Culture: November 2009 Archives

The Silicone Diaries, the new one-woman show written and performed by self-proclaimed "most celebrated transsexual in Canada" Nina Arsenault currently being performed at Buddies' cabaret space, is already a hit. The theatre announced an added performance before the show had even opened, tickets have been selling like hotcakes, and there's already rumours of the Diaries coming back next season, this time in the more spacious "Chamber" section of the venue. That last tidbit is very welcome news for audience members; when we attended the jam-packed opening, "seating" choices were limited to standing room at the back, or cramming ourselves onto the room's grand staircase. We opted for the latter, an experience so uncomfortable we couldn't help but imagine, while Arsenault waxed poetic about the various illegal silicone injections into her ass and hips she had scored in Mexico, the more practical appeal of having a little extra cushion back there.

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

The Edgewater Hotel sign is gone. City officials ordered that the Parkdale landmark be removed on November 3, after nearly three years of working to convince the owner of the building to which it was attached to make necessary repairs. According to a Municipal Licensing and Standards manager, the sign had finally become so derelict that city inspectors deemed it unsafe.

“Guys, we did it. He's actually here!" Toronto comedian Bob Kerr exclaimed in front of a sold-out, standing room–only crowd while he hosted the first of two shows at the Rivoli starring Paul F. Tompkins. Tompkins, if you didn't know already, is an enviably talented Los Angeles–based comic with a resume that includes decades of stand-up, TV (Mr. Show, Best Week Ever), and movies (There Will Be Blood, The Informant!), but before last month, he had never set foot in Hogtown. So, what brought him here? Twitter, Facebook, and Bob Kerr. Together, Kerr and Tompkins took advantage of all that is good in social media and started a trend that shows no signs of abating.

For the past eight years, the Ontario College of Art and Design has been asking potential art buyers to put pretense aside and trust their gut in support of the school. “Whodunit?,” OCAD’s signature annual fundraiser, is a mystery art sale in which the name of the artist remains a secret until after you purchase the piece. It’s a refreshing concept in a creative marketplace so often dogged by an atmosphere of manufactured buzz and the dreaded art star.

When will the TTC open subway doors earlier than its current wake-up call of approximately 9 a.m. on Sunday mornings?

The usual way for a driver to avoid eggnog-fuelled destruction during the holidays is for them to travel with a designated driver. This is a tried-and-true method of avoiding being the only perp at the station who smells alluringly of nutmeg. If, for whatever reason, it's not a viable option for you (maybe all your friends like the 'nog as much as you do?) Toronto-area entrepreneur John Long has a solution. It involves tow trucks.

Who doesn't wish they knew Natalie Portman?

Last Friday brought together Toronto filmmaker Paul Saltzman, producer Patricia Aquino, Academy Award–winning actor Morgan Freeman, and members of the city’s most well-to-do families at the Varsity Cinemas for a "VIP Screening" of Prom Night in Mississippi, Saltzman’s feature-length documentary chronicling the efforts of a Charleston high school hosting their first "integrated prom."

As of January 3, 2010, TTC fares will rise across the board. Well, almost. Here's what the Commission approved at their meeting this afternoon, all effective on the first Sunday of the new year:

...Or the end of an era as Hostage Life return and then quickly and mysteriously disband while on top of their game.

Pity the person made agitated and restless by drinking an over-stimulating beverage. Because of their tragic decisions, the owl woman fell asleep at her office desk, while the mule man walked up to his boss, a report firmly clenched in his hand, and allowed his overactive nerves to tell the boss what he really thought of the company’s management. By the end of the day, both found themselves facing the harsh realities of the Great Depression. If only they had sent away for a free sample of Postum…

There’s something about the quiet landscapes that line the walls of the Stephen Bulger Gallery that’s oddly disquieting. It’s easy to tell that they show vistas far from here—the vegetation and the topography carry those subtle but clear cues of an unfamiliar place—but it’s not that. The lighting seems suspended between an artificial dusk and the bleakest of mid-days, but that’s also not what’s out of place. It’s because there’s something intentionally absent from Canadian photographer Bertrand Carrière’s series “Lieux Mêmes.” They are photographs of something that is no longer there. The subject left the scene ninety years ago.

This film should have been great, what with honourary Torontonian Sam Jackson and the cool special effects and all. The filmmakers also went all out, filming in Tokyo, Egypt, Rome, and…Peterborough. That's right—no matter how exotic you get, you can't make a film this flawed without giving Toronto and the GTA a little love!

Since its official launch in August 2008, Google Suggest has been fuelling a new auto-complete meme that has taken off on social sites like Digg and Reddit and even encouraged news sites like Slate to take a pseudo-sociolinguistic look at Google's most popular searches. What we search can tell us a lot about who we are, so we thought it would be funny illuminating to use Google Canada's version of Suggest to find and dissect common queries about Toronto.

It's been a very exciting week for Toronto Fringe enthusiasts. First, there was the announcement of the festival's partnership with both Mirvish and the Randolph Centre for the Arts, which means the Fringe Club beer tent will move from the Tranzac to the parking lot behind Honest Ed's (which happens to be across the street from new Fringe location Randolph). The move makes a lot of sense in terms of giving the festival a central, highly visible hub that's pretty much exactly in the midpoint of the festival's various reaches to Tarragon in the north, UofT in the east, and Factory/Passe Muraille in the south. Those interested in participating in next year's festival had better get a move on it, though: the new, early application deadline this year is this Wednesday.

Do you remember when you were seventeen and you thought about being young, and urban, and an artist? Maybe you imagined whitewashed loft spaces with a low-key reek of depravity and beautiful people with their improbable haircuts. And maybe there were poetry readings, and everything was a little bit of a performance, and everything was deeply, self-consciously cool.

The Nightwood Theatre has set up shop at the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre with an extraordinary production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist drama No Exit. In more traditional stage incarnations, No Exit is a fairly austere piece of theatre. Following the discussions of three strangers who find themselves trapped eternally in a sparsely decorated hotel room, Sartre’s play originally called for just three major characters, a mostly-mute valet, and one set. The drama arises from discussions between the three leads as they parse their various sins, deficiencies in character and weigh the morality of their mortal decisions.

Yesterday, Torontoist packed into the charming wood-panelled ballroom of the Gladstone Hotel along with throngs of passionate food lovers for the launch of The Edible City: Toronto's Food from Farm to Fork, hosted by This Is Not a Reading Series. The latest in Coach House Books' ambitious uTOpia series, which selects one broad aspect of Toronto each year and corrals some of the city's most influential writers to tackle it—past publications addressed the city's future (uTOpia), the environment (GreenTOpia), and arts and culture (The State of the Arts)—The Edible City delves into all things food.

Egypt’s famed boy-king is gearing up to set off another bout of "Tut-mania" in Toronto.

The success of Battle of the Blades has brought Maple Leaf Gardens back into the national spotlight. The show’s mix of glamour and excitement fits some of the visions Conn Smythe had for the building when it opened its doors to the public seventy-eight years ago this week. Built in an almost unimaginable span of five months, the building that became a temple for generations of hockey fans is a testament to the executives who used their persuasive skills to raise the necessary funds during the Great Depression.

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

Cory Doctorow possesses a strange kind of celebrity. He's famous, but not so famous that you could offhandedly mention him to a stranger on the street and reasonably expect the person to be familiar with Doctorow's life and work. For other notable people, this situation might connote a kind of ignominious C- or D-List celebrity, but not for Doctorow. In his case, it might be more accurate to say that he is extremely, A-List famous, but only among the subset of the population that uses and understands the internet. This would explain why he was able, last night, to pack the third floor of the Lillian H. Smith public library tighter than a college bar. That's right. Cory Doctorow: as appealing to nerdy people as beer is to students.

Sure, we all loved last winter’s “I Get On (The TTC)” viral video hit. Syrus Watson and Randal Medford’s urban-flavoured ode to Toronto transit (or at least the non-homophobic version) was all the rage with just about everyone—adults, children, grandmothers, national newspaper outlets, and even the TTC itself. But all the while, one disillusioned soul was peering from the shadows, perturbed that they weren't keeping it real enough. And so, he's taken matters into his own hands.

When we heard that the Eaton Centre had launched their own iPhone app in time for the start of the holiday shopping season [iTunes link], it seemed like a good, ol'-fashioned trashing would be in order. Why, we wondered, would you need an Eaton Centre app on your handheld if you were already in the mall? And if you weren't in the mall, how much use could it be?

Remember when we pretty much scolded The Most Serene Republic for releasing a mostly mediocre record? And remember how we said that the most redeeming moment on ...And the Ever Expanding Universe was not only a standout on the album, but an absofreakinglutely excellent little slice of post-millenial indie rock? Well, here is the video. Finally. A good new reason to listen to this song nine times in a row.

We're sure they thought it was a good idea at the time.

Freelance journalist and native Torontonian David Sax received death threats from New York, blushing gratitude from LA, and lots of chatter from cities in between, all due to his newly released book, Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen. Within its pages, Sax passes judgement on which towns have the best delis (hence all the civic pride), but his real concern is how these emporiums of comfort food are rapidly disappearing from our culinary landscape, disconnecting Jews and the population at large from a vital aspect of Jewish culture. During his travels across North America and Europe, Sax had moments of despair (his working title for a time was The Death of the Deli), but he met too many dedicated and passionate people, fighting to keep the tradition alive, to give up that easily.

It's been two months since Mariam Makhniashvili disappeared without a trace, and Toronto police are attempting a new tactic in their search for clues: peeking into thousands of homes around the Bathurst and Eglinton area. Sixty officers began knocking on doors this week, asking for residents to let them in to root around, scouting for possible evidence. They hope to cover about six-thousand houses and apartments, and although homeowners are not legally obligated to let officers inside without a warrant, denying the request is bound to make some people feel like automatic suspects, possibly subjecting themselves to further scrutiny. As for the motivation of the Toronto Police Service, some would say that canvassing neighbourhoods has worked before, while the more cynical might wonder if the force is attempting to improve the optics of the case, given that any leads seem to have run dry. However, by knocking on doors and asking to be invited in, the police are asking the community to waive its right to privacy, albeit for an important reason. "The innocent have nothing to fear," goes the mantra, yet one of the cornerstones of human rights is the protection of privacy and prevention of arbitrary interference and intimidation. Keep calm and carry on?

The clock is ticking, usually reticent authors are primping, and in a few short hours Canada's literary establishment will be donning tuxedos and evening gowns in preparation for tonight's Giller Prize black-tie gala dinner and awards ceremony. Writers typically tend to elbow patches and cozy knits—the "sequins and spit-shine shoe" look comes but once a year. The Giller is the most prestigious of Canada's literary awards, guaranteeing the winner a firm spot on the bestseller list through the peak holiday shopping season and providing a level of exposure few fiction writers are lucky to find in this country. (To a lesser extent, all the shortlisted writers see these benefits.)

Somewhere in the first half of this decade there was a handful of female artists and bands churned out into mainstream Canadian music and steered towards an edgy look and sound—for example, Avril Lavigne became an international Top 40 star, while Vancouver then-teens Live On Release and their single "I'm Afraid of Britney Spears" were banished to the one-hit-wonder subconsciousness of regular Muchmusic viewers. Based mostly on timing (oh, and uh, total gender association), innocent bystanders Magneta Lane got lumped into a similar rundown of names, and even after releasing their excellent third album, Gambling with God (while also jumping from indie powerhouse Paper Bag to powerhousier Last Gang Records), they might still be suffering from the initial wrong-place-wrong-time impression.

A dazzling view of the Toronto skyline welcomed visiting flyers like this Royal Canadian Air Force pilot throughout World War II. The glimmer of city lights, the Royal York Hotel, and other pre-war skyscrapers as he approached Port George VI Airfield (as the island airport was officially named upon opening in 1939) was a far more welcoming sight than enemy fire.

It's only on for the rest of the week, so you'll have to hurry, but as far as seeing theatre in this town goes, getting tickets to August: Osage County is about the best favour you could do yourself this year. The Pulitzer Prize–winning Steppenwolf production—coming to us by way of sold-out runs in Chicago, Broadway, and the West End—brings Oscar-winner (and Roseanne's mom) Estelle Parsons to the Toronto stage, along with a highly talented ensemble cast and a phenomenal script by Tracy Letts. Rumoured to be in talks for big screen development, this is the perfect chance to catch this bold and original work in its purest form.

              

On Friday night the glass and steel canyons of downtown Toronto echoed to the running footfalls and excited yells of almost two thousand participants in the annual Newmindspace game of Capture the Flag. Dodging traffic, sidestepping security guards, and disappearing into the PATH system, teams ebbed and flowed across the King Street "neutral zone" throughout the night. In the end, if the score mattered, the blue team emerged victorious by four captures to two.

              

The Santa Claus Parade was started by the now-defunct Eaton’s department store in 1905 with just one attraction: Santa. This year, on Sunday, November 15, the parade will feature twenty-six floats, twenty-one bands, and more than a million pieces of candy. To get a sneak peak at this year's edition of the one-hundred-and-five-year-old parade, Torontoist visited its Weston-area workshop last Thursday and talked to the people behind the magic—including the big man himself.

Disney's live-action tween projects, like High School Musical and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, are some of the most lucrative entertainment franchises in recent history. Kids get to nurse their meaningless prepubescent crushes, while parents are comforted by Disney's squeaky clean role models—and as Miley Cyrus and Vanessa Hudgens found out, straying from their chaste likenesses can be a career-limiting game of PR brinkmanship.

My question has to do with buying tickets/passes from the ticket booths in the subway stations. I find it very inconvenient that the TTC does not accept debit payments at the ticket booths when I need to buy my tokens. In order for me to get cash, I have to get off the TTC system, go to an ATM and then get back on to a bus/subway. Why not even have automated vending machines that users could use their credit cards or debit cards to buy fares (there used to be vending machines, but I haven't noticed them lately)? If I can buy gas at the pump with my debit card, there must be a way that I can buy TTC fares too.

On September 10, 1939, Prime Minister Mackenzie King officially declared war on Germany. Toronto was impacted by the war almost immediately. Drawn by patriotism, adventure-seeking, or just the lure of a job after nearly a decade of the Great Depression, thousands of young Torontonians spilled into recruiting stations and from there into manning depots. In Bill McNeil's Voices of a War Remembered (Doubleday Canada Limited, 1991), Torontonian Ella Trow recalled how every family was touched by the Second World War. "My brothers and my husband went into the services," she wrote, "and most of my friends were in the same boat."

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

Earlier this week the Toronto Star announced, among other changes, that it was planning to outsource some one hundred in-house, union editing jobs. In the press release issued by the union in the wake of the announcement, union chief Maureen Dawson explained that "Journalism is a collaborative effort, the product of a team of reporters, photographers and editors working in concert to produce the kind of activist agenda that has served Star readers and our community so well for so long...To remove a critical element of that work is to shortchange everyone who depends on it."

Last week, Live Green Toronto, the City of Toronto’s website for eco-friendly living, launched a new transit shelter advertising campaign with a unique twist: passersby can flip a giant switch that turns the ad on or off. The ad’s text encourages readers to "switch this poster off," and to switch on Live Green’s website for information about saving energy and living green. The ad was designed by Agency59, a Toronto-based advertising agency, and installed by Astral Media, the company behind Toronto's street furniture. While it’s undeniably clever, the execution is a little flawed.

"I probably don't even need this microphone, to be honest!" Frontman Odario Williams and the rest of his genre-bending hip-hop group Grand Analog launched the Toronto Public Library's current Make Some Noise series straight from the kids' section of the College/Shaw branch last night, and the alternative venue proved a somehow very fitting setting for an affair that's typically relegated to dark clubs at late hours that no adorable two-year-old would ever be able to attend.

When Matt Greenwood saw this video on YouTube last year, he didn't just gawk in a rude fashion (as we did). Inspired by people's responses when confronted by a camera sans photographer, Matt sought to expand on an idea previously touched on only by self-timers. And when he happened to come across a disposable camera, idea met material and art was born.

As anticipated by transit watchers, the TTC is proposing an across-the-board fare hike, effective January 3, 2010. That hike, to be decided on at the commission's November 17 meeting, would see adult cash fares rise from $2.75 to $3.00, tokens rise from $2.25 to $2.50, and adult Metropasses jump from $109 to $126. A full list of the proposed changes are here; the immediate reasons for them are—as they always are—myriad. (The Star and Globe both take a look at some of them.)

Everybody panic! It's the H1N1 über-lethal supermegavirus plague! Actually, it's just the regular ol' flu, but simply a mutation that is infecting more people because most of us don't have sufficient built-in immunity for it. And while health authorities started the flu season wondering how they were going to convince people to get themselves vaccinated, the tragic death of twelve-year-old Evan Frustaglio may have been the tipping point that immediately clogged clinics and depleted vaccine supplies. Though enough vaccine is being produced, the bottleneck is in getting the vials filled and shipped quick enough, as well as prioritizing people in higher-risk demographics. Meanwhile, as all of this is going on, corporate executives are paying $2,300 each to step to the front of the line at Toronto's private Medcan Clinic, according to the Star. With three thousand doses of the H1N1 vaccine shipped to Medcan so far, these corporate clients are getting the shot as part of their "enhanced annual checkups," immediately, in the comfort of a warm doctor's office instead of waiting hours in a line with the commoners. Pay-for-privilege bypasses Ontario's single-tier health care laws for procedures considered "medically unnecessary," in the same way Ontarians can pony-up $500 for a quickie MRI across the border in Buffalo.

On Monday, Torontoist spent the day at the Toronto Innovation Showcase at City Hall, learning about data sets, queues, and civic engagement. At the top of the agenda was the unveiling of toronto.ca/open, Toronto’s new open catalogue of city data, ranging from—as Mayor Miller explained in a press release on Monday morning—"apartment inspection data to child care availability to dozens of GIS mapping data that will enable a broad range of location-based applications. And yes," he added, "our initial data offering also includes the TTC’s scheduling data."

Last night's episode of the increasingly addictive Being Erica sent its eponymous protagonist ten years into the future, where she proclaimed that 2019 was pretty similar to 2009. And indeed it was, save for a bad haircut and a few subtle embellishments that we're really looking forward to a decade from now.

Why is Jonas Bonnetta so damn disarming? His debut full length as Evening Hymns—essentially a fleshed-out version of his real-monikered earlier release—oozes a level of granola that could cause discomfort for hyper-aware, self-conscious indie rock fans; the album is called Spirit Guides and much of the lyrical content is about the forest and there's a full track just of a rain storm and have you seen that eerie, foggy mountain on the cover? Somehow, though, there isn't a pretentious note on this record.

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.

Isn’t it wonderful when four stereotypical figures can come together in perfect harmony thanks to a humble can of spaghetti? We never suspected that the finest spices from Asia lurked within our sloppy Saturday childhood lunch.

In the two rooms of Gallery 44 at 401 Richmond Street West, you can see planes take off from Chicago’s O’Hare and Tokyo’s International Airport at the same time. The gallery’s current exhibition, entitled "Google Earth"—running from October 23 to November 28—features a handful of the millions of images captured by the aerial photography internet program.

This is a movie about a taxi/limo driver, played by Jackie Chan, who wears a magic suit that makes him do kung fu shit, and he fights evil criminals with help from a scientist or secret agent or something played by Jennifer Love Hewitt. Yeah, this is precisely the sort of movie that usually gets shot here.

Waste not, want not—so the old saying goes. Taking the adage very much to heart is a fledgling non-profit and its several hundred volunteers, who have been plumbing our city for hitherto forgotten bounty for the past couple of years. The organization is called Not Far From The Tree, and its mission is to rescue fruit growing in Toronto that would otherwise go to waste.

Enza Anderson waits at a bus stop on the west side of Bay Street by City Hall with a tall shovel in her hand. The bus to Queen's Quay pulls up and all eyes fixate on her as she boards. Walking towards the back, an elderly passenger comments, "A bit early for shovelling the snow off your driveway, isn't it?"

Yesterday afternoon, hundreds of people who were way cooler than Torontoist came out to the Gladstone Hotel to see the 175 independent publishers, artists, and writers at Canzine, Canada’s largest zine fair and festival of alternative culture. The day-long event was organized by Broken Pencil, the quarterly magazine dedicated to all things underground culture and the independent arts.