On Thursday night at the Silver Dollar, Jay Reatard's show got ugly. The Memphis band's shows usually do, but almost never like Thursday's: Reatard punched a patron who climbed on stage square in the face and angrily packed up his gear (video above), before Dan Burke, the Dollar's legendary and notorious booker, hopped on stage himself, delivering a tirade against Reatard ("fuck this American...that's fucking pussy shit"). On his blog on Friday, Reatard recapped......

On April 3rd, Trevor Norris successfully defended his dissertation "Consuming, Schooling and the End of Politics" and was awarded a PhD in Philosophy of Education by the Ontatio Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE/UT). On April 4th, a party was held at the Bedford Academy in his honour. Little did Trevor know that into this party would explode his friends in the shape of a uniformed marching band, banging......

Sam Javanrouh—the man behind the venerable Daily Dose of Imagery, this city's most widely-read photoblog—has always had something of a knack for creating amazing stop-motion timelapse videos. Whether it's cars filling up an Edward and Bay parking lot or the downtown skyline (go to his archives under the heading "timelapse photography" to see more), his videos are hypnotic, beautiful, and fascinating—a chance to see the motions of the city in a new way. Javanrouh's......

The above video—not safe for work unless you're using headphones—was shot by the late Peter Walker and is a clip from Min Sook Lee's documentary Hogtown: The Politics of Policing (winner of the best Canadian feature prize at Hot Docs 2005). Uploaded to YouTube fewer than three weeks ago, it's been passed around online over the last few days, since being linked to by Toronto Life's Philip Preville in a Friday blog post. The......

Yesterday afternoon, a group named AlwaysQuestion organized a "day of action" protesting a fee increase for New College residence students at the University of Toronto. The day was to end with a sit-in at Simcoe Hall intended to garner the group a meeting with U of T President David Naylor, to get "the proposed fee increase removed from the University Affairs Board meeting," and to get fifteen minutes at that meeting for a "presentation......

No longer content to simply paint kitschy nature porn, Canadian artist Robert Bateman is tackling performance art. In a two-minute video for environmental group No Tankers, Bateman paints a black wash over Orca Procession to demonstrate the detrimental effect of oil spills. But Bateman was not defacing the original, he was defacing a reference copy valued at around $1,950. The Star reports: "Bateman afterward rushed into the shower with the print to wash the......

Far be it from us to take pleasure in our favourite team’s misfortunes...but as much as we love the Maple Leafs, we had to laugh after Vesa Toskala’s incredible blunder against the New York Islanders earlier tonight. If you missed it, we’ve included the YouTube clip...which was probably unnecessary, since the play—a goal scored by New York defenceman Rob Davison from his own goal line, a distance of approximately 200 feet—is about to become......

A characteristic of spending any good length of time on the internet is desensitization—one's tolerance levels for graphic horror are escalated with repeated exposure to lemon parties, tubgirls, a certain .cx domain, and the indelicate contents of 1 cup. Nothing, however, prepared us for this eyeball-searing, nightmare-inducing, yet totally brilliant commercial created by local ad agency Zig, Toronto. It should be safe for work, but fair warning to those at overzealous nanny workplaces: you......

Being a TV reporter is dangerous work. Just ask intrepid reporter Rob Leth, who set out on a fine sunny day to do a typical fluff piece in Riverdale Park. We're still unclear about what exactly he was hoping to accomplish with a camera and his "trusty stopwatch" at the bottom of the toboggan hill. He could have been timing a toboggan race or demonstrating how quickly sledders could lose control. Or maybe it......

Award-winning Canadian comedy troupe The Imponderables are at it again. In this spoof of the movie The Bourne Ultimatum, the famous red-and-white striped bespectacled Waldo must piece together clues of his half-remembered past. Bourne Parody on FunnyOrDie.com Just like one of the classic children's books, see how many familiar Toronto landmarks you can spot in the video. You can catch The Imponderables live at the Rivoli this Tuesday, March 11th, at 9 p.m. Also make......

Mark Oliver Tessaro just sent us a link to the video above, of an unbelievably fun-looking do-it-yourself ski-hill that he and his roommates built in mid-February on their Kensington Market deck. Says Mark of the hill: I live with 3 other guys above a used clothing store in Kensington Market and we have a ridiculously large deck. A few weeks ago this meant that we also had a ridiculously large amount of snow on......

According to the Inside the CBC blog and the National Post, Toronto's favourite boyish-looking provocateur, Avi Lewis, is back on the airwaves with his newest show, Frontline: USA. The show promises to "strip away the spin and highlight real issues such as poverty, violence, race, health, and immigration" in America. Considering that Lewis is involved and that the show airs on Al Jazeera English, chances are that Frontline: USA won't be a Dobbsian exercise......

Jeff Healey, legendary Torontonian musician and owner of Jeff Healey's Roundhouse on Blue Jays Way (and Healey's at Queen and Bathurst prior to that), has died of cancer at only 41. The news, posted to his website earlier tonight, comes just under two months before the domestic release of Healey's new album, Mess of Blues, recorded with what Healey called "the best damned bar band in Canada." His website has plenty more information about......

If you like dancing and the TTC, this is probably the sweetest thing you will see today (other than, maybe, that Spadina Bus video). On Saturday afternoon, Jared Alleyne––inspired by Toronto's Improv Everywhere–inspired stunts like the Eaton Centre freeze and the no-pants subway ride––organized a small group to fill a Yonge-University subway car with spontaneous, unsolicited, and definitely unchoreographed dancing. We'd say more, but the video above pretty much does all the talkin' for......

Many years ago, the TTC launched the smart "Ride The Rocket" ad campaign, of which only the slogan and typewriter-like font still exist. The fast-paced and effective television commercials featured a quirky spokesperson chattering rapidly into a wide-angle lens about the pros of public transit, and the slick spots made the Commission look modern, exciting, and cool. To a tourist or GTA resident, the subway looked like the backbone of any big city experience.......

Yes, it's kind of cool to hate on Alexisonfire once you've reached puberty. And no, Crisis, their last record, wasn't filled with delightfully twee indie pop, but pretty much every person who reviewed it dug it like whoa. And the fact remains that as played out as "screamo" gets, these guys have been doing it since long before downtuning and shouting put you on the fast track to rock 'n' roll success. They've bucked......

Spacing contributor Jessica Duffin Wolfe (aka vforvandal) captured the above video at Ossington station during a late-night mid-December snowstorm. It's difficult to think of a better possible respite from the sleet; every station should have one of these.......

Chris Bosh is at it again. Although his innovative video pitch to fans wasn't enough to push him past Kevin Garnett and Lebron James for a starting spot in the NBA All-Star Game, it has made him a media player. Sports Illustrated's Chris Mannix details how the video's popularity has raised Bosh's profile to new heights and how it prompted CB4 to start his own Chris Bosh TV channel on YouTube. To ring in......

It's Super Tuesday south of the border, and American politics are finally becoming interesting again rather than just depressing. The web is crowded with candidate support videos, and one of the oddest and most widely disseminated is "Yes We Can," assembled by Black Eyed Pea will.i.am. Distractingly overlaying an Obama speech onto a rootsy acoustic track, the video features appearances by fellow musicians Common and John Legend, but also Scarlett Johansson (who's releasing an......

Sure, Protest the Hero are technically from Whitby. And Troy Sexton, the Stomp cast member featured in this video, is really from Etobicoke. But that's nitpicking. Check out Troy trying to teach some sweet dance moves to Protest's rhythmically-challenged vocalist, Rody Walker. It's funny, but could you do better at noon on a Sunday with a hangover? Protest, who have been blowing people's minds with really stupidly complex punk-cum-metal, just released their latest full-length,......

Torontoist Environment Editor Chris Tindal is currently engaged in a federal by-election campaign. This weekly column is an attempt to offer a "behind the scenes" glimpse into what it's like to be that mysterious Other: a politician. A strange thing is happening here in Toronto Centre: Barack Obama seems to have become a candidate. Not literally of course, and (as you'll see) it's not clear what party he's representing, but his presence is certainly being......

Hot on the heels of a sweet little in-store at Sonic Boom, Brooklyn's Nada Surf have further endeared themselves to Torontoist (and allowed us to make yet another obvious "Popular" joke) by so obviously featuring our wonderful city in their new video for "I Like What You Say" (via Chromewaves) from their upcoming full-length, Lucky. How weird would it be if the band actually played a show at Filmore's? Only a sad animated cardboard......

Dundas Square gets a lot of flak for being a cold and soulless expanse of commercial neon and grey granite, and in a new music video for local singer-songwriter-producer Colin Munroe, it still is! But in this case, it's appropriate for his fantastic cover of Kanye West's mediocre "Flashing Lights" track. Directed by Toronto-based street artist, musician, and director Philip Sportel, the super-low-budget video effectively dulls the square down into a generic, industrial, underpopulated......

Remember Diamond Shreddies? Last summer, Post Cereals launched a new angle on their classic "Good good whole-wheat Shreddies." This year, one local comedy hero is reshaping the way we look at product testing. Toronto talent and four-time Canadian Comedy award-winner Kerry Griffin has recently appointed himself as head of Shreddies Market Research. Known for his work with improv troupe Slap Happy, Griffin spoon-feeds a series of test questions to consumers in three freshly-released clips,......

When Austrian company Wiener Stadtwerke approached Owen Pallett/Final Fantasy about using the song "This Is The Dream of Win & Regine" in a commercial, Pallett declined (probably nicely). So, naturally, Wiener Stadtwerke used the song in a commercial in June of this year anyway––or, at least, the most similar re-recorded version of Final Fantasy's song possible, changing a few notes in the violin part, adding some guy awkwardly singing "can you feel it?" and crediting......

Many of you may remember 25-year old Jason Jones, who was on the front page of the Toronto Star last February as a graphic indictment against "the miserable state of dental care for our working poor." The resulting outcry led to demands that the indigent and working poor have better access to dental care. Jones' story had a happy ending: offers poured in from readers to help pay for the dental work he desperately needed,......

The Ontario Coalition For Social Justice and Make Poverty History believe there need not always be dissonance when electioneering and rock n' roll meet. This Monday's Vote Out Poverty gala at Massey Hall promises to be a "coming together of people from all walks of life and political allegiances gathering for an evening of entertainment united by a desire to reduce poverty in Ontario, Canada and the world," and will feature a multi-partisan mashup......

Finally, another excuse to write about La Blogothèque's Take-Away Shows. The last time we covered the France-based music filmmakers, they were psyching us up for the Arcade Fire's May concert with the best concert footage we've ever seen of the band. Before that, they won us over with The Hidden Cameras parading along boardwalks. Now they've given us Owen Pallett plucking away at two songs––"Your Light Is Spent" (above) and "Horsetail Feathers"––in Paris. If......

Earlier this evening, The Star reported on what might somehow rank as one of the strangest videos on YouTube. Recorded on Monday afternoon at the protests in Montebello, the video shows the tail end of a confrontation between Dave Coles (president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada) and three masked men who seem hell-bent on rilling up him, his fellow protestors ("old guys, grandmothers, grandfathers"), and the line of riot-ready police.......

Do you love this city? Of course you do! And here's your chance to profess your undying love to the world. Elevator Films, the people who brought you the Hot Doc hit Let's All Hate Toronto, are holding a contest called "Let's All Love Toronto." They are asking you—yes, you—to share photos and videos of why it is that you love this fair city of ours. Does riding the subway warm your heart? Put......