Photo of d’bi.young.anitafrika and her son, Moon, courtesy of Women’s Press. Last week’s literary listings featured a number of events celebrating one man (Michael Redhill, who is likely exhausted and has since gone back to Narbonne, France) and One Book (Consolation). This week the obvious literary picks are two very talented, very different women. Recent winner of the Toronto Arts Council Foundation Emerging Artist award and one of Canada’s most celebrated young performers, d’bi.young.anitafrika......

Oh, the seemingly endless toil and frustration of being an underpublished and underappreciated writer. There's the mailbox full of polite, predictable rejections and the depressing rite of passage otherwise known as "open mic night." When you finally emerge from it all, it's certainly time to rejoice. Thankfully Pages Books & Magazines’ This Is Not A Reading Series has stepped up to celebrate some of the lesser-known but soon-to-be-well-known players in Toronto’s vibrant literary scene.......

SEPT. 28, 2006: Torontoist publishes "Two Peas In A Pod," a poorly considered article making fun of Eye and Now for both deeming Nuit Blanche significant enough to feature on their covers the same week. JAN. 17, 2008: Eye Weekly publishes "Where does Toronto Life get all those great ideas?" a poorly considered article making fun of Toronto Life for also deeming the Zeidler family, Dave Meslin, Yonge Street, and Council's right wing significant......

Selected quotes from "Toronto's Type and Tile Heritage" by Edward Keenan, from the November 14th issue of Eye Weekly: Joe Clark: "The trick is trying to prevent the destruction of the subway system as we know it. What are these [TTC] commissioners doing, exactly? Through malign neglect, they are beginning a 35-year process of destruction. Because if they make over Pape station so that it doesn’t match any of the other stations, if they......

Throughout the year, we select photos from the Torontoist Flickr Pool and feature them here on Torontoist––some as Daily Photoists, others in our Weekly Photo Roundup. Here, in no particular order, are our picks for some of the year's finest.......

Sarah Polley is having a kickass month as her debut directorial feature, Away From Her, racks up the accolades. On Sunday, the Los Angeles film critics gave Polley a New Generation Award for up-and-coming directors. Then, on Monday, the New York film critics felt Away From Her was 2007's Best First Film. In addition, earlier this month Polley was named one of the "50 Smartest People in Hollywood" by Entertainment Weekly. She's the youngest......

As the unofficial fansite of Roncesvalles' favourite success story (and one of the oldest operating movie theatres in this country), Torontoist is pleased to tell you about another exciting event being staged by the good folks at the Revue Film Society. This time, money will be going towards brand-new educational initiatives the theatre aims to have up and running in early 2008, including a film school for neighborhood kids. This particular event, starting at......

City councillor wants to bring in the army—literally—to fight gangs. Torontoist ultimately decided to link to the Star's version of this story over Holy Shit Somebody Actually Said That Weekly. You are welcome. Mitt Romney delivers passionate speech defending religious plurality in America. The gist of the speech is thus: "Don't be intolerant of me because I am a Mormon; be intolerant of those agnostics and atheists over there who should not even be......

The short story is an unfortunate middle child. Not romanticized like poetry, nor widely read like novels, the short story finds refuge in literary journals, the New Yorker, and writing contests. In fact, the Toronto Star, Broken Pencil, and Eye Weekly all have contests ready for your masterpiece. First, stalwart Toronto Star has its annual short story contest. The top prize includes $5,000 and tuition to the Humber School for Writers for Creative Writing.......

Dual protests are set for tomorrow afternoon in Vancouver and Toronto in an effort to maintain media awareness of the misuse of force by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that led to the death of Robert Dziekanski, captured on video by a witness. The video, since viewed (in its various incarnations) by millions of people, documents a confused and clearly agitated Dziekanski sweating and pacing until a fatal confrontation with four RCMP officers killed......

These days, everyone and their grandmother has a celebrity gossip blog. Perez Hilton became a millionaire by outing Lance Bass and defacing paparazzi photos, while TMZ.com (named for the Thirty Mile Zone surrounding Hollywood) came out of nowhere in 2005 and almost instantaneously became the top site to see celebrities behaving badly. Sassafraz may be the closest we have to The Ivy, yet it's not stocked with a phalanx of paps, and celebrities can usually......

The idea of another Toronto restaurant guide may not seem original, but Urbanspoon, a newly launched website, sets itself apart by combining the best elements of other guides with some ideas of its own. And it presents them all in a clean and user-friendly design. Like many guides, it lets you browse by type of cuisine or by neighbourhood (including the suburbs), with the results listed alphabetically or ranked according to ratings. What distinguishes......

"Oh my God, my blow-up doll has been brutally murdered!" shrieked the young woman from the southeast corner of John and Richmond as she clutched her fake-blood-soaked inflatable companion. "My only friend, and someone brutally shot her! The horror! Why hasn't the police security camera done anything about it?!" Early Saturday afternoon, the Toronto Public Space Committee's Cameras in Public Spaces campaign performed this bit of street theatre in the Entertainment District. It was......

They’re trying to hypnotise us, people. They’re trying to brainwash us and subdue us by bombarding the television with adverts and by using the media to confuse us, and they’ll never stop… Until Superbad is the number one movie this weekend. Stupid movie executives. We were totally stoked for Superbad until they started a non-stop marketing frenzy that made us completely bored and, frankly, offended. John Harkness at Now is similarly unimpressed: “The weirdest......

Photo by Nora Vass. Habitat 67 is one of the few structures remaining from Expo 67, the most successful World's Fair in the twentieth century and arguably one of Canada's finest cultural achievements. It's a teetering jumble of blocks, catwalks, and gardens designed to reflect the celebration of diversity that the event represented. It is from this structure, and Expo 67, that the Vulcan Dub Squad draws inspiration for its new album, The New Designers.......

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......

Weekly indie institution Wavelength started in 1999, setting up shop at Ted's Wrecking Yard, then bouncing between venues until landing at its current home, Sneaky Dee's, in 2002. Past performers read like a who's-who of home grown indie music: Great Lake Swimmers, The Bicycles, Cadence Weapon, Julie Doiron, Peaches, Final Fantasy, Feist—and the list goes on. After a Canada Day hiatus, the Sunday night series is back with a stellar July lineup for its live......

Michael Moore’s much anticipated Sicko hits, and having seen it, we can say it’s not particularly essential for Canadian viewers to watch, unless you want to feel smug about our lovely health care system, or slightly surprised that it only takes an hour or so in London (Ontario) to be seen in an emergency room. Yes, the film is chock-a-block with anecdotal evidence, and it’s probably to the film’s fault that, as usual, Moore......

If you picked up a copy of this week's Eye, you may have noticed that the text along the bottom of the cover claims that "It's official! Eye Weekly has the largest circulation of any urban weekly in Canada!*" Yipee! That asterisk leads to small text running up the side of the paper that reads "119,873 copies picked up each week. Verified Audit Circulation Interim Audit Report. April '06 - Sept. '06." The point......

The Star's website is reporting that at 10:30 a.m. tomorrow morning, the TTC will announce details of a plan to blanket the city in a network of sixty to eighty kilometres of Light Rapid Transit (or LRT, as it's affectionately called). The cost, according to Giambrone, will be an anything-but-light $30 million per kilometer, which puts the price range for the new lines between $1.8 and $2.4 billion. The TTC hopes to get the......

Admirers and connoisseurs of adult films mark this down on your calendar: Ron Jeremy, the “hardest working man in showbiz” brings his, er, talents, to Toronto tomorrow evening. This Is Not A Reading Series presents the Canadian launch party for Ron Jeremy’s memoir, The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz, published by HarperCollins. Over the past two decades, Jeremy, known as The Hedgehog, has appeared in more than 1700 porn films and directed 250 of them.......

Last week, Matthew Blackett quietly announced that his comic m@b would be taking an early retirement after four years of syndication in Eye Weekly. "I'm still happy with m@b", he writes, "[but] I've lost the energy to think about it. The spark of inspiration of when I saw someone do something insane, or say something off-kilter, has dulled and rarely goes off these days. I'd rather play Tetris on my cell phone that try to......

You may know Sasha van Bon Bon as the author of Eye Weekly's sex advice column, "Love Bites," or maybe you've seen her perform with burlesque troupe The Scandelles. This Thursday, Sasha reveals yet another talent, as "The Continental Pasty," an exhibition of her handmade pasties, goes on display at Paul Petro Multiples + Small Works (962 Queen Street West). Pasties were invented by resourceful burlesque dancers as a way of getting around obscenity......

On Wednesday and Thursday nights at 9:00, Toronto media superstar Sook-Yin Lee will be in attendance at the Royal's screenings of John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus, the Cannes and TIFF hit (applauded by Eye Weekly's Jason Anderson as "Manhattan with money shots") in which she stars as a New York couples counselor on a quest for her first orgasm. Lee will be participating in a Q&A each night, the questions of which will undoubtedly turn to......

Well, after what could be considered a bit of a drought, there’s enough movies to choke a horse on release in Toronto this week; and that’s a horse which had previously won speed movie-eating competitions. First, the long awaited arrival of the new Cinematheque Ontario season. Lars Von Trier’s new comedy The Boss of It All hits tonight at 8:30pm (and the website claims there are still limited tickets available, if you’re interested) with the......

The word on the street is that the hottest ticket in town is The American Astronaut, screening tonight at Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex) as part of U of T Cinema Studies Student Union’s Free Friday Film. Screening in 35mm, this black and white sci-fi western rock opera is “the best thing ever” according to Todd Brown from Twitch Film. If you don’t think your hands are suitably insulated to hold the hottest ticket in......

Did David Miller do it for you the past three years? Did Jane Pitfield plagiarize your heart? Or did Kevin Clarke shout his way into yours? And what of the 30-odd other mayoral candidates, and that whole "choosing a city councillor" thing? Well, after months of waiting, months of hype, and months of just wanting to get the whole mess over with, you finally get to vote. But what if you haven't chosen? For......

There are several films out this week. As there are every week. But for some reason Torontoist just isn’t that interested in them this time. Oh, sure, we could riff on the new Will Ferrell vehicle, Stranger than Fiction, but we are… Disinterested, as we said. Thankfully the professionals aren’t so undisciplined, with Eye Weekly’s Jason Anderson praising the script as “clever and idiosyncratic”, and Barrett Hooper from Now calling it “genuinely funny and surprisingly......

The Ryerson Review of Journalism is one of the most acclaimed magazines in the country – and it’s run entirely by the students of Ryerson University’s school of journalism. Running a national magazine is a costly endeavour, so to fill the coffers the RRJ is hosting a black-tie fundraiser this Tuesday night. It promises to be a good one. In honour of the 40th anniversary of Truman Capote’s Party of the Century, the RRJ is......

After being hotly anticipated for months- at least by stores- All Hallows' Eve is finally here. If you're at all concerned, the so-called North American Halloween Prevention Inc. has released a charity single, "Do They Know It's Halloween?" (It's really a spoof of the well-intended-but-slightly-patronizing "Do They Know It's Christmas?") It features a slew of Canadian musicians, including Arcade Fire, Buck 65, Sloan, Feist, and Wolf Parade; even better, all proceed go to UNICEF.......