Kenny Hotz has a new job and he doesn’t care if he gets fired
By Emma Teitel - Sunday, January 27, 2013 - 0 Comments
A chat about his new radio show and, of course, Spenny
Kenny Hotz and Jeff Kassel in the new SiriusXM studio
Kenny Hotz is a breaker of records in (among other things) octopus wearing, semen producing, bible peddling, and gas passing. Post Kenny vs. Spenny, he’s been covering new–equally gross– ground. There was Testees, a short-lived comedy about human test subjects, Kenny Hotz’s Triumph of the Will, a reality series in which Kenny wanders a Nevada desert naked, tries to get his mother laid, and enlists a Jewish community to help him build a mosque. And now, for the first time in his career, he’s doing radio–with Testees actor, Jeff Kassel. Hotzcast, will debut this month on Sirius XM’s Laugh Attack (XM channel 160), live on Tuesdays at 5 PM ET. Kenny and Jeff will be covering politics and popular culture, with the occasional guest (including, he hopes, Martin Short some day.) Here’s Kenny Hotz on life without Spencer, Hebrew school, the NHL lockout, and his new “no mandate” radio show.
Q: Hi Kenny, how are you?
A: Surprisingly well. Still relevant, thank God. How are you? How is everyone at Maclean’s?
Q: Everyone’s fine, I think. We’re all in cubicles, so I can’t see anyone right now.
A: Yeah that’s good. You don’t wanna see those people.
Q: Tell me about your new radio show.
A: It’s funny because I’m not really a radio guy and my fans have been bugging me for years, telling me to do a podcast, but podcasts are stale and they’re dying now. But I’ve always been a really big fan of radio and I grew up with it. I’m 45 and the early part of my life I spent with headphones on in my basement listening to radio.
Q: What kind of radio?
A: Brave New Waves, 102.1, a lot of CKLN, you know, Ryerson. And then when I moved to Los Angeles I lived in a garage for five years, and it was Howard Stern every morning.
Q: Have you ever met Howard Stern?
A: No, but I heard he liked the show [Kenny Vs. Spenny].
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Rob Ford is back in business, for now
By Emma Teitel - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 at 5:27 PM - 0 Comments
Chris Young/CP
It was like an ancient parable. Toronto mayor Rob Ford (yes, he’s still mayor) had to pass three tests to win a stay and remain in power– until a judgment is made on his Jan. 7 appeal.
In order to win the stay Ford’s legal team had to prove that:
1. The case involves a serious question to be tried at appeal.
2. Refusing to grant the stay would cause Ford “irreparable harm.”
3. It is in the public’s best interest to do so.
“We have an elected official and we want to maintain the status quo so that the democratic way is maintained,” said Ford’s lawyer, Alan Lenczner, who looks and sounds a lot like Ron Paul.
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Rob Ford fumbles again, but he doesn’t seem to care
By Emma Teitel - Monday, November 5, 2012 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford watches from the sidelines near the Argos bench during a CFL football game between the Argonauts and Stampeders in Calgary on Aug. 18, 2012.(Larry MacDougal/CP)
Sometimes we get leaders whose ascent to power is hard to understand: i.e. how did we end up with this jerk? And other times, we get leaders who make us question whether or not they ever wanted to be leaders in the first place. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, ever absent, and always cranky, is one of those people.
His life looks a lot like a bad movie, the kind in which a salt-of-the-earth football coach wakes up one morning and realizes that, by some magic, he is the mayor of a metropolis that doesn’t take kindly to salt-of-the-earth football coaches. Suddenly he’s snubbing gay people, tackling reporters, flipping off constituents and before he knows it, he’s embroiled in a series of scandals involving tax payer money and his own high school football team — two things that don’t belong in the same sentence, but so often are these days.
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Rob "Eraserman" Ford, hold your fire! All graffiti is not evil!
By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, April 15, 2011 at 12:03 PM - 20 Comments
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford attacks graffiti with a power washer. Photo: Tara Walton/Toronto Star
If I can step off the film beat for a moment, I like to take a look at a local blockbuster superhero: Eraserman. I’m talking about Rob Ford and his recent foray into performance art. Last week, the Toronto mayor hit the street with a high-pressure spray gun to deface graffiti for the cameras. With this stunt, worthy of a Gotham comic book, Ford is painting himself as a boots-on-the-ground crusader out to purge our abused walls of graphic crime. All that’s missing is the cape.
For a politician, graffiti is as easy target. A lot of it is ugly, offensive or simply banal. But hey, that’s also true of a lot of art, even the pricey stuff that hangs in corporate boardrooms. To tar all graffiti with one brush, or nozzle, is bone-headed. There are all kinds of graffiti, ranging from puerile vandalism to high art. Taking spray cans to the street is one of most dynamic movements to hit modern art in years, producing stars from Basquiat to Banksy. It’s also public art of the most democratic kind. Free, chaotic and ever-changing, it’s urban cave painting, a zoo of individual gestures that form a fluid collage of collective expression. Whether or not graffiti should be erased by public officials is not a black-and-white issue. Whether it should survive depends what it’s like, where it is and the spirit in which it’s created.It’s one thing to recklessly deface a tidy piece of public or private property. Any artist who’s into that kind of mischief has to know he’s an outlaw working in a highly impermanent medium. But it’s something else to lavish some spray paint on a derelict alley wall, a strip of industrial wasteland—or a bridge abutment in a ravine.
I’ve been photographing graffiti in Toronto’s ravines for years. Bisected by highways, rail lines, bridges and industrial blight, these are wild urban spaces. The lyrical tags adorning slabs of concrete and rusting steel connect these structures to the tangle of nature that surrounds them. It roots them in the landscape. Like the forests and wetlands in the ravines, this art is in constant metamorphosis. It’s a jungle of molting paint. Some of it is ugly; some is beautiful. But it definitely seems to belong. To wipe it all clean would be an act of industrial vandalism. It would also be pointless. The war on graffiti, like the war on drugs, is unwinnable.Eraserman, no matter how long and hard you clean, in the end all you’re doing is preparing a fresh canvas.
Click on any of the below thumbnails to view a gallery of my graffiti photos:
