Culture: May 2009 Archives

If you’ve ever considered that it might be a fun idea to invite the local roller-derby girls to your next party, Thursday at The Power Plant cleared up that misconception. That night, the eleventh annual Power Ball art party fundraiser at Harbourfront’s contemporary art gallery filled every space with interactive installations. This included some unfortunately unavoidable interactions with some very determined girls on roller skates—determined to be noticed, to be outrageous. Fortunately, their grit was unnecessary. Power Ball 11’s sheer saturation of art upon art in every corner was a reminder of why the event is worth attending.

A spring weeknight. A fan planning to go to that night's Blue Jays game flips on the radio to check on the traffic heading to the ballpark.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

This year's blockbuster season seems to have dragged on interminably already, but it's finally starting to look (tee hee) up, with the long-awaited release of Pixar's latest, Up, today. Their first in 3D, we've wondered if they've chosen such a vertically minded project because the form of 3D projection used tends to look better when things are moving up and down rather than horizontally; not that that would make that much difference to the quality of the film. Indeed, most of the reviews we've read barely mention it, with in particular NOW's Norm Wilner providing a deep look at the film that will disappoint anyone who was expecting some dumb fun or (at least) a break from the heartbreaking whimsy of WALL*E—"[Main character] Carl is a widower—and in a truly heartbreaking opening montage, we see how he ended up that way," he explains. "What distinguishes Up … is the fact that it never, ever forgets that Carl’s anger and misery come from a real, raw place of bereavement and helplessness."

In a basement studio at the corner of Oakwood and Amherst, a small group of hip-hop hopefuls has been meeting for the past ten weeks. Under the tutelage of urban music veteran Dan-e-o (best known, perhaps, for his 1995 single, “Dear Hip Hop”), these emerging rappers have literally learnt it all; from rhyming to freestyling, to writing, recording and producing their own tracks—Dan-e-o’s students aren’t playing pretend. And on Sunday, May 31, they're hosting a block party—a real block party—to celebrate the release of their new album, Visionists.

An eco-friendly, humanitarian band of Coupe Bizarre employees has broken off and started a new hair salon: Parlour. Owner duo Tyler Moore (seven year manager of Coupe Bizarre) and Franz David (colourist and ten-plus year employee of Coupe Bizarre) took along a handful of their cohorts to open their own shop just a few blocks away. Although they officially opened on March 21st, they upped the celebration on Wednesday night at a launch party, where they showed off their new space, their hair styles, and some of their earthy initiatives.

Louise Garfield is taking her love of art to the streets. As executive director of Arts Etobicoke, she is collaborating with Lakeshore Arts, her sister organization, to display new works across Toronto. But these pieces won’t be seen on billboards or in other traditional outlets; instead, they will be featured on the side of travelling motorized vehicles for a new project titled ART ON THE MOVE.

Good fences make good neighbours; Rosie DiManno, not so much.

As part of each hand as they are called, her Luminato project celebrating the history of Jewish life in Kensington Market, artist Reena Katz was to organize a game of Mah Jongg between seniors from the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care and grade eight students from Ryerson Community Public School. (Mah Jongg is "a game that originated in China, migrated west, and was popularized with North American Jewish women during the 1920s.")

It's that time of week again: every seven days or so, we're going live with a new Toronto style-maker in a new series on the future (or lack thereof?) of fashion in our city. This time, we've got Aileen Telesforo, a lifelong local who grew up in Scarborough and dreams of San Francisco. (What, not New York?)

On Tuesday, Torontoist was invited to the Harbour Gallery in Mississauga for the Canadian premiere of Sir Anthony Hopkins’s original art exhibit. Everything at the show was swanky, from the gentle music to the hors d'oeuvres to the wealthy socialites. The only thing missing was the man himself. (Jenna Bryant, the gallery’s associate director, hinted that he might make an appearance in the fall or late summer, schedule permitting.)

Believe it or not, Willis Ansong was artistically inspired by Law & Order. While watching an episode in his grade eleven journalism class, he came across a character named Peter Franco—and loved the moniker so much that he co-opted it, less as an alias and more as an expression of the life that he wanted to lead. For Ansong, "Peter Franco" became representative of an idea, a lifestyle, and a means of artistic expression. "Initially, it was going to be used for any art discipline that I wanted to put out there," he says, but, "I always knew that I wanted to do something fashion-oriented." Building on this hunch, he tagged the word "sneakers" onto the title (because it "just sounds good") and this past August, he finally launched a line of t-shirts under the Peter Franco Sneakers label.

Why is the configuration of seats on the streetcar and subway the way it is? Couldn't more people be accommodated with bench seating running all along the sides?

       

How do you run a massively successful improv festival that brings together a bunch of non-local talent with a tiny budget? That's easy: improvise! "Mark Little from Picnicface is sleeping on my couch right now," laughs Julie Dumais, artistic director of the COMBUSTIONfestival, over the phone this morning. "We were able to pay everyone a small honorarium, but everyone's just kind of crashing at each other's houses."

Remember Igor Kenk? He's many things to many people. The world’s most prolific (suspected) bike thief? Check. Alleged drug trafficker? Affirmative. Raging hothead? Yup. Stellar recycler? Sure, that too. But movie star? Now there’s a new one.

May is a good month to follow European football soccer, not so good to follow the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Montgomery’s Inn is usually a quiet place. Located in the west end at Islington Avenue and Dundas Street West, the historic house and museum barely receives more than a few dozen visitors each week. While the Inn didn’t receive a Don Jail–style turnout during Doors Open, it did manage to draw in 475 guests. We went behind the scenes to better understand the process and to see how the inn’s volunteers transform into "historic interpreters."

The Worldwide Short Film Festival has two things perpetually working against it. One, any feature-length program of short films, in any context, is almost necessarily going to be a mixed bag; there will be one or two works of sustained brilliance, two or three self-satisfied efforts that try your patience despite their limited lengths, and then a handful of other interesting but mostly unremarkable entries. Two, the WSFF—this year running June 16–21—always comes at the end of Toronto's busy spring festival season, following Images (early April), Sprockets (mid-April), Toronto Jewish (late April), Hot Docs (early May), and Inside Out (mid-May); it's sometimes received as an afterthought in the scheme of things.

Throughout his fifteen-year career, Hayden has been travelling a leisurely path from gravelly grunge-folkie to a more refined folk-pop sound. It's a transition still in progress, and on The Place Where We Lived, out today on Hardwood Records, Hayden gets a little help from his friends on a fitting next chapter in his ever-expanding sad-boy saga.

On a cloudless Monday off, we sat down with Corduroy Magazine co-editor Tim Chan at the Beaver. On the Tuesday, we met with the online editor of a traditional newspaper for the usual doomsday klatsch. We showed him Corduroy: the not-it girl on the cover and the almost random array of subjects inside; the informal interviews and all-original, gorgeous photography. He looked impressed and bemused.

Hands up—how many of you read Chickadee or Owl during your childhood or purchased it for kids you knew? With features like the cartoon adventures of the Mighty Mites and the experiments of Dr. Zed (aka York Region science teacher Gordon Penrose), these magazines aimed to introduce scientific and environmental concepts to young readers.

Any assignment such as this, where the odds of an exposed nipple are a nigh certainty, immediately triggers prolonged internal strife over whether or not the article is to include, in any derivative or form, the word, “titillate.”

     

Toronto is getting the first of what are planned to be several new bicycle stations this morning, aimed at making cycling a more comfortable option for commuters. Nestled into the pedestrian underpass on York Street right by Union Station, the station provides secure, monitored storage for bicycles, as well as changing facilities, a repair stand, and a few other thoughtful amenities, like a vending machine that dispenses tubes and lights.

Each week, Torontoist examines the upcoming TV listings and makes note of programs that are entertaining, informative, and of quality. Or, alternately, none of those. The result: Televisualist.

On Friday, as part of Doors Open, the ROM hosted "The Bold Museum": an informal discussion between Kenton Vaughan (the director of The Museum, a documentary on the construction of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal) and Kelvin Browne (the author of Bold Visions: The Architecture of the Royal Ontario Museum). We had high hopes for the event, as the ROM’s transformation is beautifully explored in Browne and Vaughan’s work, but instead of sharing their knowledge, the two spent the night discussing the merits of their creations, rather than the substance of them.

It's the last day of Inside Out, but there are still a few screenings you can catch before Toronto's queer film fest closes up shop for another year. Last year's closing-night gala was XXY, an Argentinian movie from director Lucia Puenzo that told the touching story of an intersex teen named Alex who was faced with a difficult decision: to live life as a man, or a woman. This year's closing gala film is another from Puenzo, once again starring Ines Efron (XXY's Alex) as a troubled queer teen.

At 9 a.m. on Saturday—one full hour before the notorious Don Jail opened its heavy, ominous doors to the public for the first time in thirty years—hundreds of curious visitors were already camped out at the back entrance, chomping at the bit to get inside. Thanks to the gracious folks from Bridgepoint Health, the jail’s new owners and landlords, Torontoist was able to sneak in early to see what has got to be this year’s most riveting Doors Open venue.

In the heady 1920s, Ontario was a dry province. After the war, the Ontario Temperance Act, which originally prohibited public consumption and sale of alcohol as a wartime measure, had been strengthened to close a variety of loopholes to become outright prohibition. It was, of course, a widely flouted law that gave rise to an underground economy of thriving bootleggers who supplied beer and whisky to blind pigs and speakeasies—as well as to Americans suffering through the decade-long thirst of the Volstead Act south of the border. Rocco Perri, an Italian immigrant to Hamilton, was one of many once-small-time crooks who were emboldened and enriched by the smuggling trade.

It's the penultimate day at Inside Out, so this is one of your last chances to catch this year's crop of queer cinema. One of the highlights of the day is the Queer Youth Digital Video Project, a program Inside Out has been running for the past eleven years, which showcases the work of seven different queer youths, each of whom has been given the opportunity to produce a short film on a shoestring budget.

       

There was a movie that played at Hot Docs called Reporter. It was about Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times columnist who globetrots to the sites of the world's worst humanitarian disasters in an effort to provide original reporting that will draw attention to crises of which very few people are aware. Most interestingly, Kristof stays up to date on all the latest psychology literature on the subject of compassion; he is obsessed with crafting stories that will move his readers to action. Anyone can write something that will prompt people to respond "oh, that's a shame" before moving on; it takes a special talent to rouse a readership to demand change or intervention or support. What has been concluded from various experiments is that humans' innate capacity for sympathy is extremely limited: we are more likely to be affected by the suffering of an individual than that of a group. Kristof therefore tends to focus on very particular tales of one person's exceptional affliction.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

It’s Terminator Salvation week! This year’s franchise reboot that we were most looking forward to (we’ve always just liked Terminator more than Star Trek), though when we say “looking forward to” we mean “trepidatious about any new film directed by that glossy hack, McG.” (Seriously—who calls themselves “McG”? And then expects people to call him that even when they know him personally, as heard in that famous Christian Bale tape?)

Doors Open is the most rare of Toronto events: widely anticipated, universally loved, well attended, and free. Every year, tens of thousands of locals and tourists (and more than a few Torontoist Flickr Poolers) lace up their walking shoes and descend on the participating sites, learning about architecture and history while exploring rarely seen parts of the city. And with 175 buildings on the slate this year, there's lots for everyone to enjoy. But it's impossible to look at the full list of venues and not wonder about the buildings that don't appear. Maybe they've never taken part or maybe they're simply taking this weekend off. Either way, here are a few of the sites we'll miss this year.

For a lot of queer cinephiles, Milk (not that cowboy thing) was the real breakout gay movie of the new millennium. Here, finally, was a story about an out gay man whose homosexuality wasn't depicted as some tragic problem, but rather as a completely normal part of his life. More than that, it helped re-affirm the legacy of one of the great heroes of the gay-rights movement, one of the first openly gay elected official in the United States, and a man who helped pioneer the idea that the most important political action any gay person can take is to come out of the closet. Sean Penn's brilliant performance matched with James Franco's smoldering mustache certainly didn't hurt matters either. And so, Inside Out's decision to screen Academy Award–winning 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk is a very smart piece of programming.

In its cover story this past Sunday, the Toronto Sun took a hammer to City Hall's transportation plan, slamming it for waging a "war on cars" and for having an "anti-car strategy" that leaves the issue of traffic congestion by the wayside. Prioritizing public transit, cycling, and pedestrians ahead of autos, the Sun claimed, is leading to serious economic and social consequences for both drivers and Toronto as a whole. Has City Hall taken a wrong turn? Should the municipal government make the expansion of automobile infrastructure a priority?

Ever since the Art Gallery of Ontario reopened its doors in November, its free Wednesday nights have been a big hit. The cultural access initiative has been a popular smash (gallery users line up in droves for the evening and crowd the museum’s spaces with a palpable enthusiasm) and a media slam-dunk (Toronto’s other big renovated museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, did away with their free Fridays upon reopening and came off more elitist as a result).

Many of the world's greatest discoveries were made serendipitously. From Post-its and silly putty, to microwaves and penicillin, lots of good things happen by mistake. When Brian Joseph Davis, while browsing the web at the Blocks office, misread the name "Alvin Lucier" as "Alvin Lucifer," he asked his colleague Steve Kado how he might put to use his misinterpretation. And in the world of grant money and experimental everything, a tiny misread can mean a whole new method. So begat "Alvin Lucifer."

       

Misinformation travels mighty fast these days. So when major news organizations around the city reported earlier today that there was word of one—or several—people with a gun in the Bickford Centre, a continuing education school on Bloor at Christie, and that police had swarmed the area, it was hard to separate what was really going on from what was alleged to be happening behind the building's walls.

Today's mini-celebration at the corner of Queen Street East and Lee Avenue was a historical event three years in the making. In early 2006, the Beaches BIA proposed the idea of branded street signs. Plans for new street signs citywide were put on hold while the city tried to secure a contract for street furniture, and they remained on hold until late 2008. Meanwhile, area residents were asked to vote on what name would appear on the signs: the Beaches or the Beach. Out of 2,113 eligible votes, 58% preferred "the Beach"—a somewhat surprising choice, since the neighbourhood seems to be most popularly known as "the Beaches." Glenn Cochrane, journalist and author of The Beach, spoke to this in his brief speech to the crowd today. "A few years ago, there would have been an uprising over the choosing of this new name over the other name, which I'm not going to mention because I don't want to start anything."

Music and movies and theatre—oh, my! Thanks to local indie music impresario Eric Warner, you'll be getting all three of these forms of entertainment in one tidy festival package. With events kicking off today and continuing through to Sunday, Warner has jam-packed Over the Top's schedule with all sorts of tricks and treats for the whole family to enjoy.

There were no direct comparisons drawn between architects John M. Lyle and Jack Diamond by Ryerson architecture prof Marco Polo, who moderated last evening's readings and discussion at Harbourfront Centre. As part of the fifth annual Festival of Architecture and Design, Diamond read two chapters from Insight and On Site: The Architecture of Diamond and Schmitt (Douglas & McIntyre, 2008)—written with his long-time design partner, Donald Schmitt, and Don Gillmor. And Lyle was discussed by Glenn McArthur, whose recent A Progressive Traditionalist (Coach House Books, 2009) charts Lyle's life and work as one of the twentieth century's foremost architects.

Torontoist took a day off from Inside Out, but we now resume our daily coverage of the queer film fest.

For a decade, Doors Open has provided Torontonians with the opportunity to discover and explore some of the unique architectural gems that this city has to offer, at no charge. Since its inception in 2000, it has grown every year, both in attendance and in the number of buildings to visit, and this year's edition—taking place on Saturday (May 23) and Sunday (May 24)—will feature free access to nearly 175 buildings of architectural or historic significance, many of which are usually closed to the public. This year's theme is "Lit City: Toronto Stories, Toronto Settings," the grand finale of a three-month festival that honours literary writers who find inspiration in Toronto and use the city as a setting in their work. Libraries and buildings of literary significance have always been a staple within the official Doors Open program, but this year nearly a quarter of the venues have a prominent literary connection.

U of T's flat fee proposal for Arts and Science students—the one that would force new students to pay for 5.0 courses, regardless of how many courses, from 3.0–6.0, they actually took—has barreled over the final administrative hurdle at the University of Toronto, and was passed this evening by the university's Governing Council at a meeting held at the school's Mississauga campus.

Crows Theatre has Toronto under siege. First, there was the company's much-ballyhooed remount of I, Claudia, which has just been extended due to popular demand. Then, last weekend, the company hosted The Directors' Showcase & Exchange, which involved a fascinating panel discussion by some of the country's most prolific and accomplished theatre directors. It also featured the performance of several plays, including a reading of Caryl Churchill's controversial new work Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza. Written in January as a response to the recent attack on Gaza, the ten-minute piece has been highly acclaimed by some, and dismissed as anti-Semitic propaganda by others, including B'nai Brith, which tried to protest the work's being performed in Toronto. We found the piece powerful, tragic, and ultimately very human, less interested in pointing fingers than drawing attention to the complexity and the sadness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Welcome back to the future...of fashion. It's our current series on style in our city, in which we corner up-and-comers in the clotheshorse race to talk about our fashion-capital dreams—near, far, or never happening?

Queen West. 9:30 p.m. last Wednesday. A trio of teenage girls are crossing Peter Street.

If an artist trading card event is held, and no one shows up or trades anything, does it make for a good night? Originating in Switzerland in the late 1990s, the idea of artist trading cards is simple: make an artwork the size of a hockey card, and swap it with others for their creations. There are few stipulations—such as the standard size, and no money being involved in the trade—but the concept seems to be centred around the value of the experience, of artists meeting, sharing, and mingling. Toronto’s monthly incarnation of this event may be missing this key element.

Can a commercial printer invoke religion in order to refuse services?

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No statistics have ever been made public about the number of deaths and injuries caused by the swift, sudden attack of colossal bellboys bearing large stacks of classifieds that descended upon downtown Toronto during the spring of 1936. Urban legend has it that the attack was an extreme ploy launched by the Toronto Star in its circulation war with the number two paper in the city, the Telegram, that was intended to bury "the old lady of Melinda Street" in a mound of newsprint.

The Dufferin Jog—that railway underpass at Dufferin and Queen—has long been considered a public art icon in Toronto. It's just that the public art it's displayed has been graffiti and paste-ups rather than municipally chosen sculpture.

Well, here's one of those generic thrillers they shoot here on a regular basis. 16 Blocks probably looked good on paper, but it's mostly a good example of a two-star flick coming to town to save a few bucks. To its credit, they shot enough footage in New York—and used Toronto sparingly enough—that you almost wouldn't recognize our fair streets. Almost.

It may only be Tuesday, but for Inside Out, it's Hump Day; we are right in the middle of the 19th annual queer film fest.

At long last, four of the eight food vendors who survived the City's rigorous multi-stage selection process for the pilot "Toronto a la Cart" project took to the streets on Victoria Day. Torontoist had the pleasure of visiting with all four proprietors who graciously spoke with us about their new businesses—even while in the middle of frantically setting up their stations for the very first time.

Sometimes, thematic trends at Inside Out are unexpected. Last year, gay surfers were all the rage. This year, gay parenting seems to be all the rage. But AIDS stories always have been a mainstay at the fest, and probably always will be.

It's Day 4 of Inside Out and of Torontoist's coverage of the the annual queer film festival. There's a bunch of films on today, including Make the Yuletide Gay, starring Degrassi alum and fab cover boy Adamo Ruggiero. Torontoist caught Israeli sizzler Antarctica, which is sort of a queered-up feature-length version of Metropia, in Hebrew. There's sexy boys (and even the odd lesbian) to look at, but the plot is both meandering and banal, and the fleshy eyefuls aren't enough to keep the yawns at bay. Much more worthy of your attention is Drool, a 2008 American film starring Mulholland Drive's absolutely gorgeous Laura Harring.

Four years of watching the American version of So You Think You Can Dance whetted Canadian appetites for a homegrown version of the show, so when So You Think You Can Dance Canada premiered last year, its massive ratings and eventual status as #1 new show in Canada of the 2008 television season should not have come as a surprise. The quality of the show, however, did surprise; fans of the American dance reality show were impressed as the show's dancers (including eventual winner Nico Archambault) and choreographers provided routines of extremely high quality.

Dateline: Toronto, December 28, 1928, the corner of Richmond and Victoria streets. Over a thousand people gathered at the Tivoli theatre to attend a midnight screening of the first all-talking feature to play in Toronto, The Terror. The crowd was treated to a tale of an organ-tinkling homicidal maniac preying upon guests at an English hotel, with sound provided via the Vitaphone system of giant record-like discs synchronized with the film.

It's Day 3 of the Inside Out festival, and there's a whole bucket load of queer films to catch.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

This week most of the cinematic excitement is kept for Cannes—after all, those lucky sods have already been able to see Pixar’s latest film, Up!—so there’s not very much that is likely to excite us otherwise (apart from the Inside Out festival, of course, as covered by our own Johnnie Walker).

Word association time! When you think of the Cannes Film Festival, happening now on the sunny French Riviera, which of the following pops into your head: a) prestigious awards like the coveted Palme d'Or, b) celebrity-studded red-carpet events, or c) insightful online comments like "go suck a dick" and "LMFAO"? Granted, options "a" and "b" have the edge, but thanks to the National Film Board of Canada, YouTube flamers can have their piece of the film-fest pie too.

Although it technically opened last night, today is the day that the Inside Out festival really gets under way.

Toronto comedian and activist Derek Forgie got inspired to start Heterosexuals for Same-Sex Equality (HSSE)—a gay-rights group founded by people who identify as straight—from the unlikliest source: 100 Huntley Street. On a particular episode in 2003, the hosts and guests were denouncing gay marriage seemingly on the behalf of all straight married couples in Canada. "I didn’t feel this was a fair representation of my country," Forgie says, "and I vowed to prove it in numbers."

Between the 1950s and 1990s, the urbanized area of the GTA more than tripled from 193 square miles to 656. Yet, in the same time period, the population only doubled. Toronto became, former mayor John Sewell writes, "a city that resembled Vienna surrounded by Los Angeles." In The Shape of the Suburbs (UTP, 2009), Sewell sets out to investigate how low-density sprawl became the predominant urban form in the suburbs beyond Metro Toronto, what is now the 905 region.

"Honey, any woman who counts on her face is a fool." So says the mother figure of Kiki in Zadie Smith's fierce, tender 2007 novel, On Beauty. Kiki's right; better to count on the body.

Are you a gay, or a gay-at-heart, despairing over the heteronormativity of the multiplex? You've watched your Milk DVD so many times you've developed lactose intolerance, but you can't quite bring yourself to go see that movie with Robert Pattison in a false mustache? Lucky for you, the Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film and Video Festival is here to bring you the gayest movies this side of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Now 19 years old, the queer film fest opens tonight with the gala screening of 2008 Swedish film Patrik, Age 1.5. In it, a bourgie gay couple moves to the burbs of Stockholm with a yen to acquire the trappings of middle-class success: a picket fence, a flower garden, and a baby. But when the adoption agency makes the pretty egregious error of inserting a decimal where it doesn't belong, Göran and Sven wind up with a 15-year-old badass instead of a 1.5-year-old baby. Patrik is a homophobe, and potentially a criminal, and clashes heavily with hot-tempered Sven. But, thanks to the Power of Love, everyone learns to get over their prejudices and yadda, yadda, yadda, you can see where this is going. Essentially Breakfast with Scot, sans dimples, Patrik, Age 1.5 isn't exactly a life-changing film, but it's totally cute, likable, and full of endearing performances, and some genuinely funny moments.

The sun is shining, the blossoms are out, and snow is all but a distant memory. It's officially day-trip season! And while slot-junkies and wax museum enthusiasts may find themselves drawn to the siren song of Niagara Falls, we suggest you might also consider its more demure cousin, Niagara-on-the-Lake, home of the well-loved Shaw Festival. While slightly beyond the reaches of the TTC, many Torontonians rent a car or hop a bus to this quaint little burg to catch a play, have some tea, and maybe visit that jam store.

If it works for shopping, it works for us: this is a pop-up series on the future (or is there a future?) of fashion in our city. Every Wednesday from now until we get bored, we'll log time with a new face on the local style scene: someone who's fresh, and not Joe, because there's got to be more to Toronto than the Mimrans.

The Ontario College of Art & Design’s tag line confidently declares, “Imagination is Everything.” This may even be true. Within the university’s walls, it may be the most important thing to have in great supply. On the outside, not only is it not everything, it’s simply not enough. At school, the goal is to make art. When the end goal shifts to making a living by making art, the process and the path become significantly more complex.

The TTC's newfound propensity for remodelling isn't limited to just their stations, shelters, routes, and vehicles: the transit organization is now in the midst of exploring how to open up the Metropass to local artists and arts institutions in time for the summer.

This music stuff sure can be serious business sometimes. When Bon Iver's Justin Vernon secluded himself in an isolated cabin for a winter to deal with the break-up of a band and a relationship, he produced one of the most (rightfully) lauded releases of 2008. For Emma, Forever Ago was an aching, almost desperate catharsis—a much-needed exorcism of love and self lost. With her group The Weather Station, Tamara Lindeman makes a similar attempt at hiding and healing on the new debut full-length, The Line.

     

Bloorcourt residents, rejoice! Dufferin Station will be the next station to receive upgrades. Plans to revitalize Dufferin Station were presented yesterday at Dovercourt Baptist Church, where TTC representatives were on hand to discuss the plans and field questions from the community. The forty-one million dollar project, led by Project Manager David Grigg, is slated to start later this year, and will take two and a half years to complete.

This morning, at a press conference at the RBC branch at King Street West and Spadina Avenue, Heritage Toronto announced the release of its first iTour: a historic tour of Spadina Avenue. Funded in part by RBC, the iTours program provides free downloadable audio and visual walking tours that are designed to help people explore Toronto’s rich history in areas that are often too difficult to navigate with a tour group.

Would you trust a doctor whose name carries an element of danger with your next bridge work? Especially when they advertise a half-price offer? At least Dr. Risk tried to make his patients as comfortable as possible by focusing on small details and a comforting environment. In an ad that ran in The Toronto Star throughout most of 1899, the good doctor claims that:

All signs pointed to ice cream. But for some strange reason, our invitation to the Barenaked Ladies' mysterious press conference (held at the top of the CN Tower, we might add) left us in the dark. The banner-dragging bird, the sky-blue background peppered with white clouds and bubble letters—everything about the e-vite seemed eerily familiar. But it took Ed Robertson's unveiling of a giant tub of Ben & Jerry's ice cream—called "If I had 1,000,000 Flavours"—for us to finally clue in.

Book readings are, in a certain way, transgressive. In bridging the usual remove between author and audience, and in reinstantiating the written word as performance, they breach the boundaries which usually govern our experience as readers. Book readings rely on that transgressive quality for their success: a good book reading is one in which listeners feel genuinely connected to the author they are hearing, and in which the performance conveys something more than whatever is contained in the written work alone.

             

At the Royal Ontario Museum, the portraits of homeless or formerly-homeless people holding signs with self-scrawled messages on them start outside the main entrance on Bloor Street, one large-scale man and large-scale woman standing back-to-back, dwarfed by the Crystal. They continue life-sized just inside, one young woman hiding above the main entrance, an older man further inside off to the right. In total, there are eighteen portraits wheatpasted at spots on the Crystal's bare walls, part of a series called "The Unaddressed" created by Dan Bergeron—fauxreel. Like his spectacular Regent Park portraits from last year, Bergeron's focus in "The Unaddressed" is on uprooted subjects, which is why it makes sense that the portraits themselves refuse to rest in only one location: all eighteen portraits, in addition to being safely contained on the ROM's property and walls, are also mirrored on walls across Toronto.

The Tragically Hip really have nothing left to prove. They've peaked commercially; arguably, they've peaked artistically (it's hard to see Day for Night ever being surpassed). But they're not standing still: their latest album, We Are The Same, is a gem, and they’ve recently embarked on a five-month-long North American trek that's already got fans salivating.

This weekend, the Toronto Reference Library’s bespectacled old ladies of Saturday morning cartoon fame were replaced with another near-sighted crowd. Trading cat’s eye glasses for black horn rims, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival crowd, several thousand strong, dominated at least the first two floors of the behemoth library.

OCAD keeps pumping out interesting art contests. Back in March, the school ran its nifty bike stand design competition, and just last week, it announced the winners of its collaborative industrial design competition with 3M Canada. For the latter, third-year Industrial Design students were asked to create new Scotch tape and Post-it Note Pop-up dispensers.

Last night, several thousand Tamil protesters took over the Gardiner Expressway for several hours, the latest and most remarkable protest in a series of attention-grabbing moves by the Tamil community that included shutting down University Avenue for several days two weeks ago. The protesters' methods have, without a doubt, drawn an enormous amount of vitriol, but also a large amount of attention for their cause. Do the ends justify the means? And are the ends even justified at all?

Not long before dusk on Sunday night, several thousand Tamil protesters flowed onto the Gardiner Expressway, shutting it down shortly thereafter, to protest the ongoing violence in Sri Lanka. The Gardiner would remain shut down until about midnight, when the protest migrated off the roads and on to Queen's Park.

Did you know that boner means more than one thing? It's true! According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it can be both "a mistake, a blunder" or—the usage that has become far more common over the past few decades—"An erection of the penis" (or, figuratively, "a strong attraction to or state of excitement about something specified"). Did you also know that the latter half of Adam Giambrone's last name sounds sorta like "boner"? And that he made a pretty big mistake recently? And that, because the Sun has a boner for embarrassingly bad headlines, that the photo above is of the actual cover of today's paper?

Union Station hadn't seen a crowd that size since the Prince of Wales had visited. A throng of more than five thousand men, women, and children crammed into every corner of the concourse on November 24, 1934. Waving red banners, they eagerly awaited of the arrival of the 9:30 p.m. train from Kingston carrying Tim Buck, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC), who'd been released from the penitentiary mere hours earlier. Prison officials, hoping to avoid just such an uproarious welcome, had attempted to keep his release quiet. Buck didn't even know he was going home until an hour before boarding the train. But at the train station, Buck eluded his escort, who'd been under orders to keep Buck in the car until right before the train's departure, and managed a brief phone call to Toronto. His comrades alerted the press and hastily distributed leaflets among the public. As The Star reported, news of Buck's impending arrival "swept working class districts like wildfire," and the jubilant turnout at Union Station defied all expectations.

by TEETH

Word that there's an interesting show at a suburban gallery can often, sadly, inspire a feeling of dread in the South-of-Bloor art crowd.

Seems like the only release anyone cares about this week is the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot, a release notable simply for the number of people we know that have come out of the woodwork as massive Trekkies—possibly feeling that now it's safe, as with a hot young cast (including the brilliant Simon Pegg, pictured above playing Scotty as a tramp) it may now finally be "cool" to like Star Trek. Or so they can be prepared to yell about how terrible the new film is for featuring a hot young cast. One or the other, probably.

"He's the bad boy of the Canadian art scene," said Nino Ricci, raising an (ample) eyebrow at Iain Baxter&. As the UTAC crowd finished chewing on Ricci's words of introduction, the man with the ampersand-emblazoned cap took his place at the podium.

Each year, the executive committee of the Pug Awards looks to expand the scope of their initiative to further influence design in Toronto. Last week marked the introduction of PIMBY (Pug In My Backyard), an interactive and ever-evolving blueprint for growth that aims to cover as much of the city as possible. The intention of this project is to provide the general public, landowners, and city decision-makers with a framework for planning future development in the region, while promoting an ongoing dialogue about the importance of good design.

Lobster telephone? Check. Table with bird’s legs? Check. Lips sofa? Check. No—not an inventory of items from the Michael Jackson Estate Auction; these are just some pieces of artwork you can see at "Surreal Things", the latest exhibit to open at the AGO! Finally, art you’re meant to not understand!

The question too often asked of fashion is this: "But is it art?" If fashion can't be art because it's too obviously commercial—made to sell and mass consumable—then, fine, but most of art isn't art either.

We're not sure most would consider it a sensible way to spend your last dollars. But it's certainly a way to get creative with your cash.

Eye is completely, almost annoyingly, obsessed with charts, diagrams, and other math-based minutiae. It's like their thing now! (Well, that, and articles written by Kate Carraway about her personal life.) But that doesn't mean we weren't delighted to open up the paper this morning and see, on the very tip-top of page five, beside their masthead and above their letters, that they'd devised formulas for determining "which websites are essential feeds and which ones are only recycling what you've already read on Yahoo News." It appears that, in Eye's eyes, we are the former! We're "Gawker - Fark - (US Weekly/Stillepost)"; "all the insidery snark that fits." And here we are, writing about it in an insidery and snarky fashion!

The photographs of Adam Krawesky hang from trees, lamp posts, railings, and street signs like prizes in a treasure hunt. Part of the photographic explosion that is CONTACT, Krawesky has installed his work in tiny plastic slide-viewers across the city that he has spent years documenting. There are maps provided to guide you to their locations, leading to a thrill of reward in finding the innocuous and ridiculously humble artworks suspended in places that are so common you barely see them anymore.

We've been at City Hall a fair number of times, but it wasn't until this week that we had the rather delightful experience of being met by a beatboxing duo at the front door or rocking out to OutKast in the Council Chamber. The occasion for this upending of formality? A town hall meeting, hosted by a network of organizations known collectively as the Beautiful City Alliance. The coalition is working to convince city council to direct revenue from the billboard tax it plans to introduce this summer towards art in the public sphere and is stepping up its campaign efforts as the vote on that tax approaches. The town hall, attended by some two or three hundred artists and activists, as well as several city councillors, was part informational meeting and part pep rally, with a bit of spontaneous art production thrown in for good measure.