On the east end of Cataraqui Street, a stone’s throw away from the frosty waters of the Kingston Inner Harbour, sits a run-down factory that, upon first sight, looks frighteningly similar to the imagined locale of childhood nightmares.

Inaugural Doodlezoo, on exhibition at the Union Gallery, is a show that finds its identity in working through chaos. Upon entering, one finds the gallery’s space changed from the traditional, white box-like room—on one side it has become a working artist’s studio, with all of the mayhem and disorganization that entails, while the other half of the gallery has become a haphazard notebook—a patched-together collection of memories, ideas and doodles.

Free album giveaways are usually a sign of the desperate and obscure—not an up-and-coming Canadian rock quartet.

Over the years a music lover and fervent concert-goer will attend too many shows to count, watch friends’ bands grow up and fizzle out, and witness the evolution, demise and reinvention of icons.
Usually we look back at ticket stubs, photos and anecdotes from those nights to remember when our favourite musicians came to town or when we ventured to the next city over to catch them live. A concert’s atmosphere is volatile; good or bad, it’s dependent on a cross-section of many factors. Band, venue, audience and, hell, even the weather help create a mood.

In his famous lectures on Shakespearean tragedy, the scholar A.C. Bradley once said: “King Lear seems to me Shakespeare’s greatest achievement, but it seems to me not his greatest play.” It’s an undeniable masterpiece. A text containing incredible verbal possibility, humour, hardship, a myriad of themes but it’s also one big yawn.

Winnipeg has long been a surprising hotbed of CanRock talent, and with the release of their new album Reunion Tour, the Weakerthans need not fear for their place in this canon.

As a whole, this album has the basic components of any Radiohead album: the acoustic and electric guitars, drums, synthesizer and the beautiful (yet at times haunting) vocals of Thom Yorke. The hearsay was true—the band released In Rainbows online, and fans were able to choose their own price. Given this fact, one could only speculate on the quality of this album. This can be said: this album is definitely priceless to hardcore Radiohead fans.

The idiosyncrasy—from set to characters—of any Wes Anderson film is expected. The colour scheme, actors, character flaws, humoristic-melancholic tone and intricate details are instantly familiar and marked as Anderson’s mythology that took off with Rushmore and was affirmed by the Royal Tenenbaums.

Though there are many would-be solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict, so far none have included ukuleles.
None, that is, until Paul Moore started Ukuleles For Peace.

The infamous “work hard, play hard” atmosphere defines the university experience for many Queen’s students—a phenomenon that Health, Counseling, and Disability Services director Mike Condra calls “binge culture.”

If bands could go through puberty, Montreal’s the Darling DeMaes would be pimply-faced and squeaky-voiced.
The band’s lead singer and guitarist, Erik Virtanen, moved to Montreal from Vancouver Island last year. He started playing music at open mic nights around the city, and through that met a Quebecer named Buz. Elysia Torneria, who sings and plays the glockenspiel, came to some of their early shows and eventually joined the band, who are playing at the Artel tonight.

Low-key and indistinct from the outside, 173 Princess St. is a large, beautiful space, a former video rental store and is currently the home to an unusual art exhibit this week called Art On The Street, courtesy of the Street Health Centre. An outreach centre that provides medical and psychological care for people with addictions and living on the street, Kingston’s Street Health Centre is a place of refuge for Kingston residents facing tough times.

Our lives are completely conventional. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It simply means that we are forced to make ourselves at home in a place that we did not create. From the very start we are subjected to norms, marketing campaigns, the Internet and Barbara Walters. And if you ask me, this isn’t a recipe for quietism. It simply means we need to continually work at negotiating our identities, never stopping to assert, “Finally, this is the real me.” For instance, I used to like unicorns. Now I like Lululemon.

The domestic is a setting rife with familiarity. It’s accessible to its audience, common, homespun—in other words, dull and overused.

In a growing crop of movies that cater to the woefully short attention span of today’s public by assaulting your senses with music, video, photography and tired plot gimmicks, it’s encouraging to find a movie that stands confident in the power of its script and its actors. Michael Clayton, George Clooney’s latest venture into acting is if nothing else, unabashedly confident.

Oh, inverted world of contemporary art. Breaking down traditional Western binaries is tough work, but armed with clever artistry, entertaining and meaningful results can ensue. Despite the daunting task of reversing age-old symbols and dichotomies such as savage/civilized, good/evil and Christian/heathen, World Upside Down, the newest exhibition at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, produces thought-provoking works that create a space for dialogue and suggest a collapsing of restrictive views

The Most Serene Republic may not have the most serene views on suburbia, family values or what it means to be an indie band, but they do have a rockin’ new record which they will be promoting during their concert tomorrow night at the Ale House.

Picture a barn: rural, nondescript, lost in the cold of another Kingston winter. The image conjures up thoughts of perpetual nose-dripping and outfit malfunctions, or perhaps the rekindling of an age-old grudge against Jack Frost.

The boys of the Vancouver-based instrumental hip-hop outfit no luck club (NLC) have been keeping busy. The boys of the Vancouver-based instrumental hip-hop outfit no luck club (NLC) have been keeping busy. After releasing two albums, Happiness in 2003 and Prosperity in 2006, the band is focusing their time on playing festivals and gigs across Canada and the U.S., all the while undertaking two ambitious side projects—a musical and the soundtrack for a video game.