatrist and his reluctant patient for the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s season-opening production, Dov Mickelson and Jada Rifkin opened their calendars and set aside one hour for an introductory appointment.

The two actors made their way to a Toronto coffee shop, but as they quickly discovered, they might have unknowingly read the same waiting-room magazines: for a time, they shared the same therapist.

“Now what are the chances of this? We just thought it was hilarious,” says Mickelson, who featured as Yekel in last season’s Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre staging of playwright Paula Vogel’s Indecent.

That one-hour coffee chat quickly evolved into a four-hour schmooze session, during which the two performers found an immediate rapport that the complex characters they portray in Job could only dream of finding.

Winnipeg-shot movie ‘Normal’ gets raucous reception in Toronto

Die Hard meets Fargo. That was one of the more on-the-nose critical reactions to the Winnipeg-lensed movie Normal, which got its world première Sunday at midnight at the 50th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival.

Amazing Race Canada winners' autobiographical show a moving ride

When Broadway stars Catherine Wreford and Craig Ramsay bolted across the finish line for the TV hit reality series Amazing Race Canada in 2022, they were stunned to hear they had won the gruelling six-week competition, earning the top prize of $250,000.