WINE: Prepare to enjoy fine wine, food, and persistent denial of the coming world economic collapse and food shortage as the Gourmet Food and Wine Expo opens today. Strap on your BlackBerry, put on your suit, and get drunk the luxurious way—by drinking tiny glasses of expensive wine as you pretend to be interested in a random brochure on stainless steel grape skin processing in Southern France. Metro Toronto Convention Centre, South Building (222......

Shove over, Bosh. There's a new game in town, and its million-dollar players, though rather shorter of limb, are limber enough when raising those little numbered cards (with much bigger numbers behind them, of course). Lately, though, wealthy, aging boomers are feeling a bit busted, and it's not just the old rheumatoid arthritis; the r-word, now murmured around the world, is said to be stiffening bidding joints in the til-now uber-competitive scene of—did you......

THEATRE: Puppeteer troupe The Old Trout Puppet Workshop will be presenting their project Famous Puppet Death Scenes at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts. The Dora-nominated production explores what happens when extremely well-crafted puppets get annihilated. The show runs until October 16. Young Centre for the Performing Arts (55 Mill Street, Building 49), 8 p.m., $20-$30 WORDS: Internationally renowned printmaker Akira Kurosaki is speaking today at OCAD. Kurosaki's work is displayed at MoMA, the......

MUSIC: Tonight's No Shame music showcase is over at the Silver Dollar Room, and will serve as a Pop Montréal preview for those lucky enough to attend the festival this weekend (and presumably as some sort of compensation for those who are not). Toronto favourite the Rural Alberta Advantage will be playing, along with the similarly indie pop groups Hooded Fang and Mt. Royal. The Silver Dollar Room (486 Spadina Avenue), 9 p.m., $7.......

WORDS: “This Is Not A Reading Series For Tots,” a new monthly literary program for children that we told you about a few weeks ago, is launching today at the Gladstone Hotel. Kids aged two to eight will get to meet the authors of childrens’ books and participate in art activities, sing-a-longs, and puppet shows. Speaking today is Matt Hammill, who will be giving a PowerPoint presentation about his new book, Sir Reginald’s Logbook.......

FESTIVAL: The Manifesto Festival of Music and Art is returning for its second year. The festival runs until Sunday and will feature art exhibitions, a street dance competition, a market devoted to the wares of young entrepreneurs, and musical performances from Rascalz and k-os. Tonight's event is a music showcase at The Mod Club featuring performances by Torontoist fave Shad, and Hey Ocean (722 College Street, 8 p.m., $12). Tomorrow, check out a special......

As orientation weeks get ready to overwhelm Toronto's many post-secondary institutions, there is one question more important than the hemming and hawing over academics, new friends, and leaving home: who will have the best Frosh Week concert? This year's race is as stacked as ever: U of T gets Tokyo Police Club, Cadence Weapon, and Basia Bulat on Friday, September 5 on their Back Campus; York gets Stars (U of T's /hidden_cameras.php">leftovers), Sweet Thing,......

Summer is a time to get intimate with the gritty streets of our little borough, and this is exactly what industrial design students from OCAD have set out to do in their exhibit TORONTO UNBOUND. Together with the design school and the City of Toronto, OpenCity Projects has put together a creative lab to come up with design ideas for Toronto's neighbourhoods, to help foster communication between the members of that specific community and......

And it's Birdcage Vs. HPSCHD—two original compositions from that great American musical inventor and electronic musician John Cage. Both pieces feature classic Cage components like chance-controlled melody and rhythm, and environmental sounds. But who will come out on top? A one-hour piece featuring tapes from aviaries, oral fragments of Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and ambient street noise, where a computer randomly selects which sound will be played? Or, a three-hour bombastic show of musical intensity,......

Remember when the town crier would stand on Yonge Street and shout his hear-say and hear-ye, passing out copies of the daily news for a penny a pop? Yeah, us neither. The fast-spreading news of today is a far cry from days of old (take us for example), and we'll bet you didn't see what was coming next. But tomorrow at the corner of Queen and John, you just might. Walk past Pages and......

Last Thursday, we wrote about OCAD's awkward new name—OCAD University—and asked readers to come up with some alternatives. The school, a university since 2006, wants to ditch its college reputation without, well, ditching the "C" in its acronym that stands for "College." Thankfully, some of you pitched in to help. Our favourite suggestions from readers were Svend's Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson–inspired "This Is Not A College"; deepsalia's "Ontario Centre for Art and Design," which preserves......

In what might not be the wisest move, OCAD—the Ontario College of Art and Design—wants to be called OCAD University. Yes: Ontario College of Art and Design University. Sort of. According to the Globe, the school's new appendage is the result of "creative brainstorming" throughout the school, and follows a branding expert's advice that the school's acronym "OCAD" not change (which would typically be the route to take when one of the words in......

The organizers of Nuit Blanche held a launch event at OCAD this morning to announce this year’s curators—Wayne Baerwaldt, Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art and Design; Dave Dyment, Director of Programming at Mercer Union, Toronto; Gordon Hatt, a writer and curator who lives in Kitchener; and Haema Sivanesan, Executive Director of Toronto’s South Asian Visual Arts Centre—and allow them to outline their individual......

Since January 2006, quirky black-and-white brushstroke illustrations have graced the back page of the The New York Times Magazine. The work is that of Toronto-based designer and OCAD teacher Bob Hambly, who just completed his 500th illustration—a bus—for the prestigious Sunday newspaper supplement. "Even after twelve years, I still get that little pang in my stomach each time a new story is sent to me," he says. "I feel a great sense of responsibility for......

Each week, Torontoist shows off the most interesting, creative, and cool submissions to our Torontoist Flickr Pool. We're especially partial to photos that show our city in a new light, highlight a recent event, and remind us why we live here. Join the Flickr pool and show us what you've got. Parking AvailableBY DAIFUKU SENSEI In the streetcar, ParkdaleBY 'NENZI UntitledBY ARCADY GENKIN 95-BirdBY ILS_FL winter sceneBY ARTICLAMB Day 113 - Feb 26, 2008BY MIKE......

At the Interior Design Show this past weekend, British innovator-icon Tom Dixon lamented the impossibility of creative rebellion in today's art and design world. In the eighties, he said, postmodern design values were near-universal, and thus easy to subvert. In the oughties, however, the aesthetic is increasingly fractured, and there is no one standard to either strive for or strain against. If anything goes and nothing is new, how are today's students to design......

One day Pamela Anderson stood in the centre turn lane of a highway, clad only in a Canadian flag...picturing it? Welcome to the lead photo for the "Best of Canada" edition of SNAP!. Now in its seventh year, SNAP! combines a juried competition for established and emerging photographers with a gala fundraiser on March 2 at the National Ballet School. Organizers predict that the works offered in live and silent auctions will raise $140,000......

According to Rafael Fajardo, absolutely. In the midst of last Wednesday's snowstorm, Fajardo spoke to a half-filled auditorium at OCAD as part of the Faculty of Design's speaker series. He is currently the Director of Digital Media Studies and Electronic Media Arts Design at Denver University, as well as the Director of SWEAT, a collaborative of video game designers who strive to push gaming beyond the realm of entertainment. Fajardo sees video game design......

Attention basement dwellers: on Wednesday, February 6, OCAD is hosting a free presentation by SWEAT, a collaboration of game designers, programmers, and artists dedicated to bringing socially aware video games to the general public. SWEAT has already produced games like Crosser, a Frogger-esque game about illegal crossing at the US/Mexico border, and is currently developing Juan & the Beanstalk, a game about the societal effects of illegal drug production in Colombia. The presentation will......

Snappy Answers runs every Saturday afternoon. Send your questions, be they tough or trivial, to snappyanswers@torontoist.com. Hi. I'm an immigrant all the way from the depths of third world South America. First of all I would like to say how blessed I feel to be able to live in a such a great country like Canada and such an awesome city like Toronto. I love this country and I love this city just as much......

Good morning university and college students, and good news: you don't have to go to school today. The University of Toronto updated its website shortly after 9 a.m. this morning to say that "Due to severe weather conditions on Friday, Feb. 1, U of T Missisauga is closed, U of T Scarborough is closed as of 10:00AM, and U of T (St. George) is closed as of 11:00AM. University buildings are closed and classes......

Carol Schwartzott, A Brief History of the Fan, Lilliput Press, c2003. Lovers of books, art, art books, and book art should check out Art Under Cover, an exhibition of "books as sculpture" which opens today at the Toronto Reference Library (TRL). The show features a selection of rarely-seen pieces from the TRL's special collections. Artists' books have been an integral part of 20th century art practice, from the Dada and surrealist movements to the......

Toronto has been called a city of neighbourhoods: The Beach, Yorkville, Chinatown, Little Italy, Greektown, The Annex; all have their defining characteristics that make them appealing to locals as well as visitors. And when it comes down to it, most of these areas are well-defined by the intersection of two major streets. Photo by sono salvo from Flickr. Baldwin Street, a lush strip that runs between Spadina Avenue to the west and McCaul Street to......

Torontoist has already done a pretty good job of letting you know how rad Posterchild is. In fact, the extent to which Torontoist writes about Posterchild could be seen as the textual equivalent of a marriage proposal. So without rehashing what has already been said about our favourite local street artist/public space crusader, just know that his radness is still on the upswing with new and improved versions of what he’s known best for:......

On Thursday evening, Torontoist broke the news that Wednesday's bomb threat at the Royal Ontario Museum was OCAD student Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson's final project for an advanced video class. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp's readymades (like Fountain, pictured above), Jonsson told us that the piece was about recontextualization, the idea that context changes art's meaning; in this case, something that is, he said, "quite clearly not dangerous, but when you put it in a different......

Regardless of how you choose to celebrate (or not) the upcoming holiday season, it’s hard not to embrace a spirit of generosity that seems unique to this time of year. Students from the Ontario College of Art & Design’s Think Tank program are hoping that giving mood will be alive and well among restaurant patrons on Thursday, December 6, as they unveil the inaugural Bread Project. A joint project between OCAD’s Think Tank and......

Proving that print’s not dying, just aging gracefully, Toronto’s 23rd Annual Book Arts Fair happens this Sunday, December 2. Held at OCAD, the hopefully bomb-free event is a celebration of all things typed, pressed, cut, bound and illustrated. Watch live demonstrations of skills you didn't know existed—printing from litho stones, anyone?—in the school's printmaking studios. And if you like a little commerce with your art, take a stroll through the Central Hall, where items......

The half-wit OCAD student who planted a fake bomb at the ROM on Wednesday has turned himself in to police and been charged with mischief and common nuisance. Ha, closing a major thoroughfare, wasting the time of hundreds of police and emergency service personnel, and forcing the cancellation of an AIDS gala—what a lovable scamp. The death rates at Canadian Hospitals have now been made public in a report from the Canadian Institute for......

Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson has, as he put it to Torontoist in a phone interview earlier today, "seen better days." The Integrated Media OCAD student and his final project for his advanced video class are the direct cause––intended or not––for yesterday's bomb scare at the Royal Ontario Museum, and, a day later, Jonsson is now suspended from OCAD and is wanted for questioning by police. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp's readymades pieces (the most famous of......

Photo by David Topping. A mysterious bag discovered in an alleyway beside the Royal Ontario Museum at about 7:00 p.m. tonight has shut down all traffic––pedestrian and vehicular––on Bloor between St. George and University and on Queen's Park southbound from Bloor and Harbord. UPDATE (10:45 p.m.): CTV is now saying that police have found "what appears to be a pipe bomb," and that the building was (half-)evacuated (contrary to what we were originally told).......