Torontoist is ahead of the game for previewing some of the best music choices this week (Queen West fire benefit, Forest City Lovers' CD release) but Musicologist will give you one more recommendation—just for kicks. When UK’s Field Music announced a (begrudged) break last year, who knew David Brewis would be in Toronto playing a show under a different name and clean ethos so quickly? School of Language and their debut LP Sea From Shore......

To borrow a line from an old Saturday Night Live parody of Talking Heads frontman David Byrne's fashion sense, you may ask yourself "why such a big suit?" Village by the Grange opened on McCaul St in the mid-1970s as a mixture of residential and retail spaces. Any secrets the complex held by the time this ad appeared were hidden in each model's shoulder or loose jacket. The toll of those stuck in narrow......

A Torontoist reader passed this photo of Mao on a Queen Street West transit shelter on to us. He writes on his flickr site: On first glance, I thought this was an ad. But on closer inspection, realized someone had removed the Viacom ad, painted this Mao on the back of it, and carefully inserted it back into the transit shelter. Interesting subversive commentary on the commodification of the Queen West West area. The......

It certainly seems to be the summer of strike. Be it the avoidance of strike with last minute backroom dealings or the injunctions against hydro workers to stop blocking entry to the gates of power, mediators must be working overtime. And now the CEEB has gone dark. CBC employees have been locked out as of 12:01 this morning. The mainpage has been redirected to a much paired-down CBC News page, And the radio is playing......

One of the surprising things about Contact, the month-long photo festival that has invaded Toronto galleries this month is the sheer amount of work shown outside of galleries. For a month, bars, restaurants, clothing outlets and almost any space with bare walls or a big enough store window can be part of the fest, with mixed results. What is more interesting is when Contact photographers decide to show in truly public spaces: outdoors on the......

Yesterday afternoon, in between alernating spurts of sunshine and rain, TOist ducked into Brassaii hoping to catch a glimpse of the Contact Photo exhibition and, especially, everybody's favourite Talking Head, David Byrne. Alas, we missed Byrne's lecture, but did show up in time to watch a very stylish- in an high tech Prada-clad cyclist way- Byrne ride off into the sunset with his adorable (and young) female companion. About 20 minutes later, deciding to......

This week marks the countdown to next weekend’s opening of the much-anticipated and much-debated Massive Change exhibit at the AGO. Everyone has criticized Mau’s bizarrely utopian and woolly optimism. Mau’s 2001 book, Life Style, focused on shaping design’s role in individual lives, recognizing that ‘lifestyle’ in the post-war period had come to be defined solely in terms of consumptive patterns rather than class or occupation. The argument was loosely patched together by brilliant aesthetic design......