The name “Mesopotamia” derives from a Greek term meaning “land between the rivers.” The Royal Ontario Museum’s latest major exhibit, which opens on June 22, takes this literally, as visitors flow between painted representations of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers on the floor.

Presented by the British Museum and rounded out with pieces from institutions in Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, Mesopotamia: Inventing Our World covers 3,000 years of human development in the cradle of urban civilization. Most of the 170 artifacts on display have never been shown in Canada.

There are a lot of chefs in the kitchen for the Canadian premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, a triptych set in three time periods that tells the stories of amateur actors (played by real actors) involved in staging performances of the story of Christ. Three different Toronto independent theatre companies, all with reputations for innovative staging and creation in their past work, each tackle one of the three acts. Ordinarily, such a complicated arrangement would be to a show’s detriment, but not in this case. While you need to be prepared for a marathon of theatre (the show runs four hours, incluing two intermissions), you’re certainly going to get your money’s worth.

“A cross between Woodstock and the Algonquin Round Table,” is what Michael Redhill called it. Dorothy Parker grinding out an electric cover of “The Star Spangled Banner”? Well, not quite. Rather, Redhill, the literary curator for Luminato 2013, was describing A Literary Picnic, the annual festival’s celebration of storytelling, creativity, and the written word.

The 2013 Toronto Jazz Festival descends on the city this Friday with a huge “free for all” event. That means all of Friday’s programming at every Jazz Festival venue is, yes, completely free of charge. There will be concerts from local favourites Molly Johnson and Mary Margaret O’Hara, plus a show by Smokey Robinson and Martha Reeves, who will be launching the fest from its epicentre, Nathan Phillips Square.

Here’s a rundown of some of the shows worth checking out on Friday—and during the rest of the festival, when you’ll actually have to pay.

Folks who are planning on having a swim in the pool at Scadding Court Community Centre over the next few days may find themselves a little disappointed. Those who want to go fishing, however, will probably be ecstatic.

For the rest of the week, the Community Centre will be holding its annual Gone Fishin’ event, meaning its indoor pool will be an indoor fish pond. The pool has been drained, dechlorinated, and refilled with 2,000 rainbow trout, to be caught by local children and families.

Cold Specks was fantastic at this year’s CMW. The festival as a whole? Not so much.

If you were paying attention to the local Twittersphere over the course of the last week, you probably saw a fair bit of mention of Canadian Music Week. Many of those mentions were comparing it to the city’s other major music festival, North by Northeast, and the comparisons were almost universally negative. The consensus was basically as follows: even if you’re working it as a writer, PR hack, or record-industry type, North by Northeast is fun. CMW is an event where you can see some great bands, but will generally leave frustrated.

We’re inclined to agree. There’s plenty to like about CMW, of course, which is why we spent a week writing about its shows. But even though it’s older and better established than North by Northest, it’s now vastly outshone by its younger counterpart.

Here are six things that are wrong with CMW, and how they can be fixed.

1 The branding is terrible.

Is this Canadian Music Week or Canadian Music Fest? Apparently it’s both. Canadian Music Week is the overarching week-long music-industry shindig, which features a conference, as well as comedy and film festivals. Canadian Music Fest is just the music festival. However, your Canadian Music Fest bracelet will also get you into the comedy shows and the film screenings. Clear? No?

If Canadian Music Week/Fest/whatever wants to generate a little more enthusiasm about its event, its organizers could start by figuring out what the hell it’s called.

2 There are no rules.

While your wristband will get you into comedy shows, there’s no guarantee it’ll let you see many bands. Far too many concerts this year were labeled “limited passes and wristbands allowed.” What that actually meant varied from venue to venue. At the Mod Club, it meant that there was a cap on the number wristbands let in to see CHVRCHES. At The Crawford, it meant that there were no wristbands let in after midnight, regardless of how few people were in the bar, and also regardless of the fact that during a festival, most people like to move between venues. Add to that the fact that holders of VIP wristbands were still required to line up, and you’re left with the impression that CMW’s festival passes are near worthless.

It’s pretty clear that some establishments are just using CMW as an excuse to stay open later. This happens at NXNE, too, but at least they have to put in some sort of effort. Let’s make it clear what a bracelet or pass does and doesn’t entitle a festival-goer to do. It would also be helpful if CMW would set some clear expectations for its venues.

3 The big acts aren’t accessible.

If there’s one thing North by Northeast does well, it’s making big-name acts accessible. Over the years, we’ve managed to see the likes of Ghostface Killah, Iggy Pop, and The Flaming Lips for free, in Yonge-Dundas Square. CMW, on the other hand, tosses big names on the bill, then makes them hard to see. The A$AP Rocky and Rihanna show was largely sold out before a single wristband was allowed in. The Grade and Choke showcase at the Mod Club, Austra, and Action Bronson were all limited-pass shows. CMW puts big names on its posters, but for many attendees this ends up being a form of bait and switch.

Either keep the festival restricted to unknowns, rising stars, and blog-buzz bands, or make sure people can actually see the the megastars.

4 There are too many mistakes.

The app doesn’t work. The set times on the website are wrong. Shows require special, previously unknown “media guestlists” for photographers. Headliners cancel without warning.

A 32 year-old festival should be smoother than this. Period.

5 There are too few repeat performances.

During NXNE, most bands have at least two gigs. If a band has a good show, it allows them to build a buzz and play before a bigger crowd the next time around. At CMW, most bands only play once. This is unfortunate. Finding those word-of-mouth hits is one of the most enjoyable parts of NXNE.

Why not give CMW’s performers some sort of opportunity to build buzz throughout the festival? The organizers could cut the number of bands and try to give each band two shows.

6 Who the hell is in charge of quality control?

There were 1,000 bands playing CMW. Some of them were excellent, but there were far too many generic rawk bands, industrial acts that dressed like Orgy tribute bands, and rappers who couldn’t find a decent rhyme scheme if it kneed them in the face. We realize registration fees have become a cash cow for CMW’s organizers, but the money has clearly blinded them to the fact there are some truly bad bands on the roster. There are far, far too many deluded musicians wasting everyone’s time at CMW. Someone needs to listen to these demos more carefully.

Listen, CMW. We want to love you. You’re a venerable institution. We saw some great shows this year. Unfortunately, we also saw some terrible ones, and missed others entirely because the schedule was wrong, or we couldn’t get in and no one would tell us why, or else they cancelled at the last minute.

Until you fix these things, you’ll always be seen as the discount-store knock-off version of North by Northeast, even if you were here first.

k-os performing at Manifesto in 2008. Photo by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/qinn/2881360248/"}Qinn{/a} from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

Manifesto Festival
Various locations
September 21–23
Most events FREE, some require registration

If this year’s edition of the Manifesto festival feels oddly familiar, it’s because the festival is going back to its roots. Faced with a shrunken budget due to a fall-off in corporate sponsorship, and spurred by a desire to emphasize the other initiatives they run throughout the year, Manifesto’s organizing committee opted to make this edition of the festival a smaller affair, cutting it back to its original three-day length from last year’s high of 11 days.

Manifesto started in 2006 as a celebration of urban arts and youth culture, and especially to provide performing opportunities for musicians that fell outside the rock-oriented scope of many other local music festivals. As in previous years, the highlight of the festival is the closing concert, which will take place on Sunday at Yonge-Dundas Square.

Programming director Jesse Ohtake is quick to point out that Manifesto is about more than just music though. The festival includes visual arts; dance performances; entertainment industry seminars and panels; and Freshest Goods, a fashion marketplace featuring local streetwear designers.

“Fashion is just another outlet for young people to be creative,” says Freshest Goods coordinator Taurean Scotland. “We’re working with people like 1Love TO, as well as a bunch of smaller brands. Sometimes you just have a great idea for a T-shirt, you make it happen and then it takes off.”

Manifesto also runs a number of youth-oriented programs during the rest of the year. Ohtake says that this year’s festival is smaller in part because the minds behind Manifesto have opted to devote more resources to working on the group’s five-year strategic plan, which will see a new emphasis on Manifesto’s community work.

“I think a lot of people only know Manifesto as a festival, which makes sense, but we do a lot of other things in the community,” he says. “We do a lot of consulting, work with youth in community centres… We work with Luminato and Hot Docs and a number of other festivals in terms of engaging youth and multicultural audiences, and that’s the stuff we’d like to bring out more… I think people will see Manifesto as more than just a festival in the next five years.”

Graffiti writers at the 2009 festival. Photo by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/metrix_feet/3947584638/"}Metrix X{/a} from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

That’s not to say the festival isn’t worth catching—there are still a lot of interesting things happening.

The opening party is also the first public event being held at the brand new Regent Park Arts and Cultural Centre. “That’s a pretty amazing thing,” says Ohtake. “That’s a multi-million dollar project that’s a key to the revitalization of Regent Park, and that’s going to be a really great centre for people not just in that centre, but also in Toronto as a whole. That’s going to be a real stand out.”

Also worth noting: this year’s musical line-up is heavily Canadian—more so than usual. Ohtake says that in the last couple of years the roster has been roughly 75 per cent Canadians and 25 per cent international artists, mostly Americans. This year, the roster is “95 per cent Canadian,” a move fuelled in part by the explosion in Canadian hip-hop and R&B talent.

“Shi Wisdom and her band are playing, we have The Closers, which is the collaboration between Rich Kidd and SonReal—we’re going to have the debut set of that record,” he says. “It’s great to be focusing on these Canadians who are starting to get a little bit of attention.”

Local MC Tre Mission will also be on the bill, making his Manifesto debut. Mission has had commercial success overseas in the U.K., but is only starting to become a known quantity in his hometown. He hopes playing Manifesto will help raise his profile locally.

“I’ve been going [to Manifesto] since the beginning, when I was a teenager,” he told us. “When people see me at Manifesto, they can look me up and check out my resume. The way our music scene works, if you’re not big somewhere else, it’s hard to get big here. If people see you succeed elsewhere and rep Toronto, then they’ll rate you and you’ll get that love at home. Now, someone will see me at Manifesto, look up this unknown kid and realize I’m not so unknown after all.”

Even Pharoahe Monch, the lone American on this year’s Yonge-Dundas bill, is being served with a side of CanCon. He’ll be performing with critically lauded jazz-rap fusionists BadBadNotGood.

The Manifesto Festival’s opening party is Friday, September 21 (9 p.m.–1:30 a.m.) at the Regent Park Arts and Cultural Centre. The closing concert begins at 12 p.m. on Sunday, at Yonge-Dundas Square, and runs throughout the afternoon and evening. Headliner Pharoahe Monch is expected to perform at about 9:00 p.m.

Fans of Asian street food turned out in droves for the third annual T&T Waterfront Night Market this past weekend, in the T&T Supermarket parking lot at the foot of Cherry Street.

Despite the unpredictable weather, Torontoist was on-hand to take in the sights and sounds (and stinky tofu smells) and to try out some of the many snacks available from the dozens of vendors on-site.

We just narrowly missed out on the shrimp skewers spun in a tornado of crispy noodles (cries of “Oh no!” and “Boooo!” burst out from behind us at the news), but grilled baby octopus, steamed fish, and shrimp siu mai were all tasty, filling, and amazingly cheap.

Other favourites included octopus balls, fried-oyster omelettes, tofuyaki, and ever-popular, ever-chewy bubble tea. We did manage to score some fresh-fruit smoothies and one of the delightfully unhealthy deep-fried sandwiches known as Asian French toast.

Those needing a break from all the eating enjoyed live entertainment at the concert stage (we can’t say the performers were uniformly great, but that was part of the charm, in a sense) or the games at the modest but colourful midway before returning to the food stalls to eat some more.

If you haven’t yet had your night-market fix, don’t worry. Toronto is home to several over the summer, including the Chinatown BIA–hosted Night Market on Huron Street at Dundas every Friday and Saturday evening from July 20 to September 8.

A participant in last year's Scotiabank Caribbean Carnival Toronto. Photo by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/15574096@N00/6026931820/"} refreshment_66 from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.{/a}

“Forty-five is the new 20. We’re looking really good.”

With those words, Scotiabank Caribbean Carnival Toronto CEO Denise Herrera-Jackson expressed her enthusiasm over the 45th anniversary edition of the festival now legally prohibited from calling itself Caribana. Herrera-Jackson was speaking at a press conference this morning at the Royal Ontario Museum.

This year’s celebrations may prove extra-festive for some participants, as 2012 also marks the 50th anniversary of independence for Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.

The tastiest of the events, which will be happening for the first time at this year’s Caribbean Carnival, might be an overnight Fish Fry at Ontario Place following the parade on August 4. Inspired by food-centric parties held in Grenada and St. Lucia, the Fish Fry will kick off Beyond De Lime, a 24-hour string of food-related events. Also announced, though so far not listed on the festival’s website, was a pair of church services that will bookend the festival.

During the Caribbean Carnival, the ROM will launch a related exhibit, “Carnival: From Emancipation to Celebration,” which will look at the historical and symbolic meanings of such celebrations. To tie into this year’s theme of “Caring for Community,” every event staged as part of the festival will donate money to a different charity.

Two returning events are relocating this year. The Junior Carnival Parade, to be held July 21, will move from Jane and Finch to the north end of Downsview Park, where there will be more room for participants and spectators. That evening, rugby matches that were played in Markham last year will be held instead at Lamport Stadium.

New corporate sponsors were unveiled. The most prominent at the press conference was El Dorado Rum, who will play a key role in the Annual Gala at the Liberty Grande on July 27. (There were no free samples, unfortunately.)

Speaking for the City of Toronto, Councillor Joe Mihevc (Ward 21, St. Paul’s) noted that the City is “120 per cent” behind the festival. While he praised contributions by the City (council is set to approve $494,000 in funding for the carnival next week) and the province, he criticized the federal government for not playing a larger financial role in the festival over the years.

Reflecting on past years, Mihevc said he felt that a “strong-man leader” approach to running the event had not worked well, and likened the current management structure to an orchestra leader making all the instruments work together. This comment was likely in reference to the bitter power struggle that led to the festival’s name change. Caribana Arts Group, the festival’s previous organizers, lost control of the Caribana in 2006 and sued the current organizers, the Festival Management Committee. In 2011, a judge gave CAG sole rights to the Caribana name, and they haven’t done much with it since.

T&T Toronto Night Market
T&T Supermarket (222 Cherry Street)
Thursday–Saturday, 5 p.m. to 12 a.m.
Sunday, 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.

For the next few days in the Port Lands, under a canopy of power lines and cement plant scaffolding, the parking lot of the T&T Supermarket will be transformed into a pop-up Asian-style night market. There, as the event’s website puts it, “East and West meet under a moonlit summer night sky, the breeze of barbecuing pork and beef wafts in the wind, mingling with the sizzling aroma of vegetables dropped in hot oil, steaming bamboo baskets sitting on almost every stall invite hungry crowds to sample a bite of hot dumplings, spicy chicken or oyster pancakes.” Sure.
Frankly, it’s too goddamned hot out for the aroma of anything to waft in the wind. Mostly, the smell of BBQ pork, squid teppanyaki, and cheeseburger spring rolls just hangs there, commingling with the rank steam of people shuffling between booths. In the 20-odd degrees of Thursday night, even the requisite kid-friendly bouncy castle had been sieged by the elements, sagging all defeated-like. But we can’t rightly blame the Toronto Waterfront Night Market for the weather, nor for the lack of waft. Can we? No.

Hot or not, the Night Market is a bit of a hoot. While indebted to the ad-hoc markets found in places like Taiwan—where normal thoroughfares become, under cover of darkness, bazaars for hawkers moving exotic snack food and knock-off denim jeans—and North American transplants like the one found in Richmond, BC, the Toronto Night Market is a considerably more toned-down affair. With the food vendors, souvenir stands, and live music, it has the feel of an Asian-infused Lion’s Carnival (complete with Beaver Tails, Elephant Ears, and other Ontario delicacies of the deep-fried dough variety). There were hawkers, too, to be sure. But they weren’t moving faux-Gucci bags or Nikey sneakers so much as baiting you in to buying a one dollar bubble tea or a fresh pineapple juice ($5 and, admittedly, delicious: blended pineapple served in the shell of pineapple, garnished with a slice of—wait for it—pineapple). But it must be hard for these vendors to distinguish themselves. There had to be dozens of booths specializing in fresh juices and bubble teas, churning out enough fresh juice and bubble tea to feed a small army, provided that that army subsisted entirely on fresh juice and bubble tea.

To complement all the juice were rack after smoky rack of BBQ’d food. If you like boiled lobster, skewered scallops, Chinese fried chicken, grilled mussels, stinky tofu, and other spoils of the Orient, look no further. And if those tastes are too far-flung for your unadventurous palate, there are also spins on North American favourites, like designer cupcakes, grilled toast, BBQ corn, and something called “tornado fries” (which, along with “taco shooters” and “extreme fajitas,” would feel right at home on the menu of a Mike Judge movie). To keep the well-fed entertained, on Thursday night a few bands cycled on and off the stage, playing to a half-captivated crowd of the sluggish and disinterested. (One jokey, noodly nü-metal softcore rock outfit had a song with a hook and chorus that went, quite simply: “Alive, alive, alive, alive alive / Alive, alive / Alive, alive, alive, alive, alive / I feel so alive, alive alive.”)
And if hymns to the very liveliness of life and being alive, alive, alive aren’t your tapioca-clogged tumbler of bubble tea, you’ll also find cars with souped-up stereos showing their stuff, graffiti contests, and Angry Birds paraphernalia, all unified by the din of vendors barking, “One dollar smoothie, one dollar,” and the bassy thrum of Asian classics like “Still D.R.E.” You’ll also find takoyaki, grilled octopus balls that are popular in Japan and have become something of a late night bonne bouche. A Toronto Life article flanking the booth (from the “Top 500 Takoyaki Stands in T.O.” issue, presumably) described takoyaki as being “among the world’s most labour intensive snacks.” How could you not want to to try it? Fluffy, fishy (well, octopus-y) and slathered in mayo, they are pretty tasty. Though maybe you have to get drunk, or not be full-up of blended pineapple, to fully savour them.
All these little treats are reason enough to check out the Night Market. It’s also a fine place to bring a date (especially if you both like mango juice and bands that sing songs about the degree to which you feel alive). It’d also be a nice outing for the family. You can always deposit the kids at the humid, sad bouncy castle before braving the maze of grilled squid tentacles and free President’s Choice micro-sausages. (Oh, and go later. First of all, you get a better “Night Market” vibe when the sun is down. But more importantly, they start cutting down prices around 11 p.m., to try to move remaining product.)
Photos by Christopher Drost/Torontoist.