Photo of Chris Turner at the Greater World Earthship community in New Mexico by Ashley Bristowe. It's been impossible to ignore the issue of climate change. Al Gore bounced back to relevancy with An Inconvenient Truth, and even NHL players have gotten into the act by teaming with David Suzuki to put global warming in the penalty box. With Earth Day coming up on Tuesday, Torontoist sat down with Globe and Mail sustainability columnist......

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......

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......

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......

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. Since the publication of her first book The Middle Stories in 2002, Toronto native Sheila Heti has established herself as a writer with an original and unnerving—and often extremely funny—imagination. In 2005 she published Ticknor, a well-received sojourn into the anxious mind of its narrator. Heti is also the founder of the freewheeling lecture series Trampoline Hall, and a regular contributor to McSweeney's ultra-hip publications. Heti talked to Torontoist about......

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. Gatien calls the 55,000 square foot CiRCA an "entertainment complex," which hardly begins to......

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......

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. Cathy Gordon decided to get very, very publicly divorced on Monday, with an art piece she called "On My Knees." For it, she crawled around Toronto for a while (on her knees!), signed divorce papers, and then......

Photo by Jason Thompson Photography. As TTC Chair, Vice-Chair of the Works Committee, and Ward 18 Councillor—among an ocean of other positions that he holds now or has once held—Adam Giambrone's influence spreads far across the city of Toronto and to some of its most contested issues: transit, the environment, and development, to name a few. Depending on who you ask, he is either the city's best archaeologist-turned-politician or its worst. His term as......

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......

RISE/ABOVE at Dundas Street & University Avenue. You probably haven't seen the arrows around our city unless you've been looking for them—or looking up. Scattered throughout downtown Toronto are forty-three arrows just like the one pictured, all carefully hung high above street level by an globe-trotting artist known, appropriately, as ABOVE. In what ABOVE calls "Word/Play," each side of an arrow (or "Arrow Mobiles") contains one half of a pairing of words. The signs......

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......

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......

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 videos are of one night that Posterchild spent doing nine pasteups, seven stencils, and four tags and drawings last winter in Kensington Market—the culmination of months of preparation. A full forty minutes......

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......

Toronto-based Oli Goldsmith has embarked on a project both daunting and bizarre, but surely to the delight of pop culture afficionados: he's creating a thousand portraits of...Borat? Yep, Borat. A senior designer at the CBC, former Artist in Residence at the Drake Hotel and creator of Our Lady Peace's Spritual Machines album art, Goldsmith has now set his sights on the infamous character created by Sacha Baron Cohen. The artist spoke with Torontoist about......

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. As part of the festivities, The Beguiling will be giving......

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......

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. The album angel food for thought soon became an indie smash for a woman who used to perform with an aluminum heating......

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......

Brad J. Lamb is not, to put it gently, universally loved. As head of his eponymous Brad J. Lamb Realty, he is a titan of Toronto's condo industry, the closest thing we have to a Trump -- right down to his new TV show that airs in February, Big City Broker. And, as titans tend to be, Lamb is a polarizing character; indeed, it seems that the only thing Lamb has in common with......

Who likes lists? Everybody! As we creep up on the new year, we thought we'd reflect on a few of our more popular (and our more controversial) posts of the past twelve months. Thanks to our revamped Favourites page, it's a little easier. If nothing else, this post will give you some reading material to glance over while you're busy getting spiffy for this fine evening. 1. Our TTC Swag Suggestions (144 comments, October......

I first heard about Mancunian singer-songwriter Jim Noir last April, while traveling through London. By the time I returned home, his debut album, Tower of Love, seemed to be getting attention in Toronto too, including a large display at Sonic Boom. But Jim Noir himself was not so lucky crossing the ocean. When Sean Lennon took the stage at the Opera House last week, he welcomed Noir and his band, saying he was glad they......

Two of our contributors, Shari Kasman and Jenelle Rupchand, are all about arts & crafts this weekend. In this roundup, Shari brings you some of the many weekend fairs going on, while Jenelle's stocking up on some fair trade goods. Baby Liam wants something soft and turquoise, Aunt Priscilla needs a lavender shawl, and Herman the co-worker would love a fashionable paperweight. With crowds galore and awful renditions of the top Xmas hits, the......

Earlier this year Hannah Sung left a 'dream job' at MuchMusic to travel. But Sung wasn't merely backpacking around the world, like so many 20-somethings. She was working with CARE Canada shooting a documentary on the NGO's efforts in Indonesia and East Timor. Upon her return to Canada she also started touring high schools. Both experiences changed Sung's life and urged her to do more, particularly for the people of East Timor, a country......

In the United States, the day after Thanksgiving has come to be known as Black Friday, during which retailers offer huge discounts and usher in the Christmas shopping season. Not to be outdone, the chic anti-chic magazine Adbusters introduced its own event on the same day: Buy Nothing Day. And while American Thanksgiving is limited to the United States (for now), Adbusters assures us that Buy Nothing Day should be celebrated globally. So...happy Buy Nothing......

Photo credit: Victor Tavares. Toronto is the white heterosexual male of concert audiences: we rarely dance unless very intoxicated, and the movements are awkward and self-conscious at best. Auditory satisfaction is usually conveyed by a bounce of the head, or an occasional thrust of a fist towards the stage. Despite our legendary history of aloofness, Shout Out Out Out Out made Toronto dance their asses off earlier this month at a sold-out gig at......

C'mon admit it. You secretly still love plush toys. They're cute, fuzzy, lovable and if they're creations from the Monster Factory then you know they've got a design sense and quirkiness that makes them stand out. Since 2003, these Torontonians have been hard at work designing and making their whimsical plush toys. Torontoist finally managed to cobble together an e-mail interview with the trio earlier this week. They're launching a new series of monsters......