WHAT: an evening panel & discussion about creating a just health care system for immigrants and refugees WHEN: Thursday November 26th, 6:30pm WHERE: 55 Gould Street, Student Campus Centre, Room 115, Ryerson University HOW MUCH: Free Health is a fundamental human right, one that is being denied to hundreds of thousands of people living in Toronto. This participatory evening will bring together people who are doing migrant research, front line health care professionals, administrators, students and those who are seeking to learn more about health issues for undocumented peoples living in Toronto, and across Canada. Panelists: Paul Caulford, ...

Like a strange peering glance through a keyhole into a world of rooms rented by the week in New York City of the eighties, Diary of a Times Square Thief uses the occasion of a newly discovered scrapbook to unearth a host of burnt out and jubilant New Yorkers and resurrect their memories. The film opens with a matter of fact account of filmmaker Klaas Bense's EBay acquisition of the diary, a chronicle of a young poet's efforts to establish himself in the City. The curling pages of the notebook he buys for seventy-five dollars are covered in a ball-point blue scrawl and interspersed with Polaroid snapshots of faces, some odd, some old, some beaten into new and bloody shapes. The last few pages are missing, apparently cut from the book with a knife. Captivated by the voice in the pages, Bense travels to New York to excavate any traces that remain of the young writer, John, whose character is slowly teased out from the mouths of former guests and employees of the Times Square hotel where he worked. Some of the people Bense interviews remember John well, and some don't, even though photos of their much-younger faces appear in the pages of his diary. We meet Mr. Cohan, psychic to the stars, and Mr. Joe Franklin, who sits all day at a tiny desk surrounded by a chaotic archive of papers, and we hear about the mobster who runs his organization of thieves (John among them) from a wheelchair in the men's room of Penn Station. We chat with Ducky DooLittle, former Times Square sex worker, now a Harvard sex-ed lecturer, Sammy, once an urban accident-chasing reporter, now a photographer in war-torn countries, and Chet, the philosopher bartender who graduated from Columbia in the same class as Barack Obama, and drew his first welfare check the day Obama declared his presidential candidacy. In the past world that these characters shared, and which emerges from the memories and life-lessons they feel moved to reveal, murderers can be your best friends and lovers, and bizarre umbrella headgear can shield the shy face of the most skillful artist. Nothing is at it seems—especially not yourself. Artfully keeping its secrets and doling out its surprises like a judicious chocolatier or fascinating parlour act, the film keeps viewers wondering until its final moments whether John might be the fabrication of everyone's faulty memories of a heady New York, or if he disappeared in an excess of the little blue pills, or if he vanished as completely as if he had landed in an unmarked body bag by simply finding a new life somewhere else. With eight people a night being shot in the City at the time, people jumping frequently from the upper floors of the hotel, and HIV beginning to threaten the community, survival, friendship, personality, and memory, each begin to seem precious, fleeting, and rare.

WHAT: A Rust Belt Requiem? WHEN: March 5, 6-8pm HOW MUCH: FREE (rustbeltrequiem@gmail.com to register) WHERE: Cambell Conference Room, The Munk Centre, 1 Devonshire Place Spacing is sponsoring an upcoming panel discussion at U of T that promises to expose the history and current state of the factory town -- both as reality, and as cultural idea. Space is very limited, so if you plan to attend, email rustbeltrequiem@gmail.com to register and arrive early to not be disappointed. A Rust Belt Requiem? proposes an exciting and integrative discussion on the factory town — past, present and future. Consisting ...

The docks are two hundred and forty feet out from the lake's original shoreline. Landfill pushed everything forward. Buildings erupted out of it like weeds. The city, walking on water. - p.2, Consolation (Anchor Canada, 2007), by Michael Redhill As a child I wondered if subway cars were places. The kinds of things that make places out of spaces happen in subway cars, conversations are enjoyed or endured, bonds are forged and broken, departures are cause for relief and sorrow. Yet a subway car lacks the fixity of a house, or a movie ...

He'd been spending his days hunched over papers in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at U of T, hunting down information even he admitted was dull. The Fisher was his heart's home—old teak cabinets full of file cards with the fading hand-writing of dead librarians, local history, broadsides carefully peeled off last century's lampposts by some archivist type just like himself. Newpapers, maps, advertisements for land, everything filed away in crisping folders, laid back to front in Bankers Boxes. A room full of voices. — from Consolation, by Michael Redhill, ...