Results tagged “spokenword”

Next Saturday, Toronto Poetry Slam brings you the last slam of the season, with some of the city’s brightest and wordiest battling it out for the last remaining place in the semi finals. Finalists will have a shot at the 2008 Toronto Poetry Slam Team, which competes at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word and the US National Poetry Slam (this year to be held in Madison, Wisconsin).

It's going to be a busy couple of weeks in Toronto, and you may have a tough time deciding just what bookish thing to attend. If anything, Torontoist recommends you check out this year's second Toronto Small Press Book Fair this Saturday. The twice-yearly event features a variety of micro to medium-sized presses offering zines, books, chapbooks, journals, hand-made crafts, and many other wonderful things. And if you've got any time and energy left after the fair, you also might want to head down to the Cervejaria, where the Toronto Poetry Slam will be celebrating their second anniversary. There will be a spoken word competition, featuring the spoken word folk band, The Fugitives.

This week Musicologist will be checking out Regina Spektor at the Kool Haus, thanks to the insistence of a friend who pretty much exclusively listens to hip hop. The fact the he loves Spektor means she's gotta be good. It's sold out, but Musicologist never shies away from listing sold out shows—we all know there's always an (expensive) last-ditch way to get in if you're desperate. (Why does that sound dirty? We mean scalpers, of course.)

Photo of Julie Doiron courtesy of Jagjaguwar.

This week, the already-awesome Dufferin Grove Park is absolutely ablaze with awesomeness, with tendrils of wicked cool billowing through its leafy canopies and filling the lungs and hearts of theatre aficionados everywhere. The Cooking Fire Theatre Festival, which runs from June 20-24, is a presentation of five short plays, accompanied by a spectacular organic meal and infused with a spirit of collaboration and comraderie from start to finish.

There’s a lot of poetry happening in the city today. We realize that it’s Saturday n’ all, and we hope our readers are taking time to slow down to hear the poetry in their own lives.

There are as many types of poetry as there are different styles of music. Books of poetry are usually confined to a shelf or two at a local bookstore, but if you want to buy a CD, you visit an entire store dedicated to music. When someone professes to like poetry, the reference is probably to a favourite type of poetry, and not all poetries—just as a jazz afficionado might dislike Country and Western, or a pop music fan might hate Metal.

March 8th marks International Women's Day each year, though it's sadly not yet a national holiday in Canada, as it is in a few countries. But official holiday or not, there are still a tonne of events happening in Toronto to mark the occasion. Here are some of Torontoist's best bets for celebrating feminism this week:

It wasn't just any sweater, but "the worn, warm sweater belonging to A Boy" with that goat-like smell which all teenage boys possess. In 1991, "The Sweater" propelled singer-songwriter Meryn Cadell into the music history books, landing on the Top 40 charts and illuminating the request lines at Z-100 in New York.

Award-winning Toronto author (and emergency physician) Vincent Lam will give his first public reading since winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize this Wednesday as Diaspora Dialogues teams up with the Harbourfront Centre’s International Reading series.

So, late tomorrow afternoon when you wake up all hungover from Halloween partying in the apartments directly above beside and across from Torontoist's (or perhaps as early as noon if you have small children or are that one guy who didn't see the flyers) please try to remember that the weekend is not over yet.

The week starts off with another instalment of Pussy Pen, an evening of readings and performance focusing on women, trans, and queer perspectives. It takes place at Tango and Crews, 508 Church St, beginning at 8pm. Free.

The last 10 days have been a great time to be a film nut, but now Christmas comes early for book nerds as over the next few weeks two of the biggest events of the year take place, starting with next Sunday’s Word on the Street, which will be followed by the start of the International Festival of Authors in mid-October.

This week’s listings come at you one day late but better than ever. Ok, maybe not better than ever. More like as adequate as before.

A couple of Sunday night events to kick-off or end your week, depending on how you see it. Gypsy Eyes, who is all over the place this week, hosts Last Call Poets at the Cadillac Lounge – 1296 Queen W. – tonight at 8pm. Admission is $7.

The Art of Slam, a spoken word performance art in which poets spit their pieces in the hope of getting a good score from the audience, was probably best-documented in the 1998 feature film Slam. In the movie, a young Saul Williams becomes a rapper/poet/writer in response to the harsh police-as-predators community in which he lives. This music could accurately be described as intensely verbose, though never as misunderstood as its way more popular cousin. (If there are lines to be drawn between any rap/crime issues of the day and slam poetry, it's up to you to draw them.)

I'm *sixeyes. I'm back. And Torontoist is sick of radio. The kind of )... Torontoist could go on, but that would be redundant (but it does feel good). Yeah, Torontoist just noticed that all the c.r.a.p. referenced was female... oh, but there are some 'males' who terrorize radio as well. Tim McGraw ("Live Like You Were Dying"... this is Celine Dion on steroids... not an improvement), Daniel Powter ("Bad Day" or is it "Had A Bad Day"... whenever he unleashes one of his oooooohowwwooohowww's Torontoist has to think, 'Oh, so that's what a squirrel sounds like when it's run over). There are many more, it's just that Torontoist doesn't recognize who these guys are and therefore can't make fun of them.

Wonderwoman Lisa Pijuan-Nomura has been curating and hosting RED for almost three years now, when she decided there weren't enough venues for performers and artists to simply play. Pijuan-Nomura, a dynamic performer in her own right who often uses these evenings to workshop pieces of her own, has always been adept at gathering an interesting blend of artists - where else can you catch quirky Brampton band the Lollipop People, spoken word artist Wakefield Brewster, and a tap dancer all in the same night?