Going to see a staged reading is pretty much the theatrical equivalent of watching a live jam band, only in this case the target audience is not inhalant abusers. It’s like a play, but with no movement and featuring an additional character—Mr. or Mrs. Reads The Stage Directions. The HOTscrawlsfestival is a showcase of this often overlooked art form, which puts a focus on the writer and the actors, throwing away such frivolities as......

Snappy Answers runs every Saturday afternoon. Send your questions, be they tough or trivial, to snappyanswers@torontoist.com. Hi Ms. Snappy Answers, I was just wondering where I could find a nice, affordable karaoke place in the downtown core, one that has private karaoke rooms? —Kwara......

With temperatures finally floating above zero, tonight's the tonight to dance and drink away the dregs of winter. And tomorrow morning? Head to the Gladstone Hotel for hangover brunch at noon... then start the party all over again with Shameless Magazine. The glossy for "girls who get it" is fêting the launch of the latest issue at the Gladstone Ballroom from 1—4 p.m. Saturday, March 15, with a something-for-everyone celebration. Star performers include Emma......

Boozy Suzy is the undisputed champion of the Pillow Fight League. When she’s not downing beers, she’s downing opponents with her dreaded hammer fist. Boozy Suzy is also Suzanne Carte-Blanchenot, an event coordinator who has been involved with the Pillow Fight League since its inception. She has watched the girls-only league grow from a local curiosity to an international sensation that has been covered by Anderson Cooper 360º, Good Morning America, and ESPN: The......

Dan Misener's unstoppably rad reading series, Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids, is moving to new digs for its fourth installation next Monday. The little event that could—wherein grownups read their grade school stories, diaries, and poems to a bunch of people they've never met before—is picking up from its former home at the Victory Cafe and bopping over to the Gladstone to accommodate its ever-increasing audience of believers. Even with the bigger venue,......

Sarah Lazarovic—curator of the garage-based Montrose Portrait Gallery of Canada—is painting a portrait of a Torontonian every day. Each Monday, we'll feature one of those portraits here. Stephen Eyes puts his catchy name to good use. Eyes on Toronto is a live TV talk show held monthly at the Gladstone Hotel. Tonight, Eyes banters with Trevor Boris and Major Maker. You can also watch clips of Royal Wood, Bob Wiseman and others on Eyes' site.......

Oh, the seemingly endless toil and frustration of being an underpublished and underappreciated writer. There's the mailbox full of polite, predictable rejections and the depressing rite of passage otherwise known as "open mic night." When you finally emerge from it all, it's certainly time to rejoice. Thankfully Pages Books & Magazines’ This Is Not A Reading Series has stepped up to celebrate some of the lesser-known but soon-to-be-well-known players in Toronto’s vibrant literary scene.......

It's fight night at the Gladstone Hotel this Thursday as the Pillow Fight League rolls back into town. The homegrown product and first professional pillow fighting league of its kind is just six months away from its second anniversary. With a glowing write-up in ESPN Magazine, a potential TV deal, and an April gig at Miami's Exxxotica Festival, the PFL is looking to make 2008 their biggest year yet. At PFL 14, two hundred......

Photo from Deko-ze. The holidays are normally a time for rest but nobody told that to Deko-ze. The man dubbed Canada's hardest working DJ has a doozy of a week. On top of the Christmas Bash he is throwing at Footwork on Friday, Deko-ze will be spinning a six hour extended set at CZ on Sunday for Mass and is a part of CZ's Christmas Come Get Your Fcukin Beats party. He's also at......

Next week, Taddle Creek, a Toronto-based literary magazine that publishes Toronto authors exclusively, will be celebrating their tenth anniversary. Expected to release a "giant-sized" Christmas 2007 Issue, the 72-page magazine has writing from Alex Boyd, Emily Schultz, Camilla Gibb, Stuart Ross, and many, many others, for the simple price of $4.95. The anniversary party will be at the Gladstone Hotel on November 28th, with readings, music by the Eradicators, door prizes, and maybe cake.......

Ok, so we're starting to get the message that we need to act on this whole "we're killing the planet" thing, and fast. But amongst all the noise about how much trouble we've gotten ourselves into, it's sometimes hard to hear the solutions and see the positive ideas. Enter GreenTOpia, the third installment in Coach House Books' uTOpia series, which is being released at a party this weekend into our eagerly outstretched arms. As we......

On Sunday afternoon, over 150 independent publishers, writers, artists and bloggers from across the continent will pack Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel for Canzine, Canada’s largest celebration of small press publishing and alternative culture. The affair is organized by Broken Pencil, a quarterly magazine devoted to mobilizing the scattered community of small-circulation art. This year, to coincide with the release of its Horror Issue and, well, Halloween in general, the theme is Indie Horror. That means the......

November 14 to 18 marks the return of the Reel Asian International Film Festival. Last night, the Japan Foundation played host as filmmakers and media types gathered at a press conference to kick off the 11th annual incarnation of the fest. And with more than 70 independent works from all over the world, this year’s Reel Asian Festival will be worth cracking open that golden piggy bank for. Showcasing work from 13 different countries,......

Trampoline Hall, the lecture series/literary salon with a reputation for being playful and inventive, is upping its quirk factor slightly this week in two ways. Instead of being held at its usual venue, Sneaky Dee's, this week's lectures (on robotism, hyperbolic crochet and diverse curiosity) will be delivered at Fort York. The event's organizers have also found an experimental new way to capture the evening's events: a group of Toronto-based comics artists will act......

No word yet on whether that giant lemon will be making an appearance (Yonge and Dundas anyone?), or whether it will finally be revealed how one might actually dismantle an atomic bomb, but hundreds of U2 fans will be rattling and humming into Toronto for the fifth annual (!) inTO the Heart U2 Fan Festival, taking place from November 1 to 3. With fans expected from New York, California, England, and even the Netherlands,......

On Sunday, as an unofficial kickoff to the Walk21 pedestrian conference coming to Toronto next month, the Walking Life exhibit opened at the Gladstone Hotel. The exhibit is an eclectic mix of paintings, maps, architectural drawings, collages and video. It represents images of urban walking from many different viewpoints, from the casual rambler to the urban planner. Highlights of the show include Adam Krawesky’s “Clockwork,” a digital composite showing pedestrians crossing to all four......

Originally published by Viking Press in 1957, Jack Kerouac's On the Road has been wearing holes in the back pockets and floppy canvas knapsacks of gaggles of come-find-yourself road trippers and college-aged who-am-I types ever since. To coincide with the 50th anniversary of its publication, Wednesday night will see the Gladstone play host to something of a symposium on the life and legacy of their main man, Kerouac. Authors Ray Robertson and David Creighton will......

From October 1–4, the Walk21 conference comes to Toronto. Keynote speaker Dr. David Suzuki will be joined by a host of academics, urban planners, elected officials and activists to discuss urban pedestrian issues. Lectures, discussions and workshops will cover the theme of “putting pedestrians first” in policies and infrastructure in order to make active transportation viable and attractive in increasingly dense urban areas. Running concurrent to Walk21, the YWALK youth forum is aimed at......

Lit lovers should head over to Church Street today for the Writing Outside The Margins festival of queer literature, the first of its kind in Toronto. The Gay Village stretch of Church Street will be closed from 11:00 a.m. to 7 p.m. to accommodate stands selling everything from children's books, fiction and poetry to sci-fi, erotica and comic arts. There will also be two stages for readings and performances, where you'll get to participate......

It's that time again—dance, feet, dance. After a scrumptious BBQ or a cat-like nap, pick your bones up and head over to the Gladstone Hotel where A Man Called Warwick and guest DJ General Eclectic will be turning up the big tunes for all the lovely peoples. Best bet is to always arrive before eleven to make sure you get through the doors without a wait.......

A funny thing happened near the end of the short play "The Card Trick" last afternoon in the second variation of The Gladstone Variations. The action moved outside to the alley behind the hotel and the audience was told to stand in a driveway next to the hotel's back entrance to watch the action unfold. Unfortunately, there was an humongous Jeep parked in the driveway; the kind where the alarm goes off not because......

Green is the new black. Going green is not just about flicking off or simultaneous international concerts, but being more environmentally conscious about how it creeps into everyday living. Local Food attempts to go beyond the popular concept of healthy organic eating by reducing the distance your food travels to your mouth and exposing what it takes to get that pineapple on your table. Farmers' markets are the most easily recognizable source for Ontario-grown......

The Gladstone Variations is taking the Fringe by storm. And with good reason. The 90-minute piece is by Convergence Theatre, who were the team behind last year's fantastic Autoshow, which was actually a collection of 7 ten-minute plays by different playwrights performed in and around the parking lot at Royal St. George's. The Gladstone Variations is actually more ambitious and, amazingly, even more successful. The piece is made up of four short plays by......

Often, ideas are continually improved through the feedback of others. Other times, an idea is at its best when first conceived, and can only be diluted from there. That's part of what Amy Leaman and Ryan Planche wanted to explore by creating Shift:Positions, the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) Student Press' inaugural book, which launches tonight at the Gladstone Hotel. The book contains fourteen essays written by OCAD industrial and environmental design grads......

Unlike our hetero male friends, a lot of women just don't get aroused by mainstream porn. You know, the kind where silicone-padded girls are used as receptacles for bodily fluids? Thankfully, there is a growing market for porn for women by women, which has been dubbed "feminist porn." For porn to be considered feminist, three criteria must be fulfilled. First is that the women are shown experiencing real pleasure and real orgasms. Secondly, women should......

On Monday and Tuesday nights, the Toronto Public Space Committee will be holding its third Art Attack event. The first, in 2002, had people meet up at the Tranzac to make art and then tape it over outdoor advertisements in the Annex. Last summer, the art-making took place at the Gladstone Hotel and the ad-jamming occurred mostly in the West Queen West area (with one excursion to King and Strachan to hit the Monster......

As I waited in line for Last Call At The Gladstone Hotel Saturday afternoon, bartenders from the Gladstone Hotel were behind me. "It makes us look bad, I hear," they were saying. "Like, not us personally, but the hotel. Real bad." If you are a recent transplant to Toronto, or just barely over the drinking age, then you probably had no idea that the Gladstone was once a cockroach infested, drug-addled, festering slum that was......

Last Call at the Gladstone Hotel's Neil Graham (left) and Derreck Roemer. One of the things that makes Toronto's film festivals great is the mix. In the words of documentary director Kevin McMahon, "I can go to see a screening and see both my neighbour and a filmmaker in the lineup." But most local filmmakers have been too busy to see many movies at this year's Hot Docs. The festival is one of the......

The good news: tonight, there are three great literary events happening in our fair city. The bad news: you’re going to have to choose. Mark Truscott’s Test Reading Series presents Reg Johanson and Jordan Scott at Mercer Union, A Centre for Contemporary Art (37 Lisgar Street) tonight at 7:30 p.m. Reg Johanson has traveled from East Vancouver for tonight’s performance. His first book, Courage, My Love was published by Line Books last year. Reg’s critical......

Many artists will agree that the creative effort is as important as the final presentation. With this in mind, Noah Mintz (formerly of hHead; presently of Noah’s Arkweld and Mastering Engineer at Lacquer Channel) and Aniko (Creative Director of The Spa Suite at the Gladstone Hotel) have organized an event that foregrounds the often collaborative, spontaneous process of artistic creation: "In an industry where we all get plenty of opportunity to celebrate the finished product......