Culture: August 2009 Archives

       

After thirty years, one of Toronto's most legendary independent bookstores will close its doors for good in only a few more hours. At Pages Books and Magazines, customers are scouring the almost bare shelves looking for an excuse to make one more purchase.

James Redekop loves to cycle. Between 2004 and 2009, he estimates that he's cycled for six hundred and fifty hours and covered more than eight thousand kilometres. Using the GPS data from these rides, Redekop created the Etch A Sketch–style animation above (the red lines represent five minutes of his cycling and the red arrows indicate rides outside of Toronto). But turning his riding into a cool animation wasn't always his intention.

After a building boom altered the Toronto skyline over the course of the late 1920s, construction ground to a standstill during the Great Depression. Annual spending on construction, which had peaked at $51.5 million in 1928, dropped to a mere $4.5 million in 1933. The few projects that weren't cancelled or disrupted were initiated mostly by banks and insurance companies seeking symbolic structures that emphasized institutional stability through turbulent times and faith in an economic turnaround.

If, like us, you're mourning the passing of this summer's fantastic indie theatre festivals (Toronto Fringe, SummerWorks) and the novel, experimental shows that go with them, you'll be pleased to know No More Masterpieces theatre company is holding a very Fringe-esque production called The Girl Who Married a Ghost at the InterAccess Gallery at Queen and Ossington. This complex play bravely steps into the landmine of North American Aboriginal history and subtly comments on the work of prominent artists of various disciplines (photography, theatre, visual art) who did the same in their day.

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

Last week one of our regular commenters, Derek Jensen, said he'd be going to see District 9 again rather than anything new. Perhaps this week we can convince him (and you?) to go and see In the Loop, because it's still playing and still fantastic. It's at the Cumberland (159 Cumberland Street) daily at 1:30 p.m., 4:30 p.m., 7:15 p.m. and 9:50 p.m. The last film we trailed repeatedly was probably the final cut of Blade Runner, so that should let you know how much we like In the Loop.

The recession may be officially over for the moment, but it is still unclear what the residual effects will be on the everyday life of Canadians. That’s why for Dr. Mike Wood Daly, executive director of Ground Level Youth Ventures, there was much to celebrate as the Ground Level Café opened its doors to the public this Monday, after delays due in part to the recently ended strike.

Vernon Wells is struggling. Everyone knows it, not least of all Wells himself. His body language is practically crying out, “Yeah, I know I’ve been sucking all year; I really am trying, though!” His face is screwed into an almost permanent grimace of frustration. Predictably, he’s begun squeezing at the plate—yet by trying so hard to bust out of his season-long slump he’s actually made it worse.

Since she no longer returns our phone calls, Torontoist decided to visit Ossington in person. Our mission: to chronicle what happens when the booze isn't flowing, the restaurant staff have yet to wake, and the denim and flannel are being worn by actual construction workers. Drama! Passion! And the distant sound of an old Portuguese man watering his sidewalk!

We sort of agree with Susan G. Cole. There, we said it.

When you step into the Museum of Inuit Art, which is hidden at the back of the Queen's Quay Terminal on the Harbourfront, you'll probably recognize the first picture you see. This is the "Enchanted Owl." According to the museum's curator, Ingo Hessel, it is "a true icon...probably the most famous image in Inuit art if not Canadian art."

We can all relax. Christmas-themed zombies haven’t risen up to become "exquisite" Mississauga dentists; as it turns out, the amateur colouring job above is actually City Living Magazine’s signature style. We had never heard of City Living before, but it turns out that it might just be Toronto’s best publication.

Sure, Toronto, you heart your bikes, but there are other cities just as cycle-centric as you are. Tonight at CineCycle, the Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation presents a screening of VEER, a critically approved documentary that examines Portland’s (at times) wacky bike culture and shows that for many, two wheels aren’t just a choice of transportation; they’re a way of life.

Reader Ian Simpson sent us this photograph, yesterday, of a newly installed billboard for Bud Light at John and Adelaide streets. It reads: "Torontonians aren't cold. Not in August, anyway." The ad, of course, is a direct response to a Coors Light billboard in British Columbia, which announced that that company's beer was "COLDER THAN PEOPLE FROM TORONTO."

When you cycle from the lake up to Old Mill subway on the Humber trail, there is this interesting piece of architecture. It’s a disk on posts. Somewhat intended, it seems, as a shelter. It looks like a space ship landing pod, almost. What is it really for?

       

Torontoist stopped by the Gladstone Hotel last Tuesday for the launch party of two exciting new documentaries airing on the CBC starting this Thursday night. This Beat Goes On and Rise Up chronicle Canadian music's growth in the '70s and '80s, respectively. The films were made by the two key players responsible for 2006's Shakin' All Over, which dealt with the '60s: director Gary McGroarty and writer/researcher Nicholas Jennings. Jian Ghomeshi narrates. Viewers are treated to an impressive collection of clips: concert footage, television appearances, and music videos, as well as interviews with classic and contemporary Canadian pop stars (think rock royalty like Burton Cummings sandwiched between Hot Hot Heat and k-os).

Dario Saleki isn’t happy. In late May, he applied for a Boulevard Café Licence (the city’s fancy term for a patio permit) for his new Italian restaurant, La Veranda Osteria, which is located on the northwest corner of Bloor Street West and Royal York Road. It's August now, and he’s still waiting for his permit. In the meantime, his empty patio is costing him business. Saleki blames the strike (which has created some licensing problems for restaurateurs) and the city’s bureaucracy for his woes, and in a pseudo–grass roots effort has put up several colourful signs in his windows urging Torontonians to complain to the city on his behalf.

What started as a way to compile the prolific creative output of a west-end group of musician friends turned into not only a scene-defining snapshot, but a charitable project that has so far yielded more than eleven thousand dollars for the Toronto Daily Bread Food Bank. Friends in Bellwoods II, out today on Out of This Spark, is a second showcase of what Ohbijou sisters Casey and Jennifer Mecija's house can produce for a good cause.

Once upon a time, the managers of Eaton’s men’s clothing department were preparing a hiring call for designers for their 1971 fall line. Just as they were about to post the position, an eccentric designer approached the retailer with a portfolio of exciting ideas. The man called himself Adam, and rumour had it that he had been a rising star in the fashion biz until overwork and several personal crises induced a nervous breakdown. He now believed he was the Biblical figure whose name he had assumed and claimed many of his ideas were simple suggestions delivered nightly by a higher figure. Most of the time these ideas had worked, but even “the first man of fashion” had his off days, such as the time he tried to sell an American department store chain on a line of fig leaves dyed to match the colours of fall.

Travelling down Dovercourt Road near Dundas Street West in the fading sunshine of last Friday evening, a familiar shape caught Torontoist’s eye. In the middle of a front lawn stood four CN Towers. While the material was different (wood, not concrete), the context was different (residential, not civic), and the scale was certainly different (the tallest a litle more than six feet in height, not 1,815.4 feet), the form was unmistakable.

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.

Anyone crossing Adelaide Street between Jarvis and University on the morning of March 31, 1972, would have noticed a slow procession moving in the opposite direction of the street’s normal traffic flow. A crowd had gathered to follow the move of Campbell House, a century-and-a-half-old building that was spared a date with a wrecking ball that other historic buildings in Toronto had experienced during the preceding decade. The relocation was due, as Joni Mitchell might have said, to one company’s desire to pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

Sometimes you just gotta sit down over burgers and fries with people who don't seem to even really get how talented they are. We did this recently with Katie Crown, Sara Hennessy, Nick Flanagan, and Chris Locke at the Rivoli, home of the weekly comedy series Laugh Sabbath, in which the four are regulars; we were also joined by Laugh Sabbath's producer and publicist, Leslie Aimée Gottlieb. The series celebrates its three-year anniversary this Sunday night with a special show hosted by The Flirts and featuring musical performances by Greg Alsop and Dave Monks of Tokyo Police Club.

Reading about world economies is important, but it can also be dry and boring, which is why the latest Big Mac Index, published by the Economist, caught our eye. The annual Index, which measures "purchasing power parities" around the world, has been around since 1986, but UBS Wealth Management Research has helped shape the more current incarnations. Basically, it estimates how much time an average wage earner must work to make enough money to afford a Big Mac, taking into account local currencies and wages and weighted across fourteen professions and seventy-three international cities.

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

Officially, there is one film you need to see this week. It is In the Loop. Now, we know you've heard about nothing but Inglourious Basterds for weeks—if not months—by now, and I admit it's easy to be swayed by such an obvious option: a clever, entirely fictional take on a defining moment in history, from a director well known for his skill with dialogue.

Ask Torontoist features questions posed by you and answered by our elite team of specially trained investigative experts (also known as our staff). Send your questions to ask@torontoist.com.

Pearl Jam returns to Toronto tonight for the first time since 2006, and to say it's a hot ticket would be severely understating things: the show was sold out as soon as it went on sale, and this morning StubHub is fetching as much as $280 for lawn tickets. Toronto loves its Pearl Jam—and the feeling, one suspects, is mutual. The band used the city as base camp for a third of its 2005 trek across Canada and launched its 2006 world tour with back-to-back nights at Air Canada Centre. Eddie Vedder, meanwhile, played a pair of white-hot solo shows at Massey Hall last summer. It's no surprise, then, that Pearl Jam picked Toronto as one of its few 2009 destinations.

Relatively speaking, Toronto is not a city known for successful urban (read: hip-hop) acts. Nonetheless, in the heart of the city there’s a space open to those willing to take a chance. The Remix Project is open to youth aged 16–22 who are interested in pursuing careers in urban arts. About more than becoming the next big rapper, Remix uses hip-hop as an engagement tool and gives aspiring artists and entrepreneurs practical tools to turn dreams into goals, and goals into reality.

A big city like Toronto can seem like the centre of everything. From the streets of a place as compelling and complex as this, it’s all too easy only to look inward at the interwoven fabric of city life and forget to look outward—or more specifically upward—at the impossible magnitude that exists above us.

       

If you're hankering after some urban greenery but you're tired of High Park, then you could do worse than a visit to the Humber Arboretum. It's free, it's quiet, and best of all, there are surprisingly few wasps.

This may sound crazy, but pasting thousands of ads for bargain divorce services all over hydro poles and the backs of road signs is illegal. You'd never know it, because these cheap-looking stickers seem to propagate throughout the GTA like wet Mogwais. Even worse, the fact that their contact information and provenance are so clearly displayed shows how incompetent the city is at enforcing its postering bylaw—it's not like we can't tell who's responsible, after all.

Starting soon—Monday, in fact—you'll be able to take your bike on the VIA train between Toronto and Montreal without boxing it up: the Bike Train has just announced a new twice-daily service to Montreal starting August 24 and continuing six days per week through October 8. For seven weeks stretching into the autumn, one morning and one evening train running in each direction will include space in the baggage car for six bikes.

Sure, Torontonians are notorious for bitching about our city, but we bitch because we love! Complaining about garbage pickup or graffiti is a whole process, however, and sometimes it's just not worth the time to bother hunting down the appropriate department by email or navigating a phone tree.

Making an ATM withdrawal is a mundane task, and one that doesn't differ much across the different banks or types of machines, but the Edward Day Gallery is aiming to shake up the experience by injecting a little art into every transaction.

We're cheating this week; The Wooden Sky's sophomore effort, If I Don't Come Home You'll Know I'm Gone, isn't out via Black Box Recordings until August 25, but we're excited about it, and there are lots of great upcoming releases to plan around. Throughout the vagrant Montreal-to-Toronto creation of this dense record of guilt, innocence, and wonders both abstract (God) and tangible (life), The Wooden Sky have bloomed into a resolute musical force who stand poised to carry the weight of much indie-rock respect.

It was ninety years ago today that east-enders were first able to enjoy fine entertainment at the theatre that underwent numerous name changes between its opening as Allen’s Danforth and its current incarnation as the Music Hall. Growth in what was considered suburbia in 1919, along with the ease of reaching Danforth Avenue via the recently opened Prince Edward Viaduct, persuaded the Allen’s cinema chain to build a high-quality theatre in the neighbourhood.

Every night, in the darkness above Toronto, satellites you’re not supposed to know about can be seen racing across the sky. The sun reflecting off of their antennae and mirrored surfaces reveals their existence to anyone who knows where to look. One man who knows exactly where to look is Ted Molczan, who, from the vantage point of his downtown apartment, has become one of the world’s foremost trackers of secret satellites. He has been on the cover of the New York Times, featured in Wired magazine, and is called upon by the media and government agencies to consult on matters of what’s in the sky.

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.

It may be at the other end of the budget spectrum as compared to our very first Sound Tracks–featured video, but the first video from Toronto's Diamond Rings is possibly even more intriguing. Just watch. Over and over and over.

Torontonians seeking fresh seasonal fruit in the city tend to head to neighbourhood farmers markets or pray that their local grocery store has something other than produce shipped in from faraway locales. But lurking within parks and residential neighbourhood is a wide variety of edible treats growing wild or being nurtured by community activists and green thumbs. For the second year, urban forest advocates LEAF organized an edible tree tour on Saturday to show off the city’s harvest.

Walking into Actionable, one of the first things you’ll notice is the Warner Brothers logo projected onto a screen…only the letters are reversed, spelling out the initials of performer Bob Wiseman. The backward order also represents the backward, frustrating ways of the music industry that Wiseman has experienced over the course of his career. Over the course of the stories and songs that make up Actionable, you’ll learn that lawyers from the major labels aren’t amused when you jokingly decide to pick up a name that a star is not using at the moment, claim relation to an industry executive, and drop the name of a major soft drink manufacturer when singing about 1970s Chilean politics. No wonder a former Rolling Stones manager once called the business “the industry of human happiness.” While often amusing, a melancholy tone underlies much of the material, especially during one song about personal identity.

It's often been suggested that the Canadian National Exhibition—since its founding in 1879 as an instructional exhibition to promote the development of agriculture, industry, and the arts—has reflected the social development of an ever-changing country. As the CNE website notes [pdf]: "Developments brought on by new technology, changing values, and even Canada’s role in international affairs, have been well represented at the CNE." Its populist entertainments have similarly evolved. In its first twenty-five years, according to historian Keith Walden in Becoming Modern in Toronto (UTP, 1997), there was competitive tension between the instructional agricultural and industrial demonstrations and the more popular entertainments of the midway—which, in less enlightened times, included carnival sideshows with freaks, fake levitators, and exotica aimed at a more adult audience. In the years that followed, there continued to be no shortage of eclectic attractions—although with a greater emphasis on family entertainment.

Montparnasse is the name of an area of Paris (Left Bank, 14th arrondissement, named after Mount Parnassus) and also the name of a certain bit of Parisian mythology (early 20th-century epicentre of artistic productivity and site of correspondingly legendary bacchanalia). Montparnasse is the play at SummerWorks that explores these intersecting worlds, examining what it might take to make your way through them in both the practical and mythological senses. Co-authored and co-performed by SummerWorks veterans Maev Beaty and Erin Shields, Montparnasse tells the story of two American ex-pats, one diving headlong into the revelry and one pursuing the loftiest of artistic aspirations, both working as nude models to make ends meet all the while.

Insanely popular Dinosaur Comics is one of Toronto's most unusual success stories. Insanely popular Twitter is one of the internet's most unusual success stories. Mash them up and you have a whole new level of meta.

If there’s one thing that Torontoist thought when we saw the trailer for District 9, it was “we can’t wait to play that video game; it looks awesome.” It wasn’t until some time later that we put together that the director, Neil Blomkamp, was indeed the director originally attached to direct the (ill-fated) Halo adaptation (and it doesn’t help that there’s a game called Section 8 due out soon, either).

On the night of the Great Lightning Storm of '09, we were tucked away in the sweltering Theatre Centre on Queen West, watching Toronto Noir and wondering if the thunder was coming from inside or out. The dramatic weather paired perfectly with these moody tales of love, jealousy, and murder that were adapted from a collection of short fiction published last year under the same name.

Normally, things like Hummers and overdeveloped triceps are indictors of a diminutive manhood, but a Parkdale resident has widened the figurative condition to include this dastardly delinquent, who allegedly has a potty predilection for apartment building lobbies.

Remember this sculpture? It disappeared from the TD Centre plaza last year. It consisted of enormous curved bronze slabs set across from one another to form a ring. There were three large, bronze chairs arranged around the outside of the ring. The title of the sculpture was The Ring. Which seems appropriate.

With the strike over, it’s finally easy to visit Centre Island once again. While the park is often associated with picnics and bike rides, in the summer it’s also home to two interactive art installations.

What happens when your poor-listener girlfriend forgets that you're backpacking around Europe for two weeks with no access to your mobile phone or the internet?

A little over two months ago, the Night at the Big House rave—which was to be held at the Old Don Jail—was cancelled at the eleventh hour. It was supposed to be the first of many functions held at the jail whose proceeds would benefit the Bridgepoint Foundation, but due to licensing issues between Bridgepoint (jail's owner) and the Ontario Realty Corporation (ORC; jail's leaseholder), the rave and all future happenings were put on hold. On Monday, Slingshot—the company hired by Bridgepoint to manage the venue space—bitterly announced no events would be forthcoming. Is anyone else somewhat relieved?

In Daniel Barrow’s Every Time I See Your Picture Cry, the overhead projector is liberated from its usual role in tossing static images onto a surface. A kaleidoscopic parade of illustrations flow across the screen, as revolving overlays keep limbs and other objects in constant motion.

       

What might become of our current streetcars when they're replaced by shiny new ones over the next few years? No one knows yet, but they might well dream of seeing out the rest of their days at the Halton County Radial Railway.

When photographic artist Leanne Eisen left the Scotiabank Theatre on Monday following a screening of Ponyo, she was surprised to find this piece of blue paper wrapped around the handlebars of her vintage bicycle. At first, she only saw the words, "Your bicycle has been ticketed because…"

Everyone has a story for that night when the lights went out.

The great August Mars hoax is an annual tradition. Come summer, inboxes around the world start to fill with the same old messages claiming that on August 27, Mars will come so close to the Earth that it will appear as large as the full moon in the night sky. This year, the hoax itself has received a lot more attention than usual, which makes the University of Toronto Libraries Department's celebration of the "closest approach of Mars in recorded history" even more embarrassing (the error was fixed this afternoon).

In our first-ever joint live chat with Torontoist partner the Globe and Mail, Donald Schmitt, of Diamond+Schmitt Architects (Museum subway station, the Four Seasons Centre, Jerusalem City Hall), fielded reader questions ranging from the hue of Museum Station to the importance of infrastructure investment. Toronto is "certainly not a pretty place," he said in response to one question, "but it has vitality."

d'bi.young's new one-woman show benu is one of the strongest pieces we've seen at this year's SummerWorks. Although this production, directed by Natasha Mytnowych, is technically a workshop presentation, and young does perform the show script-in-hand, her thrilling performance style makes her play seem more put together than a lot of non-works-in-progress.

Ask Torontoist features questions posed by you, and answered by our elite team of specially trained investigative experts (also known as our staff). Send your questions to ask@torontoist.com.

If you read only one album review this summer (where's your attention span?), make it this one, because if there's one local band you should listen to this year, it's Horses. There's no gimmick, no trend, no all-star roster here (how's that attention span holding up?)—just four dudes with heart, substance, stories, and balls. Their new EP, Brotherly Love, is available now through Juicebox Recording Co., and its roots-tinged, working-class earnestness is as authentic as it gets.

Believe it or not, music videos still exist. Sound Tracks trolls the internet to find the best and the worst of local artists' new singles and the good, bad, or otherwise noteworthy visuals that accompany them.

Last year, we featured the television spots used during the latter half of the 1980s to encourage tourists to come to Toronto and "Discover the Feeling!" Today’s ad is an early print version of the campaign used to lure travellers from Motown into driving east on Highway 401. After a year of development by Camp Associates, the new tourism slogan was unveiled in 1984 as a replacement for "Toronto...Affectionately Yours," which had been used since 1972. Early reaction to the new slogan was summed up by Star columnist George Gamester: "’Discover the Feeling!’ doesn't sound like much for $50,000. But then 'I Love New York' probably didn't sound earth-shattering when first proposed, either."

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process, so we are often told, is full of missed opportunities. So too, unfortunately, is QuipTake's production of Apricots, which takes that process and the conflict that underlies it as its subject. There is no shortage of material to work with, and the play opens quite promisingly with duelling speeches by the leaders of Israel and Palestine, punctuated with interjections by a bombastic and self-congratulatory American president. The premise of that scene—in which the politicians say what is really on their minds, what we all know is really on their minds, but what protocol will forever prevent them from saying out loud—is precisely what a play on this particular topic calls for: using the truth as a tool to skewer the pretensions and prejudices of everybody involved.

Though film shoots in our city have really taken off in the last fifteen or twenty years, they did make movies up here before we gained any kind of rep as “Hollywood North.” It’s fun to watch some of them old movies at least partially because they’re better, on average, than a lot of what’s made nowadays. On the other hand, they present more of a challenge for us here at Reel Toronto.

It must have been a hard day for David Morelli.

TEDxTO, the independently organized TED conference focussed on "What's Next," which we previewed in July, has spent the better part of today periodically announcing their thirteen speakers and those speakers' topics for their September 10 event via—like you couldn't guess—Twitter. And while it's far too early and the topics far too broad to make anything better than make an educated guess as to how good it'll be, it's, well, looking rather good.

Late last week, Torontoist had the chance to attend an exclusive tasting of the much sought-after, but until now relatively difficult to obtain, miracle fruit—the famous berry that, once ingested, makes sour and bitter foods taste sweet. The berry's properties have been known to Western scientists since as early as the eighteenth century, but it has nevertheless kept a fairly low profile until the past few years when "flavour-tripping parties," like the one we attended, started cropping up everywhere. In late 2008, the berries even made a cameo in an episode of CSI: NY where a flavour-tripper died after unknowingly drinking poison (this is TV; they actually aren't that potent). Curious Toronto gastronauts will be happy to know they don't need to wait any longer to get their fix.

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.

This sentence is leading off this review. This sentence is intended to mimic the speech pattern that dominates the first segment, and recurs at transitional points among the other pieces, of Red Machine: Part Two. This sentence is telling you that this production is the middle portion of a trilogy that began at this year’s Fringe. This sentence hopes not to alarm as much as the sentence in the program where one of the two directors hopes that the audience will “let yourself be as curious and confused as we are” about this work in progress. This sentence won’t deny that we experienced curiosity and confusion while watching the three short pieces taken from the point of view of different pieces of a writer’s brain. This sentence is proof of how the language games of the first piece etch themselves in the brain, though it may be up to you whether this is appealing or, as repeated at the end of the production, if “this is a sentence” of the legal kind.

Attention GenXers: there’s a new way to tickle your nostalgia bone that doesn’t involve watching VH1 I Love The ‘90s reruns. Enter Weezer – The 8-bit Album, a free covers compilation released by netlabel Pterodactyl Squad, which features songs by yesteryear’s favourite nerd-chic rockers recast using the same blips and bleeps your Game Boy used to make during all those sleepless Tetris sessions. Boasting a first-rate lineup of today’s brightest chiptunes maestros (including Toronto’s own PDF Format), the album’s been making big waves across the interwebs, banking mentions on numerous widely read blogs (including Weezer’s).

"Today, we're going to go from Manila, Philippines to Toronto, Canada," began Byron Abalos as he stood before a rapt group of about twenty SummerWorks tourists, ready to embark on the inaugural run of the Lola Lita SummerWalk ("Lola" means grandmother in Tagalog). "It’s going to be a very personal tour, looking at Queen West through the eyes of my Lola Lita."

As he neared his sixtieth year, Roy Thomson had reached a crossroads. The newspaper baron’s publishing empire was entering the United States and Great Britain and he held the presidency of the Canadian Press. These accomplishments were tempered by the emptiness in his life created when his wife succumbed to cancer and by a sense that he had reached the limits of what he could do in the Canadian media business without repeating himself. As he noted in his autobiography After I Was Sixty:

What happens during the night shift? That's the simple question which provokes Suburban Beast's new docudrama show The Art of Catching Wild Pigeons by Torchlight. An off-site performance at Rolly's Garage on Ossington (note: a real garage, not the name of a hipster bar), Wild Pigeons invites you into a sleepover blanket fort—complete with flashlights—to listen to a group of actors in plaid shirts sing Neil Young songs and tell "ghost stories." The stories in the script, created by Jordan Tannahill, are all taken from real interviews the actors conducted with various night owls: a prostitute, an insomniac, night-shifters at Tim Horton's and Wal-Mart, a Nunavut prison guard, and many others. Each story is accompanied by a slide show, and occasionally a shadow play with the aid of blankets and flashlights (note to Suburban Beast: the shadow stuff worked really well, but there wasn't enough of it; more shadow puppets, please).

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

Recently we’ve—rather randomly—been reading someone’s blog reminiscing about the highs and lows (mostly lows) of living with a scholarship basketball player in college, Livin’ Large. It was after reading about ten or so entries we realized that we were, most likely, reading the blog of the film we’ll probably be writing about in five years or so. It kind of dampened our negativity about Julie and Julia, the film version of someone’s blog in which they attempted to chronicle their efforts to cook their way through Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking. After all, perhaps the original blog was as pleasingly narrative as Livin’ Large? We certainly haven’t read it, so we can’t say, but concerning the film alone reviews seem to be positive. Susan G. Cole at NOW gives it a nice review, though she does ask us to particularly “watch what she [Meryl Streep] does with her right hand during a scene of sexual play with [Stanley] Tucci.”

Classical and jazz music are often viewed with suspicion, largely due to the elitism that's associated with their listeners. Lang Lang and Herbie Hancock are perhaps the biggest superstars in these genres, respectively, and reactions to their current tour only reinforce the sense that classical and jazz aficionados can be too uptight for their own good. A quick Google News scan for mentions of the tour, which came to Toronto's Massey Hall Wednesday night, reveals review after review peppered with judgements like "excruciating," "banal," and "nose-dive"—words that inadvertently reveal their authors as holding on for dear life to staid expectations of what the music should sound like.

How lucky are we that the "artistic funhouse" (a.k.a. the SummerWorks Performance Gallery) is on for seven more nights (August 7–9, 13–16)? Yesterday, we took in the debut soirée at the atmospheric Gladstone Hotel, not knowing what to expect, and left agape at the stunning performances that are practically being given away for free (PWYC). On any given evening, as many as seven different five- to eight-minute shows are available for patrons to peruse at their leisure, taking place in the rooms (including the restroom) and hallways on the second floor. The doors to the balcony facing Queen Street are thrown open to the summer evening, letting the sounds of the city meld with the eclectic mix of performances that make up the Gallery. Below are some we particularly enjoyed.

John Barber has been observing and commenting on City Hall for the Globe and Mail for thirteen years. Those with an interest in our municipal government will have noticed his recent absence from the paper's political pages, most acutely during the rather juicy, comment-worthy last few weeks.

Ah, IKEA. Bastion of the comfortably quirky; originator of accessible (read: cheap) design; first stop for first apartment decorators everywhere.

We Torontonians like to complain how the Blue Jays and other Canuck franchises never seem to get their due from the Americans, so it’s nice to know that The Onion, the continent's most venerable fake news source, is paying attention.

Hello, Toronto! Drama Club has been taking it easy ever since a certain mid-July theatre festival, but we're back in action to give you the scoop on SummerWorks, August's indie answer to the Fringe. Some of you may remember how the festival got revamped and re-branded last year thanks to then-new Artistic Producer Michael Rubenfeld, who added such elements as a Music Series and a "Performance Gallery" at the Gladstone Hotel to the theatre festival, and also limited it to the Queen West strip. All this and more continues at the fest this year, and while we're not entirely sure about this year's roadkill visual motif (or the now annual tradition of sexist and kind of indulgent promotional videos), it's exciting to see the festival grow and develop.

              

TOJam, in case you've somehow missed our coverage of the event for the past two years running (shame!), is Toronto's first and only video game development jam. This city is full of people with indie game-making chops (some of whom may soon have steady work, if Ubisoft decides to staff up with local talent). Since 2006, TOJam has been an annual focal point for all that technical prowess and creative energy.

Last Friday at Bloor and Lansdowne, Torontoist reader Caitlin Jane spotted one of Google's Street View cars, caught precariously in the middle of an intersection, as the cars are wont to do. Jane writes: "it was trying to turn right onto Bloor (heading west) and had to wait for the light, then waited for pedestrians, which was how I was able to take such a great picture. Then I waved, haha."

Once upon a time, the computer world was viewed in only 256 colours. It was an era when consumers were wowed by aliased text and speckly, dithered sunsets. JPEG was an unknown acronym, and GIF was king. And before video, there was the animated GIF.

Want to pack it all in and move to the islands? Someone's written about that already. Want to pack it all in and move to the Toronto Islands? We can write about that. All you need is luck, patience, and money.

There's an intriguing quality to the reflective and often eccentric scope of experimental bedroom pop. It's a romance perhaps born from the mythology-making years that Brian Wilson spent sequestered in his literal bedroom, or the similar (rumoured) window-blocking, beard-growing isolation of this generation's very own once-genius strangeboy Rivers Cuomo. While not exactly taking a page out of the lush, inextricable layers of the classic Beach Boys songbook (aside from some impeccable harmonies), Guelph's weirdo troubadour Gregory Pepper assembled his band of Problems to help him bring his self-realized musical smorgasbord to light on With Trumpets Flaring, available now through Fake Four Records.

       

Last Sunday, Torontoist trekked to Woodbine Beach for a sandcastle-building extravaganza hosted by Art Attack!, the arts themed division of the Toronto Public Space Committee. The event was free, and open to anyone who wanted to participate. Liam O’Doherty, the event's organizer, told us that the purpose of the event was "to bring strangers together" and "have as much fun as possible."

These three local towers were...

If you'd like to see what's being produced within the studio walls of the Masters of Fine Art program at the University of Guelph, be sure to stop by Georgia Scherman Projects. The show, titled “1:15,” features the fifteen students of this program, and states that “constructed systems of reference such as cartography and transcription form a conceptual meeting place for the various works selected for the show.”

It was to be expected. In Friday's Vandalist, we featured a door that somehow found its way into High Park fully intact, complete with a yellow "Dog Inside" sticker. First spotted by Torontoist photographer Nick Kozak on the morning of Wednesday, July 22, the door stood its ground fully intact for one and a half weeks—until the night of Friday's Vandalist, when someone smashed its glass to pieces. Of course, there's no telling for sure if our article led to the smashup, but given the fury that every street-art post here tends to provoke, we wouldn't be surprised if that rage hopped offline and into the real world.

According to Wikipedia, Detroit Rock City made a pathetic five million dollars at the box office but has since become a cult classic that "has been often compared to the 1993 film Dazed and Confused." That might be a nice way of saying it tries damned hard to be like Dazed and Confused (a real cult classic about a single, crazy night in the '70s), right down to the dude who apparently hoped to build a career born out of playing a combination of Slater from D&C and Jay from Kevin Smith's movies. Yeah, that didn't happen.

On the second full day of the city workers' strike—June 23—Torontoist photographer Christopher Drost set up a camera rig in a window at the corner of Runnymede and Annette streets. Set to shoot one photo every ten minutes (and one every two minutes once the deals to end the strike were in place), the camera looked out towards the street and over two waste bins, one on the south and one on the north side of the street, snapping shots all day and all night for the whole rest of the strike.

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.

Taking to the stage on May 28, 1961, Cup Cake Cassidy punctuated the end of another of Toronto's notoriously prudish Sunday prohibitions with every shake of her hips. Under purple spotlights, the buxom burlesque star performed the bump-and-grind on the Lux Theatre's runway to the accompaniment of live musicians. In celebration of a new law, passed by council on May 23, that allowed theatrical performances on Sundays, the operator of the Lux, Elliott Abels (or Abells), flew Cassidy, one of the continent's most popular stripteasers and a regular performer in Toronto, in from the States for a special one-day, four-performance engagement. By her second show, a crowd of four hundred—including, the Globe reported, "a number of couples and more than a dozen women who entered individually and were well past 40." The whistling and stomping, the journalist added, reached "deafening proportions" as, bit by bit, the six-foot-tall brunette seductively shed her elaborate, jewelled gown.