Photo of The Breeders by Chris Glass To all the slackers who swore they'd go to something CMW this week; to those who aspire to hear some maple-leaf music; and to the die-hard, loyal attendees; we have an announcement—tonight is last call. While a couple shows are saved for Sunday, this is the last full night to take in a few of the 500 artists in town, and what better way to finish it......

Photo of Hollerado courtesy of Hollerado. It’s day three of Canadian Music Week, and you can feel the excitement in the air. Before we get started with today’s preview though, we have a couple of public service announcements: German rockers 4LYN have cancelled their show at Clinton’s Tavern due to ill health, and Hollerado are looking for a place to crash for the night. Apparently they’ll make you nachos. Where were we? Right. There......

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.......

Or it will be tonight between 10:00 and 10:51 p.m., when there will be a total lunar eclipse over Toronto (and various other cities North America and Western Europe, but 10 p.m. is when it’s happening here). Lunar eclipses may not be as apocalyptic and awe-inspiring as solar eclipses, but they do have the advantage of not blinding you if you stare at them. Also, if you catch one at just the right moment,......

Reg Hartt, everyone's favourite dude with a movie theatre in his basement, is promoting the new(ish) film version of off-Broadway tittilator Naked Boys Singing by screening a mini Queer Film Festival at the Cineforum over the next few weeks. Each Thursday night for the next four weeks, he'll screen Naked Boys (which is exactly what it sounds like) at 9, with a different gay movie as a lead-in at 7. While the main attraction......

Feeling “Christmassy” yet? We aren’t either (we've just assumed you weren’t, apologies if you are, or something), and there isn’t that much on at the cinema yet to start ramping up the festive joy. It’s a Wonderful Life is showing at the Fox starting tomorrow and Bad Santa is going to be on at the Revue this Wednesday. To be completely honest, if you’re going to check out anything at those cinemas, we recommend......

Photo by Larsz Tonight the Art Bar poetry series will host its last event for 2007. Ending the year off with their annual Dead Poets Society night, this year's event will be hosted by David Clink and feature poets Ian Burgham, George Elliot Clarke, Karen Connelly, Barry Dempster, and more. Readers will cover poets such as A. R. Ammons, Margaret Avison, Cheng Sait Chia, Robert Herrick, Irving Layton, Dylan Thomas, and others. Reading series......

Thursday evening, CEPAL (the Canadian-Palestinian Educational Exchange) presents a talk by Dr. Norman Finkelstein at U of T's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). Just a few months ago, he was Professor Norman Finkelstein, but he made himself some powerful enemies, and now he's pretty much out on the street (i.e. lecture circuit). Apparently, that's not an uncommon development for academics—even Jewish ones—who are critical of Israeli policies and the advocates for same.......

With much-maligned NHL commissioner Gary Bettman in the crowd, the Toronto Maple Leafs dropped the puck on the 2007-08 season at the Air Canada Centre last night. He was probably unable to catch a glimpse of a homemade sign halfway across the arena that read: “Bettman: ruining the NHL since 1993.” Despite the Buds’ slightly new uniforms (which either look like pajamas or practice jerseys, depending on who you ask), one might have been......

When Monkey Warfare premiered at TIFF last year, Torontoist's Mathew Kumar gave it a less-than-positive review. (Its director and star were none too pleased.) When it opened at the Royal in December, however, I commented, "I personally love Monkey Warfare....I've been urging everyone I know to see it; the film fills me with a glee that makes me want to shout its title from the rooftops....On a number of levels, the film is an......

Tonight the Drake Hotel hosts the second edition of its Nonfiction series. The big idea is that a bunch of journos sit around at the bar swapping stories that never made it to print, like one imagines Charles Foster Kane's newspapermen might have done. Only for a $5.30 cover, civilians are allowed to come listen. The last edition was already somewhat controversial, especially because of the event's somewhat curious and impossible to enforce off-the-record......

If you're downtown and looking for a lunch-hour chill-out tomorrow (Wednesday), head over to Indigo in the Manulife Centre at Bay and Bloor. At 12:15 p.m., Juno Award winner, Grammy recipient, Officer of the Order of Canada, and Canada's Walk Of Fame starholder Diana Krall will be sitting behind a piano and performing songs from her latest release, The Very Best of Diana Krall. If you didn't get your autograph fix during TIFF last week,......

It’s the final day of the festival, which is always rather maudlin one—although for those of us who try to cover it, the festival is largely a far too hectic, busy period of time, once things start to slow down the sudden lack of pressure is terribly deflating. Never mind—we’ll have some wrap up coverage for you next week. Tonight’s closing gala is Emotional Arithmetic, reviewed by Jonathan Goldsbie at the very beginning of......

It begins! Tonight the Toronto International Film Festival opens officially with Jeremy Podeswa’s Fugitive Pieces, so if you want to start soaking up the atmosphere of the festival head down to Roy Thompson Hall before 8 p.m. It’s easy to write off the festival before it’s even begun: maybe you’re already sick of all the coverage, annoyed about how scarce tickets can be (despite some high ticket prices—this year we’re perplexed as to why......

"Busker? Don't even know 'er!" jokes aside, Toronto's annual street performer extravaganza is back until Sunday with a new roster of bizarre talents from around the globe. Buskerfest, the last of the major summer street festivals, draws about 350,000 spectators over four days and it's the best place to see someone jam a sword down one's esophagus up close. Magicians and balloon artists are also present for the kiddies, and there are plenty of......

Last week, because we were completely distracted by Dock in a Box, we didn’t mention our sadness at the loss of both Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. We also couldn’t think of a Director bad enough to lament the continued existence of in the same breath. Thanks to a viewing of Brett Ratner’s Rush Hour 3, we have that man! We really think that Lars von Trier missed a trick in his recent satire......

Hanging out in the city with Torontoist's Summer Reads. LitTO continues this week with a few summer reading picks. These are literally reading choices for the season, as we haven’t read them yet, but plan to take them to the cottage. Films and Poems by John Barlow, LyricalMyrical. John Barlow’s poems have a habit of looking at this crazy world, not agreeing with it, and finding their own peace and happiness. He has a......

On the west side of Dufferin Street, just south of Bloor, is a Wal-Mart. It is (currently) the only one in the former City of Toronto. On the other side of Dufferin is Dufferin Grove Park. It is the very antithesis of Wal-Mart, a collective community creation that is an exemplar of neighbourhood engagement—public space of, by, and for the people. Tonight, the Toronto Public Space Committee and Friends of Dufferin Grove Park invite......

Have you entered our Hot Rod competition yet, readers? It's still running. You probably should enter, as it’s the most exciting film you could see this week, in our humble opinion. We really like Andy Samberg, you see. It’s so rarely worth struggling through an episode of Saturday Night Live just to see him (he’s so often wasted) but Hot Rod could be good! It really could! Well, alright, maybe you have a stranger......

Even though Brooklyn has been part of New York since 1898, the calibre of talent that comes out of there these days almost makes it seem like a separate city again (and if it were, it would be the same size as Toronto!). Tonight, Brooklyn-based Project Jenny, Project Jan are performing at our very own Horseshoe Tavern for the Toronto stop of their tour, which has already taken them to Philly, Boston and Montreal. Joining......

Tonight, The Fifteenth Annual Scream Literary Festival launches its six-day festival with readings by Dennis Lee and Souvankham Thammavongsa at The Gladstone Ballroom. Performances by George Elliot Clarke, and robots belonging to Shapour Shahidi are also promised, and it sounds like audience members are invited to make art with weird, old science textbooks. This year's festival “considers the strange alchemy of poetry and science, through readings, panels, and performances.” On July 9th, the festival......

We know that you have been enjoying the LED lights on the CN Tower, but so far, they have just been ironing out the kinks. Until now. Tonight, June 28, there will be an official lighting ceremony. And it wouldn't be the world's largest phallic object freestanding structure that we know and love if it didn't throw a huge bash to celebrate the event. Starting at 9 p.m. there will be live entertainment and a......

It's the week where the Canadian broadcasters announce their upcoming season (known as an "upfront" because advertisers are then able to buy commercial airtime ahead of time or "up front"), and ACTRA isn't very happy. The Canadian actors' union is angry that domestic networks are spending a record $688-million on foreign programming (2006) instead of investing in new Canadian dramatic programming. Currently, the most successful Canadian shows are expensive franchises like Canadian Idol, Entertainment......

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......

If you're looking for something to do tonight, swing by City Hall between 7:30-10 p.m. to check out a free forum titled "Stepping Up The Environmental Agenda in Food, Housing and Lifestyles." Guest speakers include (taken from the official site): FOOD—Mike Schreiner, an award-winning social entrepreneur who has recently joined Local Flavour Plus as Vice President after 10 years as the co-founder of WOW Foods, a Toronto-based home delivery service for organic food that aims......

Tonight, DRAFT Reading Series presents its season finale with an impressive list of writers: George Elliot Clarke, Flavia Cosma, Phyllis Gottlieb, Pasha Malla, Merle Nudelman, and Ottawa's rob mclennan. Please go buy rob a beer for us: he's a tireless promoter/publisher of Canadian poetry, a prolific poet himself, and a wonderful soul. He keeps an always interesting blog of reviews and articles about books, writers, and events across the country. Honour him with multiple beverages,......

Get on over to the east end tonight for Exile Editions' Spring Reading. New books will bloom this eve, and others will be ripe for picking throughout spring and summer. Exile Editorial Board Member Chris Doda gives us the layout for tonight’s garden of authors: Priscila Uppal's Ontological Necessities, her fifth book of poetry with Exile, has been shortlisted for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize. It deals predominantly with the absurdity of the 21st century......

There are three interesting happenings in the local art scene right now. This evening Mercer Union presents new compositions by Stephen Parkinson, a local musician who creates "do-it-yourself situations...with various friends as performers, reacting to a variety of methods of prescription/notation, involving toy instruments, electronics, vintage turntables, field recordings, as well as more traditional musical instruments." Tonight's various friends include Martin Arnold, Allison Cameron, Eric Chenaux, Rob Clutton, Aimée Dawn Robinson, and Doug Tielli. The......

For over forty years, Toronto’s Coach House Books has consistently offered stellar choices in all things literature. With a catalogue that includes writers such as Anne Michaels, Di Brandt, Steve McCaffery, Michael Ondaatje and bpNichol, one can't go wrong by supporting this local press. This season’s list of new releases continues the tradition of awesomeness. Tonight, Coach House will launch their five spring titles with a party and reading from all five authors. The new......

While last weekend saw a number of free, outdoor parties in various legal and quasi-legal locations in the city, the springtime rain has washed out similar aspirations this weekend. No matter, for on these next nights Toronto's underground has prepared a number of special treats for our ears: Tonight at Crosstown, Montrealer Akufen brings his glitchy, techy microbeats to Hogtown for some raw audiophile action at what is increasingly becoming the city's showcase of......