This what a bioterrorist looks like, according to the FBI. Dr. Steven Kurtz (right) is a Professor of Art at SUNY Buffalo and member of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), an art and theatre collective co-founded by Kurtz and his late wife, Hope. In May 2004, the Kurtzes were preparing a piece called Free Range Grains, which allowed participants to test food for the presence of genetically modified organisms, when Hope died of heart failure......

Last year, 26-year-old Ines Markeljevic had an idea. Why not try and set a Guinness World Record for the most people doing the Thriller dance? "I'd been doing the Thriller dance for nine years. It was my own sort of Halloween tradition," she says. She had learned the dance as a teenager, and had performed it not only at Halloween, but also for charity events and dance competitions. "For my tenth year, I wanted......

In order to help raise funds for their excellent Toronto Upstairs exhibition (on now, until October 25), Art @ Liberty and the Side Space Gallery on St. Clair West invite you to eat your words. This coming Saturday, September 29, at 7:30 p.m., experience Baroque Poems For a Postmodern Age and Edible Poetry. Fill your belly with all that the title implies, and free finger foods, besides. John Picchione of York University will be on......

While going to York University may seem like a giant hassle (Torontoist recommends you pack a snack for the trip), this year’s Ioan Davies Memorial Lecture is shaping up to be worth the drive or TTC ride to York. The Ioan Davies Memorial Lecture commemorates the life and work of Ioan Davies, journalist, author, and professor. Each year, invited lecturers have re-invigorated the links between cultural expression, everyday life, and political practice. Dr. Thomas King,......

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......

One of the pillars of the TTC's plan to trim its budget is to cut some twenty-one "poor performing" bus routes. But what, exactly, is a "poor performing" route? As it turns out, transit whiz Steve Munro claims, it sure isn't what the TTC says it is: "in a flat fare system," he writes, "it is impossible to allocate fare revenue in any way that makes sense and produces meaningful comparisons between routes." There......

Pity sex may have gotten some of us through university, but Loree Erickson, a York University PhD candidate and photographer/filmmaker, is determined that it’s not a phrase which should be associated with the disabled. Concerned about the sexual stigmatization of people with disabilities, she’s put together an evening of film and live performance intended to open minds and shatter stereotypes about sex and disability. Reclaiming the Gaze will feature two short films by Erickson,......

Next in our series of Torontoist Poetry Contest poems of Honourable Mention is “In Transit” by Peter O’Donovan. Other poems that received Honourable Mention are “Velocity,” by Jenny Sampirisi and Matthew Tierney's "The Man who Knew from Cool"; Prathna Lor’s “((de)fragmentation.)” is coming soon. Our winning poem was "Eaton's Effluviad" by Gregory Betts. Peter O’Donovan grew up in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. He completed a Computer Science degree in 2005 at the University of Saskatchewan, and......

At left: stills from Dr. Strangelove. At right: re-creations by Kristan Horton. Today's Morning News has an interview with Toronto's Kristan Horton, an artist whose...uh...unique work, "Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove" is on display at The Art Gallery of York University (AGYU; Accolade East Building 4700 Keele Street) until June 24, in conjunction with the release of a 200-page book of the same name (also published by the AGYU). Horton "has recreated each scene of......

Several major GTA transit projects have been sitting in limbo awaiting federal funding for so long that if you weren't directly involved you might have forgotten they were ever announced. Now everybody can all breathe a sigh of relief: an election is in the wind and Stephen Harper is going on a spending spree. The biggest giftee is the $2 billion project that will extend the Spadina Subway up to York University and beyond into......

With the end of the academic year looming, Three Ring Paper Productions and the Transgendered, Bisexual, Lesbian and Gay Association at York University (TBLGAY) invite you to put down your books on Wednesday evening and make your way to Study Hall: A Night of Queer Readings. The event features new and previously published works from authors Derek McCormack, Debra Anderson, R.M. Vaughan, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. The reading is organized by Debra Anderson, who is......

Torontoist Poetry Contest Reminder! At the beginning of the new year, Torontoist launched a poetry contest to encourage the penning of new poems about our fair city. To inspire you, we are presenting a series of previously published Toronto poems that will run until the contest closes March 15. Our third poem, "I Parked My Car Behind Loblaws and Knew I Would Never Die" is by writer, performer and composer Gary Barwin. The poem references......

If you attended Nuit Blanche last fall and noticed pairs of police officers dancing the tango in the streets, apparently swept away by music pouring out of cars parked nearby, then you're already familiar with the charming and often funny work of Toronto artist Diane Borsato. It's conceptual art, but you don't need a degree in art theory to appreciate it. In 2003's "Warm Things to Chew On for the Dead," she placed "warm,......

When you go through the doors of City Hall, one of the first things you'll probably see (especially if you're headed to the café, library, or washrooms) is "Metropolis" to your immediate right, an expansive "mural" made out of 100 000 nails, their blunt ends jutting out in patterns of concentric circles. And you won't be able to resist running your hand along it, no matter how late you are for your meeting or......

Award-winning Toronto author (and emergency physician) Vincent Lam will give his first public reading since winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize this Wednesday as Diaspora Dialogues teams up with the Harbourfront Centre’s International Reading series. Diaspora Dialogues, which is about to enter its third year, is joining forces with Harbourfront's International Readings series to host a slew of events in 2007, including a mini-festival in June right before Book Expo. While the chance to hear Vincent......

Nine graduate students at Ryerson University and York University in the communications and culture program have banded together to create Make the World Your Salon: Modernist Salon Culture, an exhibit that resurrects the salon culture of the early twentieth century frequented by the bohemian artists of the day. The exhibit encompasses photography, artwork, and multi-media, and features graphic photography by New Yorker Carl Van Vechten; a reproduction of Marcel Duchamp’s With White Noise; and the......

Excuse me for the lateness of this week’s listing. I’m still on Nuit Blanche time. And yes, I made it until 7am. This is an absolutely fantastic week for word nerds. And check this – if one of your friends is more into sports, you can bring them to a literary event disguised as a boxing match. For a boxing fan like me, it doesn't get any better. Tomorrow at noon, there’s a special launch......

The report on options for the Gardiner is going to be released to council and the public which means there'll be a lot of talk this election about tearing the ugly sucker down. A prof is suing York University for $10 million, he thinks they have a pro-Israel bias. A prof at U ot T is getting a special room so he can smoke pot. He is legally allowed to smoke marijuana for medical......

Emily Schultz, author of Joyland, former editor of Broken Pencil and This Magazine is looking for your pledges. No, this is not a PBS style pledge drive where you get a special gift when you show your support. I steal from just about everyone who crosses my path. But my fear is that someone, someday, will recognize a very familiar description, moment, or trait that has cropped up in my work. Well, Schultz wants......

Inquests have been ordered on the death of two patients in the care of Toronto mental health institutes. There are suspicions that these patients were neglected. Under the coroner's act, inquests aren't mandatory in the case of deaths under psychiatric care. These incidents might change that. The city's 25th homicide victim may have been killed by an angry ex-girlfriend. A 19-year old woman turned herself in near Danforth and Eglinton. There are others involved in......

Today is the first day that you can go see Theatre @ York's performance of Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage. Findley's novel, a frightening retelling of the Noah's Ark story (involving ragtime piano, a devoted cat, and a unicorn, if I recall correctly), has been adapted for the stage and runs until March 25th at York University's Burton Auditorium. Times and other information available here.......

The transit loop at Avenue Road and Lawrence Avenue (across from Havergal College) will soon be transformed into a heart-shaped park. Along with the TTC, Lorne London (publisher of Post City Magazines) and city councillors Howard Moscoe and Karen Stintz are working to develop a beautiful neighbourhood park from an existing triangle-ish area of grass that measures nearly 100 by 100 feet. At the specified location, a lonely white sign with black and red......

Torontoist nearly spat out his coffee this morning after reading this story on the Spacing Wire. It turns out that the Ontario Government somehow might find the money to help fund the extension of the subway from Downsview all the way up to York University. That's right, the York Subway, that long-held Toronto dream might just become a reality. The total cost of the extension will be somewhere around $1.5 billion according to the Star,......

His real name is Jason Harrow. He's a graduate of York University. He started out with the name Kool-Aid. He's spare on the official releases, heavy on the Offishall last name. He's been dissed and un-dissed. He recently partied with TOist at the NOW Best of Toronto party (Him=Best HipHop, Us=Oh...you know). He is Offishall, Kardinal Offishall. Torontoist shouldn't have to tell you about tonight's Kardinal Offishall show at the Mod Club Theatre, since he's......

Earlier this week, York Region launched its new rapid transit service: VIVA. Although a VIVA vehicle looks like a bus, sounds like a bus and even sort of feels like a bus, they’re marketing it as the unbus, to trick car drivers who would otherwise feel shame riding in the common people’s chariot. But they have a good excuse as the VIVA bus service is so much more than the bus service we’re used......

Not to Thunder Bay or anything, just up to York University. Art lovers can check out Governor General Award winning video artist Istvan Kantor at the Art Gallery of York University. Controversial is the word thrown around when describing Kantor’s work. His regularly uses blood in his work and has been kicked out and had a restraining order placed on him by the National Gallery of Canada. Interestingly his works are now in the National......

Guy Maddin, the Peg's master moviemaker, and the genius who came up with glass legs full of beer will be live from excrutiatingly far York University, on Thursday at 7 pm, as part of the Independents, a monthly film series on Independent Canadian film. U of T silent cinema scholar Charlie Keil will host, and Maddin will screen a handful of short films, like Sissy Boy Slap Party (2004) and Cowards Bend the Knee.......