Results tagged “tallpoppy”

Over a year ago, Gary Rideout, Jr. of the Sketchersons bought a former Eritrean restaurant and pool hall at Bloor and Ossington and transformed it into the Comedy Bar. And his timing couldn't have been better. With venues like the Diesel Playhouse shuttering and big standup chains acting cool to so-called "alternative" comedy, Rideout's spot provided a haven for purveyors of standup, sketch, improv ,and acts that don't fit neatly into a category.

John Barber has been observing and commenting on City Hall for the Globe and Mail for thirteen years. Those with an interest in our municipal government will have noticed his recent absence from the paper's political pages, most acutely during the rather juicy, comment-worthy last few weeks.

Four years of watching the American version of So You Think You Can Dance whetted Canadian appetites for a homegrown version of the show, so when So You Think You Can Dance Canada premiered last year, its massive ratings and eventual status as #1 new show in Canada of the 2008 television season should not have come as a surprise. The quality of the show, however, did surprise; fans of the American dance reality show were impressed as the show's dancers (including eventual winner Nico Archambault) and choreographers provided routines of extremely high quality.

Over the past two years, one hundred (or so) faces have popped up on walls around the city. Most were completed in stages: a quick sketch of a woman done one night in black paint might grow blue eyes, brown hair, and earrings soon after, provided she hadn't already been painted over. The work, especially the female sketches variously dubbed "the painted lady" and "the lady," gained many admirers, including us, but the artist behind them managed to stay anonymous even as the sketches grew in number and reputation.

You’ve got to hand it to a woman who can look at footage of herself from the mid-1980s and unabashedly proclaim: “Yeah, I guess I was pretty hot.”

Photo by Jenna Marie Wakani from the NDP's Flickr photostream.

Last time we talked to Kenny and Spenny, they were headed into their third season. We heard a lot from Kenny about Kenny, a lot of Kenny's cheap shots at Spenny, and a little from Spenny, too.

Photo of Shamez Amlani by Yvonne Bambrick.

Photo of Chris Turner at the Greater World Earthship community in New Mexico by Ashley Bristowe.

Wes Williams is synonymous with Canadian hip hop. Bursting on the scene as Maestro Fresh Wes, Williams brashly declared, "'89 is mine." And it was. His debut single "Let Your Backbone Slide" was a crossover success and is the only Canadian rap single to go gold. His debut album Symphony in Effect remains the best selling Canadian hip hop album of all time despite being a year shy of its twentieth anniversary. Williams is often cited as the Godfather of Canadian hip hop and as he once rhymed, "I'm not a rapper, I'm an icon. Don't get it confused."

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 Magazine.

Kincardine-born, Mississauga-bred, Toronto-based, and Berlin-bound, Joel Gibb is the musical and managerial head of The Hidden Cameras, the fantastic and always well-populated music collective whose members have included Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy), Reg Vermue (Gentlemen Reg), Laura Barrett, Maggie MacDonald (Republic of Safety), Dave Meslin (founder of the Toronto Public Space Committee), Bob Wiseman, Steve Kado (founder of Blocks Recording Club, member of Barcelona Pavilion and Ninja High School), Ohad Benchetrit (Do Make Say Think), Don Kerr (The Rheostatics), and many, many others.

Things you may not know about Raine Maida: his mom was Conrad Black's long-time executive assistant. He's written and produced songs for Kelly Clarkson. He went to U of T for Criminology. He's about to help rebuild a school in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He is also launching his first solo album on November 13—a disc that comes wrought with anger and dejection, but also an earnest solemnity. More than a year...

If you've watched Global at all recently, you've probably seen the promos for their new series Da Kink in My Hair, which premieres tomorrow night, October 14 at 7:30 p.m. The show is being billed as a sitcom, but that's not actually the most accurate description. It's a funny show set mainly inside a West Indian hair salon in Toronto called Letty's, which sounds like it could be a very sitcom-ish premise, but it's...

Photo by Lee Towndrow.

Peter Gatien was, at one time, the undisputed king of nightlife in New York City. After being driven out of the United States by a government crackdown on nightclubs led by former New York mayor and current American presidential candidate, Rudy Giuliani, Gatien made Toronto his home, and is now opening CiRCA in the former Playdium/Lucid location on John Street.

Stephen Bulger is perhaps Toronto's most successful purveyor of photography. Since opening his eponymous gallery in 1995, Bulger has curated 110 exhibitions and represented more than 50 photographers, traveling regularly to promote their work here and abroad. In 1997 he co-founded Contact, now the largest photography festival of its kind in North America, during which seemingly every gallery and spare wall in the city is given over to photographs. As a collector whose principle interest is the documentary image, Bulger occupies a unique corner of the photography scene, one that has sustained the growth of his gallery while raising the profile of both contemporary and forgotten photographers.

A lot happens in and around Toronto, but we can only write about so much in a week. Here's the best of the rest, in a new weekly feature we're calling Superfluist. Superfluist will appear every Friday night.

Photo by Jason Thompson Photography.

If you've ever noticed half of a bike coming out of a wall, naked plywood people screwed into the facade of a building, a portrait of the Gladstone pasted to the Dufferin bridge or a fat rope chain hanging from the next of Adam Beck, then you've seen the work of Specter. A self-proclaimed prankster, Specter's canvas is the city. Always inventive, his art is meant to brighten one's day and cause people to rethink their physical surroundings. On the verge of his first solo show, Cardboard Gates, which opened Friday night at Resistor Gallery, we caught up with the mysterious man to chat.

RISE/ABOVE at Dundas Street & University Avenue.

Every Sunday, Frank Warren takes some of the anonymous secrets he receives by the hundreds and posts them to his website, PostSecret. Warren receives them as postcards, each one artistically suited to the secret it contains; what was originally conceived as a one-time art project has not only given way a website with over a million hits per week, but three books compiling PostSecret's submissions into different themes: PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives, My Secret (secrets from teenagers and college students), and The Secret Lives of Men and Women.

Would you want to read a book about the middle-aged agoraphobe son of a dead rock star whose life is transformed by a nine year old girl who wants to be a dog? Tish Cohen thinks you will, and Torontoist agrees. The Toronto native has just published her first novel, Town House, which she describes as an “urban anxiety tale”. There’s been a lot of buzz about it, not only in the musty halls of publishing but also in Hollywood, where the movie rights have already been picked up by Fox. Tish and her publishers are holding a free public launch party tonight at the Drake Hotel.

Toronto street artist (or what have you) Posterchild, the subject of a recent Tall Poppy interview right here on Torontoist, sent us along these two videos earlier this week from his first "first major film effort" Left Out In The Cold.

The image everyone has of the quintessential comic book expert is a guy sitting around in his basement with 50-year-old copies of Superman, ranting wildly about the Golden Age. Leading comics theorist Scott McCloud defies that stereotype entirely. He is best known for writing comic books about comic books: epic treatises which are remarkably optimistic about the future of the industry. This evening he will be in Toronto giving a lecture, Understanding, Reinventing, and Making Comics, at OISE Theatre.

The best things in life are free: long walks on the beach, make-outs in the dark and, for one day a year, comic books. Comics nerds around the globe will unite in spirit this Saturday to celebrate Free Comic Book Day, which means a trip to your local comic book store will result in a handful of free stuff and a general sense of well-being.

You are more familiar with street artist Posterchild's work than you realize. Visit his site Blade Diary, and you'll immediately recognize his posters, stencils and outdoor installations. Like fellow stenciler Banksy once said, "If you have a statue in the city centre you could go past it every day on your way to school and never even notice it, right. But as soon as someone puts a traffic cone on its head, you've made your own sculpture." Posterchild isn't just putting up drawings on outdoor walls; he's changing the way we see our public spaces. And now that you know his works are there, you'll start to see them all over the downtown core.

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.

Noël Mitrani is the director of Sur La Trace D’Igor Rizzi, which premiered in Canada at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006, winning the CityTV Award for Best Canadian First Feature. The film, in which Jean-Marc Thomas (Laurent Lucas), a former European soccer player, wanders the streets Montreal before falling into petty crime while grieving his dead lover, was reviewed positively by Torontoist before the festival, and now plays as part of Canada’s Top Ten tomorrow night, Wednesday, January 31, at 8:45pm, and Mitrani will be taking part in the panel, New Quebec Cinema, on Thursday, February 1, 2007 at 6:30pm.