Sex and Death at Creatures Creating

Don’t be fooled by this event’s title: Sex and Death isn’t a middling guitar-worshipping collective from the prairies. Rather, it’s an event hosted by Broken Pencil magazine, featuring readings from the Can-lit’s cagiest: Natalie Zina Walschots, author of DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains, writes poetry about wrestling, superheroes, and sex, often all at once; A Softer World’s Joey Comeau also penned the depressingly poignant Overqualified, a novel told through job application cover letters; Liz Worth chronicled Toronto’s punk scene in Treat Me Like Dirt. Show up at any time—whatever you stumble upon will surely be memorable. 8 p.m. at Creatures Creating. 822 Dundas St. West. (MT)

Dance Movie at Handlebar

A music festival like NXNE should ideally strike a healthy balance of catching a bunch of acts you love and venturing into some unknown ground to discover something new. The first music night of NXNE is a good time to do this before your options grow and the choice gets harder, so on Wednesday, take yourself to Handlebar for the Halifax Pop Explosion showcase because all those things together can only mean good things; the bright smart-pop stylings of Dance Movie will be a highlight. 11 p.m. at Handlebar. 159 Augusta Ave. (NV)

Deniro Farrar at Wrongbar

It’s a bit perplexing that one of the coolest promotion outfits in Toronto took the same name as everybody’s favourite nightmare band: Smash Mouth. The ahead-of the curve dudes that brought Kendrick Lamar to Toronto before #section.80 had an NXNE showcase planned at Rivoli last year, but it was inexplicably shut down by police before it even started because of safety concerns. That was pretty wack. Whatever though. This year, they’ve put together another great lineup, highlighted by North Carolina’s Deniro Farrar, an intriguing but most of all, downright tight rapper.  11:25 a.m. at Wrongbar. 1279 Queen St. W. (CJ)