Our friends at Images Festival have very nicely given us two passes to the screening of Grant Gee’s documentary Joy Division, screening this Friday, February 5, 2010 in Toronto. So, in order to make sure the swag goes to a true JD fan, we’re asking you to leave a comment below naming your favourite Joy […] More »

I saw him on the subway for the first time the day I brought the meat bomb to work. He wore the most glorious toupée. It was the colour of a fox with the front curled under in a Prince Valiant thing that continued on around the sides and back of his head. It didn’t […] More »

Fucked Up, winners of the 2009 Polaris Prize, this week released their cover of the seminal 1984 Bob Geldof/Midge Ure song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” and it’s pretty great. The band used part of their $20,000 Polaris cheque to bankroll the recording, and are donating the proceeds to three important Canadian charities: Justice for Missing […] More »

Sometimes it seems that no minority sits on a higher horse than people with disabilities—give an inch and they want a mile. I bet that’s what creator Ryan Murphy,  executive producer Brad Falchuck and the rest of the creative muscle behind Glee thought, in their most private moments, once they started hearing the complaints from […] More »

For day two of what we’ve dubbed “Legalization Week” here, Jordan Heath Rawlings writes about a plan from the Songwriters Association of Canada that would throw open the file-sharing doors to every Canadian and find new ways to help musicians make a living from their creativity. It’s just one of many proposals that have been […] More »

Music is a dead industry walking. A radical all-you-can-eat plan promises unlimited tunes and puts artists — not record companies — first Politically speaking, it was a pretty good haul of booty. On June 7, an organization of self-described “pirates” took what was a fairly small step toward gaining real political clout, but a gigantic […] More »

Guests at Ottawa’s Heaven dance club expect to have a good time and dance the night away. What the mostly heterosexual crowd was not expecting this spring Saturday night was for the club to be overrun by the Gay Guerrilla Takeover. The Gay Guerrilla Takeover is an organization that does what its name says: once […] More »

I love the idea of willing a new subculture into existence, and that’s the story of Taqwacore, a documentary that opens in Toronto and Montreal this weekend about the birth of “Punk Islam.” Kick-started by Michael Muhammad Knight’s book of the same name (actually, “The Taqwacores”), the new documentary chronicles the fledgling scene. It seems kind […] More »

In early fall of 1950, Len Dobbin stepped out of a listening booth on Rue Ste-Catherine in Montreal to find himself confronted by five New York jazz enthusiasts seeking potential founders for a satellite jazz appreciation society. Only 15 years old at the time, Dobbin had never met enough fans to think the project would […] More »

[Editor’s note: If you’re curious, This Magazine has its own Tumblr blog. Visit quote.this.org] I have never left a cinema with as big a grin on my face as when I watched the spectacularly awful Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Every complaint I had heard was spot-on—that the acting was abysmal, the plot incomprehensible, the […] More »

For Toronto’s “Making Room” art show in 2006, Amy Lam and Jon McCurley—the duo who call themselves Life of a Craphead— erected a bed sitting on a couch. The couch was large and blue and the bed sat as a human would, folded at the waist, with two wooden legs on the ground. It looked […] More »