Month: June 2007

Masquerade ticket update. You can now buy them at the door.

You can now buy tickets at the door.

(The preferred is still to RSVP with Anthony or Mimi.)

If you’re not rsvped, but really want to wear a costume and mask and thus show up at the door with $20 or $35 in hand, you should be fine given Anthony approval on-site, though possibly only if you’re attending with someone who HAS rsvped. (Given the insanely incestuous nature of Vancouver, I’m sure this will not be difficult.)

The invite that was circulating previously stated that tickets must be purchased in advance because, at the time, only a dozen or so tickets had been rsvped/purchased and the event couldn’t go through with that few. Commitment was needed to ensure that A&M didn’t lose money.

However, now that the event is for sure a go, having the ticket pre-paid in hand when you show up is not strictly required. It would be wonderful/greatly appreciated/a really nice thing to do if you would RSVP, especially if you’re doing the open bar, as if 30 people show up without warning, there may not be enough for everyone! But if you’ve let A&M know that you’ll be there, but just haven’t been able to coordinate to get the money to them, that’s definitely okay.

In short, please don’t think that you’re unable to come if you’re unable to coordinate getting tickets paid for in advance! Just make certain that you’ve e-mail geminifest at yahoo.ca, or call Anthony or Mimi directly, to let them know that you’re coming, and how many, as to quote him, “it’s a lot less hassle” if they know numbers in advance.

And if you can circulate so that lots of folks can see this this on your LJs, that would also be extremely wonderful.

I called him last night at 3 a.m. Somehow, I thought he’d be more awake.

I was working over at Alastair’s the last couple of days. Not at home, yet still, it’s up for argument.

His place is a gentle time-warp, like a mirror only vaguely curved. I hear whispers of old conversations in what we say now, as if once we lived downtown and everything that’s been past is only traffic on the other side of the door, or as if our time apart was only a phase in an ongoing relationship that was never broken. Then I go outside.

A false sense of summer – barefoot, wet and warm, heat without end, amen – saturates the Drive. Unbidden, the words to PASSION spring to my brain and I chant it to myself in time with my footsteps as I cross the street. Reine’s sister stops to say hello, I’ve only been out the door less than a minute.

Back inside, music on, old records I remember spinning in the old eastside studio – Kid Koala, NinjaTunes, DJ something-spelled-with-a-K. I remember dancing all night. We would stay up, bass loud, crashing into the windows, making them shudder like glass drum-kits. Talking about the parties we were going to host, talking about the next gig, the latest thing the kids were into. The phone was perpetually ringing and the paintings on the wall never sold.

The Boy will be here tomorrow.

—
This time last year:

“… allow me to present Koreans sublimely breaking, scratching and beat-boxing a cover of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, (hosted on the always awesome Transbuddha). With thanks to dear Larry for digging it up, I’m wondering if anyone has any leads on whatever else this group has done. I love dignified cultural mash-up’s. I think taking stylistics that evolved from the South Bronx in the 1970s and combining it with a gayageum cover of a baroque german composer is possibly even more brilliant than Dr. Fu Manchu, rocking out on Casio synthesizers.

Similarly beautiful to the Korean clip is the riveting UK promo for the tv show LOST set to Portishead and enchantingly directed by David LaChapelle. (LaChapelle is the man behind Rize, the recent must-see hip-hop documentary). It reminds me of Massive Attack’s video for KarmaComa…”

don’t talk to me about mondays

This week’s Monday Movie at Andrew’s will be Vanilla Sky.

For those less inclined to sit through two hours of delusion for the hot chick, but who also want to get out of the damned house, this week’s Vancouver Poetry Slam will be featuring the Mighty Mike McGee, funniest poet alive!!

Me, I’m going to the movie night, but only because I’m broke.

finally the desaturated sky has blown away

100 X 100: 100 rooms, each 100 square feet in size – photographs of residents in their flats in Hong Kong’s oldest public housing estate.

Nicole rented a documentary on human created spaces, called Manufactured Landscapes, that we watched over at Andrew’s with Brett. It opens with a long slow pan through an immense Chinese factory that never seems to end, as if it’s a trick result of careful editing instead of a simple uncut dolly shot. When seen from above, the factory floor looks like an illusion – it is impossible to see the other end. The distance closes down into a perfect figure of perspective, the rows of workers shutting down into a single horizon line, as if the curvature of the earth might be trapped inside with them. The next shot reels you on as the opening sequence, an outdoor file of all the company’s employees, each in a hot yellow shirt, lining up in boxes, twenty people square, stretches for as far as the eye can see. Again it doesn’t look real, there’s simply too many people, too much uniformity. Our first instinct was almost denial.

A Canadian film, inspired by the surreal visuals that mining inflicts into the earth, it presents a silently analytical framework for assessing the awe-threatening disparities that people are capable of spreading across countries, (or even regions), without care for the environment. It combines, without saying so, both economic and social variables, and refers in particular to the marked differences in consumption that mark developing countries. China and India especially, where the economic attributes create living standards unthinkable here, where industry is being created haphazardly, in situations almost bronze age, with computer chips being recycled by grandmothers who separate the precious flakes of metal from their plastic components by beating them with rocks or where barefoot men dismember gigantic ships using hand-woven rope and swim laughing through the raw oil sludge left in the bottom of the tanks. It was inspiring, terrifying, and close enough to touch. I have never been a “scared for our children” sort, but I felt, somehow, that a lot of the people pictured should be.

—
Has anyone heard of a follow-up to Robert Newman’s History of Oil? It seemed so important when it came out, but I haven’t heard anything. I would rather it weren’t swallowed by apathy.

EDIT: I’ve just created a syndication feed for his site: robnewman

“There is no such thing as innapropriate weather, just innappropriate clothing”

The Commercial Drivefest is today, a car-free festival that runs from 1st Ave to Venables, with live music, DJ’s, street vendors, and performers taking over the streets, from approx noon to 6pm.

“Due to popular demand, the peculiar and magnificent Commercial Drive Festival is now evolving into Car-Free Commercial Drive Days — TWO of them! This represents a huge shift in civic consciousness…it will not be long before the ‘hood, the City, the entire planet recognizes the massive potential for global salvation and FREE FUN that Car-Free streets represent. Hallelujah.

Please help us reclaim the street, and start creating the urban paradise we know is possible.”

schedule of events