This video is about the Family Thrift Store in Guelph. I never lived in Guelph, but it’s a town I often visit because it’s where a lot of my friends live, and it’s where my older brother went to University. I remember on one of my first visits a few years back being told I have to visit the Family Thrift Store. I went and thought it was a pretty neat store – heck, I bought a sweet jacket on my first trip! Since then, I made sure to stop by the Thrift Store whenever I visited, so I was pretty bummed out to hear earlier this month that the store would be closing. I heard they were throwing some concerts, so last Friday I made my way to the Royal City to catch one of them. This is my document of that night. I hope you get a sense of how important the Family Thrift Store was to a lot of people.
Note: If you want to see the best quality version of the video, go here, and click on HD, and then make it full-screen. Let it load all the way before viewing it. Trust me, it looks great.
Alright, I totally never got around to posting this video. It’s my recap of SXSW, and hopefully this is the last we hear of it. I was covering the Canadian beat, so that’s all you’ll find here. Interview clips with a bunch of bands (most importantly Jim Guthrie). Please watch it so I can keep making videos. Have a nice Sunday.
Phew, I have had no time to blog the past couple days (weeks?) due to me being away in Texas and then coming home with a ton of work to do. I’ve been doing laundry all morning and have only had time to listen to Side A of Attack in Black’s new album. Quel dommage! However, I finished editing my SXSW recap video (which I will post here shortly) and was just sending off some emails informing the bands who are in it of it’s existence, when I discovered that my pals Ohibjou have a secret blog. Well, maybe it isn’t a secret, but they certainly hadn’t told me about it! It’s a pretty great blog too, with tons of video content (my favourite type of content)! I’m reposting a video they just posted because I happen to be in it. It’s all about that time the D’Urbervilles’ van’s tire came loose in Ohio and Ohibjou had to come rescue us. The video is slickly edited and it has a killer soundtrack – I better watch my back. Take a look, have a laff!
I wasn’t supposed to be the one doing the interview with Brian, but due to a last minute change in circumstances I was forced to take the reigns! Unfortunately, I didn’t really have any questions prepared (I was literally at Whippersnapper with Brian when I realized I would be doing the interview). That’s okay though, I decided it might be cool if we went across the street to Soundscapes and looked at music. I thought this would buy me some time to think of good questions, plus it might actually be interesting to find out about Brian’s favourite music. Turns out I was right, because Brian actually had neat things to say about the bands he likes, and we ended up talking out the record label he started when he was a teenager! Another great video done flying by the seat of my pants.
I’m writing this post from a hotel in Nashville, TN. Last night I was in Hamilton at Greg’s house watching The Usual Suspects. Now I’m in Nashville. We just watched Seinfeld and saw a commercial for Tim and Eric. It was hilarious. We don’t have those in Canada! I’m pretty tired right now because I haven’t had very long sleeps the past two nights. I’m hoping John and Kyle will let me squeeze in on there bed. Otherwise I’ll have to sleep on the floor. Alright, I don’t think I have anything interesting to say right now. We’ll hopefully be in Austin tomorrow night. Stoked!
So I went out last to catch a CMW Canadian Music Fest show at the Horseshoe. It was a pretty stellar lineup. I saw $100, Women (who were decent enough but I ended up sitting at a table with friends… you gotta pace yourself), Gentleman Reg and finally Chad VanGaalen. I shot video of $100, which you can see here, as well as Chad, which you can see here. I’m probably heading to some more shows this weekend, so I might have more video. Check the Ampersand too, I think some of my compadres are blogging about the shows they see.
I’ve been listening to The Eric’s Trip Show a lot lately. It’s a live album that was released in 2001, with songs taken from a variety of shows between the years 1991-1996. It’s actually a pretty good jumping off point for people who haven’t heard Eric’s Trip since it includes most of their best songs, and the recordings are so good that they’re pretty much indistinguishable from the album versions. I’m posting a video of them playing Smother here in Toronto at Lee’s Palace in 1993. It’s a pretty interesting video to watch because I go to Lee’s Palace all the time for shows and it still looks exactly the same. I’d love to shoot a video there like this one, with multiple cameras, get some nice dissolves going! That would be sick!
Last night I went to the Tranzac to see a different type of show than I’m accustomed to seeing. I was there to catch the Toronto debut of Le Cyc, a live music/graphic novel extravaganza. I first heard of Le Cyc last September when I was in Guelph for the Kazoo Festival, where it was being performed for the first time. I couldn’t stick around to see it, but a few weeks ago I found out they were bringing an expanded version of the show to several towns around Ontario, so I knew I had to catch it this time around.
Still, when I took my seat before the show, I had no clue what I was about to see. The large Tranzac stage was divided in two, with a projection screen in the center and various instruments on either side. I tried to decipher what was being projected – it appeared to be some sort of desert landscape with a large mechanical-looking tower in the middle – but decided to just sit back and wait for the show to start, hoping the answer would reveal itself.
A little after 9:30, the 8 person band took the stage with their instruments (piano, upright bass, violin, accordion, guitar, drums, saxophone/clarinet ), and soon the projections started. After a few slides giving some backstory on the small cast of characters, the story started. I guess if you’re reading this you might not understand exactly what’s going on right now. Imagine a graphic novel where every panel has been blown up to fill an entire movie screen, and instead of speech bubbles for characters, there are people singing all the dialogue in the form of really catchy songs. Sometimes a panel will stay on screen for several seconds, and sometimes (when there is a lot of action for example) the panels will flash by quickly, almost like crude animation. It works really well, and each panel is really a work of art, created using only ink, wine, and coffee by visual artist Dave Willekes.
So once you’ve grasped how the show is experienced, you can really sit back and enjoy the story of Le Cyc (which you’ll quickly learn is ‘cycle’ backwards). I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but it involves a city powered by bicycles, a singing parrot, true handlebar moustaches, and an epic bike race. The show is around 80 minutes long, and it’s really entertaining the whole way through. I really hope they bring the show back to Toronto, since it’s pretty amazing what these kids from Guelph have done. The stuff that comes from that city never ceases to amaze me.
I was in Oshawa yesterday visiting my folks but I can’t be there for very long without loosing my pizzazz, so I came back early and brought Derrick with me ’cause he hadn’t seen my place yet and I’ve lived here for half a year. It was good to catch up and talk about music. He got me into Red House Painters when we did our radio show, but I can’t back him in his claim that the live version of Sundays and Holidays is better. He also told me he has two 20 minute versions of Evil, but I don’t think I can put up with that much sad-core. We also listened to an Acrid/Left for Dead split he has on translucent orange buzzsaw which had a song about veganism on it. Speaking of vegans, Derrick couldn’t eat any of my food so he starved.
