Up until the morning of July 31, 2010, Catherine Frid's Homegrown was just another one of the 42 plays produced by The SummerWorks Theatre Festival that year. But mere days before the show was to open, it was thrust into the media's spotlight under the headline "Sympathy for the Devil." Suddenly, Homegrown was no longer just a developing piece about a woman's relationship with an accused terrorist associated with the Toronto 18—it became the city's symbol for the battle between artists and Conservative politics. This past Friday, almost a year later, an event to recuperate the losses of SummerWorks's unanticipated denial of government funding (commonly believed to be in direct response to the play itself), made Homegrown all of Canada's.

A mid-air art installation in Nathan Phillips Square during 2009′s Nuit Blanche. Photo by purplepick from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. When Rob Ford was elected mayor last fall, many in the arts and culture community saw it as a blow to their field, the beginning of a dramatic and drawn-out death scene. During his campaign, [...]

Photo by sevennine from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. In the 1996 Canadian movie Kissed, a young female mortician discovers the joys of necrophilia. That same year, David Cronenberg made Crash, wherein a group of omnisexual urbanites eroticize car accidents. In Léolo, a 12-year-old boy masturbates with a chunk of liver, later served to his family [...]