Toronto’s Kiwi Jr. released their latest album Cooler Returns, the follow up to their debut Football Money, on Jan. 22 worldwide through Sub Pop, with the exception of Canada where it was released through the band’s own Kiwi Club imprint.

For this column we asked band member Brian Murphy to tell us the types of things he is consuming while at his Toronto home during the pandemic.

EATING: Our friend Russ has owned and operated Aunties & Uncles for 22 years. It’s been a mainstay for artists, bands on tour, hungover bartenders and more. I’ve met people all over the country who still think of the famous breakfast pocket, the homemade blueberry pancakes with real maple syrup, and the iconic German-style potato salad. Since the pandemic, he’s been doing takeout by phone only, and his prices are too low to keep up with the delivery app’s price gouging. Another place we love for a dinner option is La Bella Managua, home-cooked Nicaraguan food run by the nicest family you’ll ever meet.

DRINKING: Before the pandemic, Kiwi used to rehearse in a small shed around the corner from Black Dice, a really cool Japanese rockabilly bar. After practice, we’d sometimes go there and we became friends with the owner, Hidecki. Eventually, we even started sharing bills with his rockabilly band Ichi-Bons. Since the pandemic, he started a take away bottle shop in the entrance of Black Dice that sells all kinds of cool Japanese sake and beers, as well as cool snacks.

STREAMING: I believe during the first wave (or was it the second?) we were all watching The Americans, an incredible show about Soviet KGB spies living in Washington D.C. during the height of the Cold War. Incredible acting with that perfect blend of action/thriller and at-home family drama. Like The Sopranos, it spent a ton of its budget on an incredible soundtrack, tons of ’80s jams. I get choked up now when “With Or Without You” by U2 comes on in the grocery store, looking at apples, wondering about the Jennings family…

Check out more Eating, Drinking, and Streaming here.

There’s a new shop in town dedicated to gender expression and affirming gear. Urbasics is an online outpost created by local transwoman Ashley Grullon and her mother Eileen Bonetti. Their goal is to address the need for a one-stop shop for supplies for trans and gender non-conforming people.

“[Urbasics] is the kind of store I wish I could have had,” says Grullon of when she began transitioning. She says she struggled to find local stores that could get her the items she was looking for at affordable prices and instead would have to order them from the U.S. and pay associated duties and shipping costs.

“We were trying to find a one-stop shop for everything you need,” says Bonetti. “We didn’t find that so we decided to be the solution.”

The idea for the store came to Grullon in the middle of the pandemic, which is the reason the shop is currently online only. It had its soft launch on March 26, 2021 and features products from well known brands like banana prosthetics and includes packers, STPs, pumps, dilators, and binders. With the shop’s official launch in early May, the site’s contents will broaden to include items from the Urbasics brand — a collection which was “designed with the gender spectrum in mind, whether you’re on the gender spectrum or not.”

The upcoming Urbasics collection will come in non-standard sizes. The transfem collection launches this month and the transmasc collection will launch in June.

“Our bras and bralettes are unlike the ones you find in the department store and are designed for wider ribs. This comes from the experience of shopping for Ashley and never finding a good fit,” says Bonetti. “We wanted more variety so that folks early in their transition, or people who want to wear breast forms, have that capability.”

The collection will also cater to people in every age range. “I know as a parent that there is a need for underwear for kids at 11, 12, and even younger and we’re gonna have that. We wanted to cater to younger folks because we see that people are coming out at younger ages and that the trans and non-binary communities have more visibility,” says Bonetti.

Grullon says when she first began transitioning four or five years ago, she couldn’t find items that hit all three criteria of affordable, comfortable and affirming. That is the driving force behind Grullon and Bonetti’s efforts to make items at Urbasics both cost efficient and inclusive.

To ensure the affordability of the collection, the pair has negotiated with manufacturers in order to pass the savings onto their clients. This is so that clients have the financial capability to purchase more than one of the same item, something difficult to do when gaffs cost up to $39 on Etsy.

Simultaneously, according to Bonetti, “[the] collection will have similar or better quality items [than you can] get from the U.S.” The site strives to educate clients on which items are right for them, how to choose size and style, and how to take care of their products. “We wanted to be a store and also a source of education.”

As a charitable initiative, Urbasics is selling pins on Flamingo Market. All of the proceeds from the pins go to Binders OUT, a Toronto organization that enables binder access for folks who cannot afford it. The pins can be purchased here, and donations (material or monetary) to Binders OUT can be made here.

For those that are new to shopping for these items, Grullon says: “I know how hard it can be starting out with all these options and not knowing what to get or what will be best for you. We definitely want to be there to help people with that.”

For questions about Urbasics items, email [email protected].

The story of Bruce McArthur, one of Toronto’s most notorious serial killers, who preyed on gay men for years before pleading guilty to murdering eight in 2019, is a complex and confounding one.

Catching A Serial Killer: Bruce McArthur, a new documentary airing April 30 at 9 p.m. on Super Channel Fuse, attempts a deep dive into McArthur, his motivations and how he managed to get away with his crimes for so long.

The documentary’s premiere has some interesting timing, too, with a recent report finding that police did not check McArthur’s criminal record in 2013, despite having evidence that connected him to three missing men. At the time, police were actively investigating those disappearances, making this an especially unusual oversight.

At a time when trust in police has never been lower due to the ongoing police killings of Black men, particularly in the U.S., it’s a time ripe for re-evaluating what went wrong in the investigation of McArthur.

“In Canada, there’s been a long-standing conversation about why the police don’t pay as much attention when people from marginalized communities go missing,” explains Jooyoung Lee, a criminologist and professor at the University of Toronto, who appears in the documentary alongside other experts, and cites the most illustrative example of this as the Highway of Tears, the location of the country’s many missing and murdered Indigenous women.

“In this case, not only were the victims gay men, but some of them were gay men of colour and some of them were in the closet, so there are many layers of invisibility for victims. That’s why I hope that the main thing that comes out of this discussion is greater attention to the fact that not everybody is protected equally by the law. We can all guess how differently this case would have been if white women from an affluent neighbourhood in Toronto had gone missing for as many years, there would have been so much more attention given,” he says.

Part of why this case did ultimately receive the attention it did — and now, the documentary treatment — is because McArthur was not your run-of-the-mill serial killer. If such a thing exists. He was 66 at the time of his sentencing, a mall Santa who knew how to seamlessly navigate Church and Wellesley, Toronto’s Gay Village, for his victims.

Understanding that not all criminals have the same red flags is something Lee teaches in his classes. He says, “The average serial killer in the movies is portrayed as this monster, somebody who gives the impression that they are evil and sinister. You can tell from the moment you see them on the screen that they’re the villain. But that’s a caricature that Hollywood relies on. In reality, a lot of serial killers are just like McArthur. They’re the person that nobody suspects, who blends in, who has an idyllic prototypical life, who has a family, who participates in community groups or their local church. McArthur was a person who wore a mask and had figured out that presenting himself as the average Canadian guy was a way for him to get away with what he was doing.”

As the documentary dives into these details, it manages not to sensationalize McArthur to the lengths of other recent docs, such as Netflix’s Luka Magnotta doc Don’t F*ck with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer or Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes or a litany of others that have hit the screen in the last five years as true crime has gained popularity.

“There’s an old saying amongst people who work in media: ‘If it bleeds it leads,’ ” says Lee. “That speaks to people’s general fascination with crime. Now take that and amplify it by a lot, because serial killings are exceedingly rare. We’ve seen the rise of true crime as a genre in general, people are binge-watching these shows and podcasts, they’re always in the background. So we’re thinking about these cases during our leisure time, even.”

Adding in the fact that aspects of the case were atypical, from the way police mishandled it to how McArthur didn’t have the expected characteristics of a killer, and you’ve got a recipe for a very interesting story.

But what of the families of the victims? While true crime might be cathartic for some, it can be traumatizing for others, particularly when reliving the circumstances.

“I think the documentary may be cathartic in the sense that it could bring closure for friends and family of the victims, and it’s also bringing issues that the LGBTQ community has known about to a wider audience, especially when it comes to things like reported sexual assaults that are not taken seriously by police,” says Lee. “But it’s always a very delicate balance, because some family and friends also feel these stories focus a lot on the killers in place of the victims.”

In fact, Lee points out, when the documentary aired earlier this April in the U.S. on the Oxygen Network, it was part of its “Serial Killer Week.”

But that’s also doing a disservice to Catching A Serial Killer: Bruce McArthur, which makes a concerted effort to avoid any kind of true crime clichés and, instead, focus on McArthur’s developmental background, the experiences and social circumstances that led him to become a killer and get away with murder — for an incomprehensible decade.