![]() Amanda Palmer |
Wednesday, Dec 10 ![]() Zoë Keating |
ps. Andrew has a spare ticket for sale: $18, same price as ticketmaster after tax & fees.
n: vb: the spice of imagination
![]() Amanda Palmer |
Wednesday, Dec 10 ![]() Zoë Keating |
ps. Andrew has a spare ticket for sale: $18, same price as ticketmaster after tax & fees.
Cthulhupalooza, Saturday December 6, the Rio Theatre in Vancouver BC Canada.
Facebook event link
A pulpy, tentacled, and maddening Lovecraft Rockband fundraiser hosted by two brilliant yet malignant modern men of science, my friends Toren and Jay, with partial proceeds to Child’s Play charity, Cthulhupalooza features:
$16 tickets for Cthulhupalooza are now available in Vancouver at: The Rio Theatre, Red Cat Records, Zulu Records, Scratch Records, Scrape Records, Neptoon Records, RX Comics, Elfsar Collection, Strategies Games, High Life, Pulp Fiction.
Also – starting right now and valid until 11:59pm on Wednesday November 26th, Toren’s offering an unlucky $13 ticket price for Cthulhupalooza if you order through PayPal. PayPal to thickets@uniserve.com with your name and preferred contact info (this can be email or phone) and a ticket will be held for you at the Rio Theatre until you arrive!
If you haven’t picked up your tickets yet, you should act fast, as they’re going quick! And remember, DON’T FORGET to register your band by emailing cthulhupalooza@gmail.com
![]() Amanda Palmer |
Wednesday, Dec 10 ![]() Zoë Keating |
Tickets: $17.50. Richards on Richards, doors at seven, show at seven:thirty.
SOCALLED
Direct from Montreal
Vancouver Premiere
The Chutzpah Festival says:
“It’s funny that rap brought Jewish kid Josh Dolgin (Socalled) to Jewish music. Searching for records to sample while studying at McGill, he stumbled across some old Jewish folk music. The result is his hybrid style of Jewish hip-hop and album titles like The Socalled Seder. Montreal-based Dolgin was born in Ottawa and raised in Chelsea, Quebec. He played the piano as a kid and the accordion in high school and was in all sorts of bands: salsa, gospel, rock, funk. Then he discovered hip-hop and MIDI, and the rest is history. He’s appeared on many albums as pianist, singer, arranger, rapper, writer, and producer. He also rocks with fellow klezmerhybrid musician David Krakauer in Klezmer Madness!, sings with Toronto’s Beyond the Pale, performs with Shtreiml in Montreal, and with LA-based the Aleph Project. Socalled performs and records with “a crew of mixed-up freaks and geniuses” from around the world, including Killah Priest, Susan Hoffman-Watts, Frank London and Irving Fields.
When: Sunday, February 24 at 9:00 pm
Where: Norman Rothstein Theatre, JCCGV
Tickets are $25 and can be purchased from Tickets Tonight.
Bonus: Sexual Healing excerpt.
Andy Smith of Portishead is playing SHINE tonight. Tickets are only ten bucks. Who’s with me?
Impossible, this last weekend, mythology in my bed, history approaching me blind, yet wonderful. L’shana tova! Ketiva v’chatima tova.
These are my Days of Awe:
The original Friday plan was a very loosely defined, “Go To Concert”, that began with stepping out from my apartment in time for a bus that would get me to the Railway Club at nine. Easy enough. Half way to the venue, however, a man was stabbed stepping off the bus. Right in the ribs. Welcome to the poorest postal code in Canada. The assailant ran off. No way to see who it was, no way to ever find out.
This being an insulated part of the world, no one else knew what to do with violence, and so sat uselessly back, looking too shocked to move, but Crackton is my old neighborhood. This sort of thing happens practically bi-weekly. Abandoning my things to the back of the bus, I began giving orders. “Who has a cell-phone? Did anyone see what happened? Call this in.” I got a pair of sterile plastic gloves from the driver and set in staunching the blood with a bunched strip of shirt torn from the wounded man and tried to keep him awake. Paramedics arrived twenty minutes later, (slower than pizza delivery), tell me he’ll be fine, and drop me off, late and shaky, outside the Railway Club.
Not the most auspicious beginning to a night out.
Shane‘s was the first table I found in the crowd. I saved a seat with them, tried to explain what I’d been doing, found myself suddenly in the middle of a conversation about trying to look professional in a miniskirt, gave up, and went looking to see who else had showed up. (Not that it isn’t possible, they seemed very sure). There was a row by the bar, another table in the very back, and a group out on the smoking deck. It was comforting, I’d only given people a day’s warning, and – yet here they were, a little bit of everywhere. One darling friend told me she hadn’t even checked what was playing, but merely came on my invitation. After my stressful transit adventure, her comment was a cliche ray of light in the murky pub darkness.
The concert, thankfully, was phenomenal. I parked myself up right against the stage and watched rapt for the entire show. That 1 Guy plays with an exuberant precision, like a holy embodiment of joyful, theatrical grace. It washed the entire medical emergency right out of my system. I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t think there is anything like it. His instrument is an intrepid midi-wired double-necked upright bass made out of pipe and studded with triggers, but not really. And while he sings and enthusiastically plays this poetic contraption, building intense, complex sample loops, he’s mucking elegantly about with three kick pedals, a snare drum, and a saw. It’s almost overwhelming, like watching a sound-cultivating conjurer with as much energy as a coke-high David Byrne. {check if he’s playing near you}
END OF PART ONE.
Upcoming gigs in Vancouver:
George Clinton with Parliament play Plush on March 4th.
DO MAKE SAY THINK are playing Richards on Richards on March 5th.
The Constantines play The Plaza on April 12th.
Regina Spektor plays the Commodore Ballroom on Saturday, Apr 21. Tickets went on sale today.
The Books play Richards on Richards on April 25th.
Lyrics Born plays The Plaza on Wednesday, April 26.
LCD Soundsystem play the Commodore on May 3rd.
!!! play Richard on Richards on May 4th.
Explosions in the Sky play the Croation Cultural Centre on May 5th.
Peter, Bjorn & John are playing the Commodore on May 12th.
(I only have a ticket to The Books, this is a wish-list / forget-me-not list more than anything else. They’re all going to be wonderful.)
Shane Koyzan’s show at the Cultch is tonight. Duncan and Kyle also plan to be in attendance. I’m still nervous, but not as much. I’m reassuring myself with thoughts of the things I’ve done in that building before. It’s been my playground and stomping grounds since I was six, so it’s an odd list, everything from karaoke to oral sex.
Wednesday Nicole and I are staying in all day and fixing the pretty tile table that has been drying out in my living room. My current plan is to give it to Alastair as thank you for housing Tanith and Tanaquil, who are getting bigger almost every day. Mishi might drop by too, but she’ll have to vanish in time to pick up her little one from school. (Who is apparently ten-ish these days, officially making me feel unfairly old. This is a fact much open to ironic mockery and not just a little bit of serves-me-right.)
Thursday, as much as I adore the lingering fragrance of pure man, I’m throwing over packing for a chance to give Jay his Old-Spice soaked clothing back. (Yes, ladies, that is how I identified it as his.) In the evening will be Andrew and Sara‘s $13 All-You-Can-Eat-Sushi Tampopo birthday party.* Details here.
*Special events, for those interested, are essentially the only way to get me to step foot into a sushi house.
Friday and Saturday are still fairly up in the air, and Sunday, like every Sunday, I’m at the Dance Centre from 3 pm – 9:30.
A sound like god, what happens when a man covered in microphones walks into a room full of speakers.
I have been measuring things more in my eyes than my hands this week, which leads to interesting bits of missing time that I worry for, as if they’re my children and I’ve abandoned them for that crucial minute too long in the shopping mall where now the only way to get them back is in newspaper articles I clip out and tape to my fridge.
Last weekend, Burrow was in town. I know that for certain. The order of her arrival is written down, there were pictures taken. She stayed over Friday night with Sam, the evening of Meat Eatery. Sam and I had walked to BJ’s after dinner, watched atrocious movies with Bob and his girl-darling from Parksville, then returned to curl up with Burrow asleep in my bed. We were quiet, but woke her unintentionally.
Saturday we crawled out of bed in time for the Fool’s Parade. Sam went home to shackle himself to his desk and Burrow and I rolled like tired thunder downtown and met with Duncan, Jenn, Georg, and her pink-dyed ferret, Silky. The parade was rainy and under-attended, so after coming close to winning the Fool of the Year award with ferret breasts, we abandoned the street for Taf’s. When work didn’t have my paycheque ready, we turned around and walked to the Bay to visit with Eva at her clinical cosmetics booth. It was fascinating, in a quiet colourful way, but not enough to keep Burrow and I from going home to rest before Duncan pulled us out to the graceful Fool’s Cabaret on Main st. Reine‘s mother was there, and Siobhan, a friend of friend’s we went to dinner with after.
Monday is missing, a played out afterburn. I took some self-portraits, but I don’t know if I slept there at home or not. There was one, two ideas. A number, undifferentiated. Something.
Tuesday is more concrete, not only written down, but recorded. Video, audio, photographs. Imogyne and I at Hawksley Workman with darling Sophie. The Cultch in all it’s warmly worn desiccating glory, intimate, red curtained. I remembered all the shows I’d played there. Running through the back when I was a child, that one time making love inside the roof. Downstairs hot-boxing the worn office, how there was once a pane of glass violently shattered in the middle of an orchestral piece, how the beads of my necklace clattered as I bounced and clapped. The music was good too, his acoustic version of striptease sincerely captivating.
After, Devon came over and we stayed up until the last bus, listening to our bootlegs and drinking weary tea. Imogyne eventually went home, and Devon and I talked until far too late, making me late for work Wednesday. The day I went to Andrew‘s after work and Georg and I re-dyed my hair into the colour of sticky quill ink while watching Ghost in the Shell. She came back to my place after, and we let the ferret run free through my apartment as we talked about partners and lives lost, the soulmates of just then and not today and maybe yesterday we knew something and maybe tomorrow we’ll have some hope. She wrote poetry and I woke up in the morning holding her hand.
Thursday I had a date with Sam, a real live date, not one of those on-line long-distance approximations my life seems to enjoy lauding me with. Cleaned up versions of us met at Tinseltown for the Brick preview and had dinner at Wild Ginger before walking out to False Creek to hang out on a water fountain and eat caramel ice-cream. We sat under the moon passing the tub back and forth like a cheap cigarette and talked about some of the same things that Georg did. We’re all divorced, the lot of us. It’s like a curse or a disease catching in all the social circles. It seems like every split has had very little to do with love and everything to do with a basic need to keep evolving, to keep trying to touch forever.
Friday Michael stole me out from under dinner with Andrew, Navi, Ryan, and Eva, and accompanied Robin and I to Thank You For Smoking instead. It was gleeful, with some damned nice moments, (there was a montage of Bad People that slaughtered us like baby seals), and led well into creeping alone up the stairs into Duello for the end of Fight Practice, a small red flower as my sword. I sat on the couch with Lee, letting him show me knife tricks, as people cleaned up and we sat for coffee until it was too late to think of going anywhere else but home. Friday nights, however, traditionally lead into mornings without work, so we survived.
We survived well, in fact, not doing a damned thing until somewhere after two in the afternoon, until the body-call to breakfast was too deafening to ignore.