Monthly Archives: March 2009
The Family Thrift Store
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.
Handsome Furs at the Horseshoe
Handsome Furs are one of the most interesting bands around.
I also shot a video of the Bicycles, who are breaking up.
One Hundred Dollars at the Horseshoe
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.
Le Cyc
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.
Evening Hymns at Wavelength 452
This is a very intense new song from Peterborough’s Evening Hymns, shot last night at Sneaky Dee’s where he was playing for Wavelength 452. I wasn’t sure if I was even going to put it online because I wasn’t sure if the video really captures the intensity of the song. My roommate John was actually asking me how Evening Hymns was, and I said, “He was great! I shot one song and I might put it on YouTube, but it’s a really intense song, so I don’t know if I should.” John said, “Is it that song Dead Deer?!” and I was like, “Yeah, that’s the one!” And then he said, “I’ve heard that song before! That’s my favourite new song of his, it is really intense! Can you show me the video?” So I showed John the video and we both agreed that it was a good video so here it is, on my blog for all to see.