Somewhere south of the year 2000, a trio of loud-mouthed white dudes from NYC called the Beastie Boys finished up fighting for their rights to party, and released an album called Hello Nasty. The opening track was a blitzkrieg of hip-hop and hollering that went by the name of Super Disco Breakin’. Leaving no room to breathe, the three MCs spat out two minutes of thoroughly energetic diatribes about making money, drinking coffee, and something about an 808.

Super Disco Breakin’, the original, is filled with party shouts and mixed-up metaphors about pancakes, records and head-hunting. The track cannot be called sincere by even the most Gumby-like truth-stretchers: it is bereft of introspection and completely lacking in melody, and that’s exactly why we like it.

I was compelled by fate itself to transform this 90s rap track into a piano ballad - one that could turn even the coldest, darkest heart into a flourishing rainforest of love. Folks, this is the piano version of Super Disco Breakin’. The money-making anthem has been given a melody, and I have viciously injected this tune with enough sap and sincerity that even the Beastie Boys wouldn’t recognize the song. Please have your ‘kerchiefs at the ready. If the concept itself doesn’t bring you to tears, then having to listen to my Alanis-like voice wailing about the disco certainly will.

Download the file: Kevan Gilbert - Super Disco Breakin’ (Beastie Boys cover).mp3

Super Disco Breakin’: The lyrics

Verse 1:
50 cups of coffee and you know it’s on
I move the crowd to the break of break of dawn
Can’t rock the house without the party people
Cause when we’re gettin’ down we are all equal

Chorus:
Money Makin’, Money Money Makin’
Super Disco, Disco Breakin’
Money Makin’, Money Money Makin’
Super Disco, Disco Breakin’

Verse 2:
There’s no better or worse between you and me
But I rock the mic so viciously
Like pins and needles and words that sting
At the blink of an eye I will do my thing

[Chorus]

Verse 3:
It’s like a needle in the cartridge when the record spins
Like diggin’ down deep in the record bins
Everybody gettin’ down make no mistake
Nothing sounds quite like an 808

[Chorus]

Drifting without direction, crippled by convenience and firmly affixed to the furniture, the hamster-like humans featured in Pixar’s recent animated epic are meant to remind us of ourselves – those of us still inhabiting this obsolete orb called Earth. It’s a light-hearted but heart-breaking exposé of our tendencies to become motionless machines of malaise. Funnily enough, in the midst of our laconic laziness, it’s a robot that is reminding us how to be human.

If you’ve ever wished you were more inquisitive and adventurous, and able to find meaning and value in the mundane refuse that surrounds you, you should meet Wall*E. The tiny tank-like trash-compactor robot from the movie of the same name, Wall*E is a binary binner that puts the most avid dumpster-diver to shame. He can find more excitement in a thrown-away VHS tape of an old musical than most of us exhibit when we encounter major milestones in our lives.

Seeing Wall*E celebrate what the rest of us would abandon, and innovate where the rest of us would have given up, was embarrassingly enlightening. It was as if Wall*E had called me an unimaginative and lethargic sad-sack who should start being more grateful and involved with my surroundings and clean up after myself. Except, of course, this was communicated through chirps, beeps, metal fingers tapping together, timid politeness, and plenty of old-timey musicals.

FLEA MARKET START

It was approaching winter when Rob Snopek carefully loaded up the back of his pick-up truck with over 2000 vinyl records. A collection cobbled together thanks to years of careful searching, lucky finds and generous friends, he was ready to bring his prized albums out of his apartment and into the marketplace.

On this particular Saturday in 2006, he drove his record-laden truck down to the flea market, and threw open the tailgate. “One dollar each,” he said to any buyer or bystander dropping by to bargain. A steady stream of shocked visitors found themselves the new owners of early Beatles albums and mint condition Pink Floyd records, and by the end of the day, Rob’s truck had nothing left in the back except for a few lonely Anne Murray albums.

“I had no idea what any of that stuff was worth,” Rob laughs. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of records I let go for a dollar.”

Over the next year, after posting dozens of “records wanted” flyers up in local Laundromats, Rob’s record collection slowly began to grow again. By the time I came across Snopek’s legendary supply in the autumn of ‘07, the number of records was estimated to be well over 30,000, and his personal reserve was already turning into the new mecca for Vancouver vinyl hounds.

DISCOVERIES

“Private vinyl showroom,” said the ad. “Thousands of records, old and new! By appointment only.” The bizarre combination of words intrigued me. I had been idly collecting records for a few years, and felt I could use a fresh new source, outside the traditional musty thrift stores and overpriced retail shops.

The phrasing of the ad made me cautious. Craigslist has the bad habit of attracting boatloads of creeps, and I wasn’t in love with the prospect of showing up at a “private vinyl showroom” only to discover that private, vinyl and showroom had very different meanings than what I was expecting. I pitched the idea to my friend and fellow vinyl-liker Harrison.

“Why is it by appointment only?” Harrison wanted to know. “Why is it in his apartment? Where did he get all those records?”

“These are very good questions,” I responded. “It sounds like it could be a trap. Maybe he’s an axe murderer.”

“Let’s do it,” Harrison replied. “Could make for a good story. On the news. After we die.”

I picked up the phone to make an appointment. The voice on the other end supplied directions, and said he’d be waiting in the parking lot for us in one hour.

PRIVATE VINYL SHOWROOM

Wearing a denim jacket and blowing cigarette smoke into the October fog, the man was waiting for us as we pulled into the parking lot of a high-rise by Lougheed Mall in Burnaby. I couldn’t have known it then, but the sight of Rob Snopek, king of Vancouver vinyl, waiting at the base of his apartment complex would soon become an iconic sight.

“Hello, great to meet you!” said Rob, extending his hand. He spoke with a faint but implacable Eastern European accent, and his demeanor exuded a hospitable pride as he prepared to welcome us into his showroom. He gestured for us to follow him.

“So what types of records d’you like?” Rob asked, as we darted down down a short cement stairwell. He held the door for us at the bottom, and we stepped into a smokey hallway, the sounds of a sports game and clinking glasses drifting over from a basement bar to our left. “Um,” I said, trying not to give away my lack of education on the matter. “Been really getting into the blues lately,” I tried. Harrison stepped in for the save: “I’m specifically looking for early funk and soul records,” he declared, as Rob unlocked a door across the hall from the bar. We entered another hallway, this one dimmer than the last, and the door shut behind us. “Motown albums, Curtis Mayfield, that kind of stuff. And I’d also love to find anything by Nina Simone or Billie Holiday.”

“Perfect,” said Rob, pausing in front of a set of imposing, medieval-style wooden doors. He swung the doors open, and we stepped inside the Private Vinyl Showroom.

Tables and boxes overtook our vision. From ground level to waist height, along every wall and every spare surface, U-Haul moving boxes had been carefully stacked, tops opened to display the thousands of records within. Some boxes featured filing-style dividers indicating genres or artists, others had Sharpie’d labels on the front. Looking closer, each record had a transparent plastic slip-cover, with a small label in the top right corner. Every record was hand-labeled with the year of its release, the album’s genre, and this particular record’s key features, whether it was “first edition” or “coloured vinyl.” It took a second for the fact to sink in that this entire collection was curated by one individual.

Rob swept his arm across and room. “Dollar bins are under the tables,” he said. “Discs sorted by artists are on the left, and records by genre are right here,” he said, tapping the table in the centre of the room. “These boxes,” — he touched the row of boxes on the right — “contain fresh arrivals I have just finished pricing.” He pointed towards a turntable at the back. “I can put on any record you want to listen to, and if you have any questions or if you are looking for anything, just ask me. Okay?”

Harrison and I moved like magnets towards the boxes. The record collection in front of us was a veritable museum of music history. Like portals into the past, the album art was transporting us into times we never knew. As I flipped through the Jazz section, I saw Ella Fitzergald send a wink in my direction, and nearby in the blues box, Muddy Waters had a serious bone to pick with me. I saw Johnny Cash stomping his foot at Folsom Prison, while Jimi Hendrix was wrestling a guitar that looked like it was on fire, and meanwhile, four hippies were in mid-stride on a British crosswalk.

It only took about twenty seconds for Harrison to find his Nina Simone, and maybe thirty for me to pick out the blues record I wanted, but it took us two more hours to emerge from our trance. Harrison had selected 30 albums to bring home, and was only paying $30 for the whole set. I had found an original, mint condition pressing of Bitches Brew (a timeless Miles Davis double album from 1969), and in addition to Abbey Road and a couple other standouts, my bill came to only $20. For price, variety and style, the private vinyl showroom and successfully upstaged every record-hunting experience I’d had at places like A&B Sound, Beatstreet Records, thrift stores, pawn shops and eBay. I knew I’d be coming back.

ON THE MOVE

From the record player at the back of the showroom, over the speakers around the room, a bassline was keeping a messy band on track. It sounded like surf music meeting James Brown, or maybe like Weezer meets the Clash, on the inside of a tin can. “What is this?” I asked.

“It’s the Blues Magoos!” Rob replied. “1967. British psychedelic garage music. Amazing band. This is the first edition, very rare.”

Rob was not even ten years old when this Blues Magoos vinyl was released, yet he is able to rattle of encyclopedic info on it as if he had been waiting at the record store on the day of its release. He can provide this kind of snapshot on virtually record in his possession, whether it was released last year, or some time in the 1940s. “I have been loving vinyl almost since the day I was born,” Rob says. And it shows.

Since moving from Czechoslovakia (the Slovakia part) in the late 70s, Snopek has remained settled in Vancouver, but his love of vinyl has kept him constantly on the move. “I pretty much have to hunt all the time,” he admits. “I’ve traveled to Alberta, through the States, all over the place, trying to find records.”

Reciprocally, his customers come from as far away from San Fransisco to pick through his collection. Thanks to the web, word of his business has spread faster than his early Laundromat-ads could have done. In recent months, he has sold and shipped batches of over 5000 records to two separate buyers in the States, and still, his collection remains sophisticated and diverse.

It’s hard to find new sources to dig up good vinyl for the showroom, but for Rob, it’s a worthwhile endeavour. Before Rob’s records ever roped in any real revenue, he worked as a GIS Technologist, performing digital mapping in real-time environments. These days, Rob only needs to find the occasional mapping contract to keep him afloat: selling records brings in 90% of his income.

“A lot of people have tons of records, just sitting in their basements, and they just think they’re junk,” Rob laments. “I need to find those people.”

ELEVATOR MUSIC

The gentleman sharing my elevator was eyeing the two records I had tucked under my arms.

“Are those LPs?”

“Yup,” I replied. It was early 2008, and I was just returning from another successful visit to Snopek’s showroom. An Ella Fitzgerald/Oscar Pederson collaboration was my prize discovery, and the other was a Louie Armstrong live double-album.

“Neat,” said Elevator Man, trying to make conversation. “I have a big whole box of records down in storage.”

I wished I had a card to hand him, but all I had was Rob’s name and a story too long for an elevator ride. For all Elevator People of the future, dutifully hoarding un-spun stashes of records, and for those of us on the hunt for vinyl old and new, appointments to drop by Rob Snopek’s showroom can be made over email at robsnopek@shaw.ca.

An avalanche on the Coquiihalla got in the way of our plans to spend the weekend in Kelowna, so instead, Kendra and I made this movie:

Credits:
* Drawings of people: Kevan
* Drawings of food, mountains, airplanes and luggage: Kendra
* Subtitles & live motion: Kendra
* Camera work: Kevan
* Fake snow: The 3-hole punch
* Music: Illinois Street Lounge internet radio

At work, I sometimes find myself wishing for the convenience of my home music collection in order to select some suitably fantastic tunes. Without a portable music contraption to carry my music along with me, I instead rely on the web for my daily allotment of musical awesomeness. I listen to internet radio, to the podcasts of friends, or to last.fm. Lately, though, I’ve tapped into a remarkably broad library of muzak that has provided me with ample musical ammunition: it’s YouTube, folks.

The ’Tube lets you create custom playlists from any movie on the site. Harnessing this simple feature, I put together my first YouTube playlist. It’s called Please Begin Dancing Now.

Heavily indebted to Bruce Mans’ The New Balaeric podcast, this playlist consists of quirky electronica — danceable indie stuff that you’d probably hear in commercials. In fact, the first track is straight off the recent iPod Touch commercial. This collection ends up being a pretty enjoyable, breezy little list of songs, and I hope you dig this foray into fun and simplicity as much as I have.

The Playlist:
1. Cansei De Ser Sexy - Music is My Hot Hot Sex (Don’t worry, the song isn’t actually sketchy)
2. Project Jenny, Project Jan - 320
3. LCD Soundsystem - Daft Punk Is Playing At My House
4. Le Tigre - Fake French
5. Fujiya & Miyagi - Collarbone
6. Beck - Ghettochip Malfunction (Hell Yes)
7. Death From Above 1979 - Black History Month (Alan Braxe Remix)
8. Justice - D.A.N.C.E
9. Prototypes - Who’s Gonna Sing?
10. Junior Senior - Can I Get Get Get
11. Gorillaz - Kids with Guns
12. Simian Mobile Disco - It’s The Beat
13. LCD Soundystem - Tribulations
14. Datarock - Fa Fa Fa

A quick note: This video playlist contains videos I’ve never actually watched – I can’t vouch for their goodness, or warn you of their badness. I just click play, and let the music rock me into a trance of productivity.

That’s all. Please begin dancing now.

You probably couldn’t guess it from the long, lazy lapses that occur between posts here, but this blog actually means a whole bunch to me. I consider my website’s launch last February to be one of my highlights of 2007. Yet for some reason, this pride and joy of mine never manifests itself in an actual commitment to producing regular content (as Michael Kwan recently pointed out). This paralysis is starting to affect many other areas of my life. Lately, I’ve found myself:

• Singing songs at the piano but not recording any of them.
• Adding pictures to my Flickr account but not telling anybody about them.
• Discovering great things on the internet but not sharing them.
• Customizing the look and feel of my blog but not writing anything for it.

I’ve decided that if I am ever to survive in this cold, harsh wilderness called blogging, I think I will simply have to come face-to-face with my fears. Slash through this delicate, unproductive silence like Conan the Librarian.

First off, this piano thing. My mini-studio has been languishing like a forgotten child in the corner of my condo for months. Besides the occasional group singalongs to “Hey Jude” when our friends come over, I never actually do anything useful with my piano and microphone and mixing board trio – for instance, hook up my computer to lay down the tracks. So tonight, being Thursday night, I opened up the lid of my laptop, busted open some recording software, and decided to just RECORD whatever the deuce happened to emerge from my fingers and lips.

The resulting improvisation was a slip-shod cacophony of absurdity; a lyrically inept, musically unlistenable, unforgivably painful ballad that I think I will call “Transportation’s Got Me Down.”

No wonder I never do this. I really have nothing else to say about it, other than “Oh sweet heavens please prepare yourselves for this fearful audio experience.” Let’s move on to the Flickr thing before somebody realizes what they’ve just listened to.

It has taken me a while to get accustomed to the idea of purchasing items that are completely and utterly intangible, but I finally went ahead and purchased a Flickr Pro account. With my newfound bandwidth freedom, I have uploaded over 130 photographs from my family’s photo archives. These are archaic shots from the 50s and 60s that document my mom’s upbringing with her eccentric family in the city of Burnaby, and my dad’s fascinating history being raised with his lettuce-farming, six-sibling’d family in Australia. The pictures demonstrate a bygone, now-foreign era that is bewildering to behold. Click here to check it out.

Somewhere else across the vast divide of internet-dom, there are even more intriguing things to discover. One item which has successfully held the interest of both my wife and I for over a week is the new(ish) Google Image Labeler. It’s a game you can play, and it’s also a way to help the search engine. Like a cross between Pictionary and Taboo, you are shown a picture and have to describe what you see. Up to five words will be “off-limits,” but once you and your randomly assigned partner both type in the same words, you score points. Our best score ever placed us at #12 in the day’s top rankings.

You may have noticed that I have introduced a new attempt to attract advertisers to my website. The green rectangle perched on my sidebar is a weak effort to farm out space on my blog to anybody who would like to pay a mere $5.00 Canadian dollars. However, since nobody seems to think this would be a worthwhile investment, I’ve decided to hold a contest instead.

I invite all readers of this post to leave a comment on my blog, and answer this question: if this ad space was yours for free, what would you advertise? You can tell truths, fictions, confessions or lies. At the end of four days time, I will put all of your names into a hat (or maybe a bowl, or perhaps a basket) and draw out one name. The person whose name emerges will receive an entire month of free advertising: any message you wish to cram into the 250 x 90 space is all yours. You can design the ad yourself if you wish, or work with me to create something pleasing.

Alright, that is certifiably all of the mutterings I can muster for one evening. In an attempt to reduce my carbon footprint and help meet Kyoto protocols for blog emissions by 11:30 pm, I’m signing off. See you in the comments!

Sometimes, when an episode of Gilmore Girls shows up on my TV (I’m not sure how they keep doing that, although I’m starting to suspect my wife might have something to do with it), I find it hard to focus on all the Stars Hollow drama. It’s not that Luke’s Diner doesn’t have enough gossip to go around: it’s just that the dialogue hogs all the attention. It seems the screenwriters are hijacking each piece of dialogue as means of showing off their own cleverness.

It’s like that with the movie Juno: the leading lady’s mouth produces a non-stop stream of well-written idioms and clever proclamations that seem uncomfortably out-of-place in a 16-year-old. It’s less like character development, and more like ventriloquism. While Juno’s motormouth provides the bulk of the levity in the movie, it certainly makes it a little harder to believe she is anything more than a deliberately constructed container for the screenwriter’s ideas.

“It’s just that you’re so cool and you don’t even try,” confesses Juno near the end of the movie, to a shuffling Paulie Bleeker. “Actually,” he stammers back, his voice squeaking a bit. “I try really hard.”

Like Bleeker, Juno is a movie caught awkwardly between earnestness and pretentiousness. The visual and sonic ideas are precious and artful, but its cleverness kind of clouds the sincerity. By the time Juno and Bleeker are playing their acoustic duet at the end of the show, it’s hard to tell if Juno has actually changed that much from the Stooges-loving 70s-punk-rock chick she claimed to be, or if it’s just another excuse to include a great song.

Best moment: The opening credits, a live/animated hybrid accompanied by a great folk song called “All I Want is You,” by a guy I’ve never heard of named Barry Loius Polisar.

Most questionable moment: The abundance of Napoleon Dynamite-isms. One of the very first spoken lines in the movie is this: “Jeez Banana, shut your friggin’ gob, okay?” I kept expecting Juno to bust out the “Vote for Pedro” t-shirt.

Dear friends and readers, real and imaginary:

I hope that 2007 has brought you a satisfactory sequence of months and weeks. For me, this year has been like attending an auction on the roof of a train: mile-a-minute decisions and actions proceeding with dangerous speed, resulting in an overabundance of unexpected blessings that I keep expecting to fly away.

As advent calendars, Rick Dees and that guy who announces NASA space shuttle launches would love to tell you, there are only 14 days until Christmas. Soon, there will be 13, and depending on when you’re reading this, it might even be Christmas already. Since my impending holidays will involve precarious wintertime road travel, I’d like to give you your Christmas gifts early. Only for the sake of alliteration, I shall not call them “gifts,” but “contributions.”

Christmas Contribution Number 1: A Christmastime Podcast

This 45-minute, 16-track Christmas mix brings you a cheerful smattering of Christmas songs that are both piping-fresh and well-aged. If you are looking for a little bit of seasonal music to spice up your Christmas parties, road trips, work days and iPods, this mix is here to help. It’s called “Yuletide Cheer.”

Tracklist:
1. Ron Sexsmith: Maybe This Christmas
2. Sufjan Stevens: Come On! Let’s Boogie to the Elf Dance!
3. Beach Boys: Little Saint Nick
4. Hawksley Workman: Common Cold
5. The Rat Pack: Have a Holly Jolly Christmas
6. Aimee Mann: Christmastime
7. Otis Redding: Merry Christmas
8. James Brown: Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto
9. Brian Setzer Orchestra: Zat You Santa Claus?
10. The Blind Boy of Alabama (featuring Tom Waits): Go Tell It on a Mountain
11. Son Seals: Lonesome Christmas
12. Chuck Berry: Merry Christmas, Baby
13. Charlie Parker: White Christmas (King Kooba Remix)
14. Erlend Oye: Last Christmas
15. Johnny Cash: Silent Night
16. Sufjan Stevens: O Come, O Come, Emanuel

“Yuletide Cheer” is the name of the mix, and it comes in the form of a podcast. “What on earth is a podcast,” you ask? Well, in this case, it’s one giant MP3 that contains 16 songs, which you can burn to CD, or throw on your MP3 player, or play from your computer.

Click here to download the podcast (41.2 MB).

Christmas Contribution Number 2: Website Remix

Just in time for the holidays, I’ll soon be unleashing a completely redesigned “Kevan Gilbert Online” upon the internet. While the new look won’t exactly be Christmas themed, I decided that ‘twas the season to for some serious website renovations.

Depending on when this Christmas missive reaches your retinas, the new site might already be live. If not, keep your clicking constant and your refreshing rampant, because this site will be “off the hook.” Indeed, it will embody a term I have just now decided to call “profunktionalism.” I haven’t been this excited about the internet since I discovered that you could make sideways smiley faces by combining colons, dashes and brackets.
:-) <----- See??

Anyway, let me tell you about the new look. Thanks to a brilliant WordPress theme by Darren Hoyt called Mimbo, the old Kevan Gilbert Online has been replaced by a tighter, cleaner, shinier version of itself. The site’s design fuses clean professionalism with decidedly hip typography and colour usage, giving it a spit-shine polish that makes things easier to read and funner to click around. I truly hope you like it as much as I do.

Christmas Conclusions

I’m afraid those are all the Christmas contributions I’ve got for us this season. While you can always recycle the old tradition of reading “The Real Story of Christmas” around the family tree, I am essentially all out of yuletide offerings. So in closing, I’d like to wish all of my loyal friends and imaginary readers (or is it the other way around?) the merriest of Christmases, and the happiest of New Years. Download a podcast, click around the new site, and make sure to leave a comment or two.

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is home to an army of unsolved, unsolveable mysteries. I work there now, in the relative safety of a third-floor office building, and my daily transit commute is peppered by question marks from station to station. Each day I ride past the 8:00 am camp-out at the Bottle Depot, slide past the aimless congregation at Carnegie Community Centre, and step softly past the lonesome sleepers curled up in vestibules all across the city.

The mysteries of addiction and pain, buried inside people, are only explored through dialogue. I don’t have time for that, I assure myself, fumbling with my security pass. I’ll be late for work.

But work often lends itself to distraction, and this week I solved a mystery that has tugging at me since 2006. It’s the mystery of 645 East Hastings Street.

This building, nestled between a drycleaner’s and a clothing shop, is painted a reserved, uninviting gray. From the stucco to the security bars, the paint is like a blanket, covering even the windows. There is no signage — only a touch of graffiti — and the three black digits on the door, reading 645. It’s the cleanest building on this stretch of Hastings, but also the most austere.

645 E Hastings has a twin: a residential building covered by the same heavy coats of triple-thick concrete-milkshake paint. This twin is situated at 640 E Cordova. The narrow alley between Hastings and Cordova finds the rear ends of these two buildings situated diagonally across from each other, trying so hard to blend in.

Rarely does anybody enter or emerge from these twin buildings, save for the occasional vehicle being driven out of the heavily secured garage in the alley. The gray colour makes the buildings incredibly evasive – in fact, it’s such a subtle colour that the buildings are virtually invisible. I’ve often wondered why these buildings exist. What is their purpose? What function requires this much privacy, security and ambiguity? Is it a mob thing, a cult thing, a sex thing?

On Thursday, a lunchbreak stroll with a co-worker brought me through the alley where the mystery buildings connect. For the first time, the rear doors to 645 E Hastings were flung wide open. A young man was painting some very tall doors a very white colour. Inside, I saw white walls, white floors and a white ceiling. One or two workers moved about inside, amongst ladders, shelving and other unidentifiable gear in piles on the floor.

“He’s got an amazing studio space,” said my co-worker, shading his eyes to try and peer inside better.

“Wait, who does?” I asked. “It’s a studio? Whose studio? For what?”

“It’s Jeff Wall,” he said. “Jeff Wall, famous photographer?”

Jeff Wall, Jeff Wall, I repeated to myself, preserving the name until a convenient Googling time arrived. The web search quickly turned into an all-out Internet-wide info-hunting expedition, and I soon learned that Jeff Wall’s technical proficiency, creativity and iconoclasm has been a driving force in the international photography scene for decades.

THE WORK OF JEFF WALL

Born in 1946, Jeff Wall has been creating art in Vancouver, BC since the late seventies. He takes pictures as if he were making an entire film: that is, each photograph is meticulously constructed over the course of weeks, months, and sometimes years.

Wall is known for his giant-sized photographic transparencies mounted on back-lit boxes – think bus-stop ads or X-ray screens. He specializes in elaborately composed shots that look either unfathomably complicated, or confusingly mundane. The shot below falls into the former category. Completed over the course of two years, the final image was composed from 75 different photographs, taken in two different Vancouver cemeteries and within Wall’s own studio. Wall worked with oceanographers to create the tidal pool in the open grave.

The Flooded Grave, 1998-2000
Read more about this image at Tate Modern.

Early in Wall’s career, he began experimenting with documentary-style compositions. Because his lightbox transparencies required large-format prints, a portable camera (in the 80s, at least), couldn’t provide the clarity he required to capture candid moments on the street. Still wishing to catch the genuine, street-level vibe of the occurrences taking place around him, Wall would instead hire amateur actors to recreate street scenes in studio. The shot below, titled “Mimic” is from 1982, and recreates a racist exchange Wall observed on a Vancouver sidewalk.

“The gesture was so small,” explains Wall. “I was interested in the… physical mimesis. The white man was copying the Asian’s body. Mimesis is one of the original gestures of art.”

Wall’s words are what gives his photography added significance. Critics might be less equipped to read into Wall’s work if he wasn’t so actively doing it himself. Having served as a professor at three different colleges and universities (including UBC), Jeff Wall has published a significant amount of essays relating to photography, philosophy and art, and of course, his own work.

Take a look at the photograph below, titled “The Storyteller.” Evidently one of Wall’s most iconic works, it exemplifies his mastery of elaborate set-ups that don’t seem elaborate, but which turn out to be loaded with intentionality and significance.

The storyteller in this image is the woman in the bottom left-hand corner. Wall has stated that this woman represents “the historical crisis of the Native peoples of Canada, whose traditions of oral history have been eroded by modern life.” By setting up the shot in a typically overlooked locale, he emphasizes the distance between Native history and contemporary existence.

Wall’s writing about this work are academic and dense, using words like “archaism” and “figura” in his descriptions. His inaccessibility is charming, illustrating an enchantment with intellectual explorations, but a detachment from popular art. In a way, Wall himself is the Storyteller, passionately providing fervent lectures on photography and art, just off the beaten path.

THE INVISIBLE MAN

Hastings Street is certainly a curious corridor to choose for studio space, but I imagine that the veil of poverty lends itself to considerable privacy. As the annual Eastside Culture Crawl demonstrates, there are plenty of artists who find this part of town to be an ideal venue for their work.

Wall’s obscure studio is incongruous with such a prolific career, but provides such a captivating legend:

“I heard there’s a famous old photographer with a high-tech studio just two doors down from Union Gospel Mission.”

“I heard he lives there too, surrounded by photography gear.”

I don’t know anything about Jeff Wall beyond what I’ve learned this past week. I don’t know if he resides in his studio, if he’s connected to his community, if he ever emerges from the darkroom or the lightbox. But every time I walk past the gray walls, I imagine Wall at work in a situation similar to the one he created with his 2000 piece, “Invisible Man.” With 1,369 illegally connected light bulbs strung together over the ceiling, the subject lives quietly and unobtrusively in a New York cellar, going about his business under the otherwordly glow of leftover lightbulbs, completely separate from the city around him.

EXPLORING MORE JEFF WALL

• Wikipedia always offers fascinating tidbits, including this gem: did you know that Wall’s photograph “The Destroyed Room” was used as the cover shot for a Sonic Youth EP of the same name?
• Read “If You Build It They Will Come,” an article in Time Magazine from February 2007 and written by Richard Lacayo. The revealing essay explores staged photographs and includes Wall in the exploration, calling one of Wall’s shots the “photographic equivalent of a Jackson Pollock drip painting.” (Ouch.)
• TateModern has created an exceptional interactive online exhibit of Wall’s work from 1978-2004, featuring detailed views and write-ups for many of his signature pieces. All of the images I have used in this entry have been borrowed from the Tate site. Visit this page to see read up on Wall’s work and career. Be sure to explore my favourite from Wall’s photographs, called “A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusa)” from 1993:

I paid two pounds (approximately 0.9 kilograms, for you Canadians) for Radiohead’s intangible new release, the digitally delivered seventh album, called “In Rainbows.” Since the stunt was announced in early October 2007, this album has everybody talking, but for the first time in Radiohead’s career, the conversation has nothing to do with their music.

“In Rainbows” is music to become familiar with, not music that captures your attention. It’s not music to share with your family and friends, unless you’re hosting a “Serious Music Discussion Night.” It’s not music you listen to for fun, unless you define fun as “a period of discouragement and longing.” Plain and simple, like much of the Radiohead catalogue, “In Rainbows” is music to be lonely to.

The album opens with “15 Step.” As electronic drums set up the song’s over-complicated rhythm, drummer Phil Selway joins in to add a little more confusion. Thom Yorke begins inserting quotes he heard during the day: “Won’t take my eye of the ball,” “Did the cat get your tongue?” and so forth. You can’t sing along – because you don’t actually want to, because the words are unclear, and because your voice doesn’t sound good when you sing like Thom Yorke. Congratulations, you’ve just been alienated.

“Bodysnatchers” takes over, introducing Radiohead’s first memorable rock riff since “Just.” The panting drums carry the song like a dogsled team. Each time this track starts, within three seconds, I’ve got my air guitar plugged in. “Has the light gone out for you?” Yorke demands, “Cause the light’s gone out for me.” This is a rock song for the apocalypse – but then again, Radiohead songs were bred for no other occasion.

Track 3 – bear with me, this isn’t actually a track-by-track review – is when the album’s mood and personality is finally established. “Don’t get any big ideas,” the listener is encouraged. “They’re not gonna happen.” Selway’s waltz rhythm is purposely ironic, taunting the listener with a rhythm you’d be tempted to snap your fingers to, while Thom Yorke is busy pissing pessimism all over the percussion.

Throughout this record, you’ll find that drummer Phil Selway is given one of the most prominent roles on this album, with his human rhythms winning out over the machines. His diverse beats, from the meandering hip-hop of “All I Need” to the quick straight-time rhythm of “Weird Fishes,” provide something tangible for the listener to hold on to. It’s a vital role to play in an album that doesn’t make an effort to stick in your head.

If you’re in the mood for a little bit of isolation, with a side dish of “haunting melodies,” this is the record for you. In public, this record alienates, but in private, it provides nothing but empathy. If you ever find yourself commuting to work on mass transit, lost in an anonymous sea of faces and burdened by the insincerity all around you, put on “Videotape” and let the scattershot percussion blend in with the sound of traffic and movement that surrounds you, and let the cyclical, soothing piano line carry you off to the pearly gates. Keep in mind that when Thom Yorke says this will be on videotape, he only means that figuratively. It will actually be on TiVo.

Music has changed so much since “OK Computer” and “Kid A” took everybody by surprise. After all of Radiohead’s vital work providing new creative direction for music, it seems they’ve finally arrived at a sound and a style that is firmly their own – and it’s a style that revels in despair, remains in darkness, and relishes desperation. While for many, this type of musical sadism helps heal wounds, for me, it suggests that it’s time to be looking for music that is actually looking forward. It is Thom Yorke’s line from “Faust Arp” that summarizes Radiohead’s new release for me: “I love you, but enough is enough.”

Today, I stepped on the Skytrain and was immediately surrounded by approximately 327 six-year-olds wearing toques and waving stuffed bunnies in the air. It seemed all the children in Burnaby had been ordered to evacuate the city en masse, and head towards downtown Vancouver. At least, it appeared that way until a Grown Up shouted “EVERYBODY STAY STANDING FOR THE PEOPLE WHO WANT TO SIT DOWN!!!” It was clear somebody was in charge, and when I asked a nearby gremlin what was up, he confessed it was a field trip to Science World.

I wish that the organizations we work for still arranged regular field trips, allowing adults the privilege of visiting nearby museums, scenic interest points and maybe the gravesites of famous dead people. However, when you try to organize a group of adults to move from one part of the city to another, it’s like respectfully inviting a group of babies to please spell their names backwards. All you get is a bunch of nonsensical screaming.

Consider an incident from this morning, on the bus:

At 10 am, there was a noticeable predominance of older folks riding the bus – most of them contentedly immersed in their blue fabric sites, a few squabbling for seats near the front. I was absently-mindedly reading a daily, sitting at the back of the bus, when suddenly a horrifying shriek pierced the near-silence.

“Yiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!” came the noise; it was the type of noise you’d expect from somebody who has just had their leg trapped in the bus door. But the only thing close to a medical emergency going on was the accelerated heart rates of the passengers. An older woman with a cane was busy exploding with rage: “DOES IT LOOK LIKE I WANTED YOU TO HOLD ON TO ME??” she screeched. Turns out, somebody had tried to stabilize the woman as she nearly fell on top of her fellow passengers.

She quieted down and said “Can I get off now?” to the bus driver. The courteous chauffer, not even at an official stop (but rather, just a light), opened the door and let the woman leave. The passengers let out a collective sigh — another failed attempt at adults trying to get along.

But wait, don’t give up hope yet. Just when you thought we were doomed, along comes John Chow, legendary internet mogul and superstar philanthropist. I won’t spoil the surprise, but let’s say John has pretty much started a worldwide blogathon. Head on over to John’s site to read about how a free lunch at Union Gospel Mission is turning into the fundraising spectacle of the century.

While the web is busy raising funds to help feed the homeless Thanskgiving, I’m spending the day over in UGM’s auxiliary headquarters at 659 E Hastings, manning the phones for the JRfm “Feed the Hungry” radiothon. If you can handle the onslaught of country music, tune in to hear amazing stories from UGM’s clients, and to hear this phone number broadcasted regularly: 604-874-8837. You can call in to make a donation, or donate online any time at over at the official UGM website.

And while we’re talking about the web, I’m pleased to announce that my own website just got a little more official. You can now point your browser towards kevangilbert.com any time you wish to visit the site. I acquired the domain name a few weeks ago, and just took the appropriate steps to redirect the domain to the existing site. I am planning (in the loosest sense of the word) to introduce a whole new design sometime over the next couple lonely winter months, which promises to be better! Bigger! Beautifuller!!

In the research process for purchasing my own-name domain name, I discovered a couple things: first of all, some hoser already scored the domain name “kevan.org” – however, it you do a quick Google search for “Kevan,” my site is the third answer to appear. Yay!

Alright, that’s about all the useless trivia for today. I have to get back to my annual Thanksgiving weekend rituals – wallowing in self-pity while ingesting regular doses of Sudafed capsules and trying to remember what it was like to have a holiday where I wasn’t afflicted by some mysterious ailment. Happy Thanksgiving!

Last March, I published a post called “Mixes in the Making,” in which I made a passing-paragraph reference to a song that teen sensation group Hanson performed in concert. It’s a cover of the Radiohead song, Optimistic. That post was mistakenly republished earlier today (to the Xanga version of my blog), and my friend Kristen posted this comment in response:

“Where can I find that “Optimistic” cover? My curiousity has been undeniably piqued.”

In my initial post, I had described the song as such:

“…it’s actually an inspiring piece of work. If you can put up with the legions of screaming girlies in the background, that is. The tribal-warefare drums carry the crunching guitars, and both provide the perfect rhythmic menace to counteract with whoever-it-is that’s singing in a tortured mini-rockstar wail.”

The song really is a wonder to behold, if for nothing more than the sheer surprise that the MMMBop guys can pull off this sound. I’ve uploaded the track for anybody to listen. Click or right-click to play it or download it:

Hanson - Optimistic (Radiohead cover)

While we’re on the topic of unlikely acts covering Radiohead tracks, I should share with you another. It’s neighbourhood guitar hero, John Mayer, and he’s covering the title track off Kid A. Pitchfork dissed it with a tepid 2.5 out of 5, but the nonchalant review shrugs off this incredible gem far too casually.

The Radiohead original is a virtually arrhythmic drone of digitally distorted vocals over top what sounds like a child’s mobile. It’s a beautiful track, it suits the album wonderfully, but one thing it’s not is “accessible.” Somehow, John “Wonderland” Mayer manages to wrangle a discernible melody line out of it. His multi-layered guitars provide a methodical, wooden strum as the bassline, subtle self-harmonies twisting it into something that’s both more musical and more maudlin than the chillingly dark Radiohead original. I recommend putting this track in the centre of a mixtape that chronicles a slow, downward spiral. Here’s the file:

John Mayer - Kid A (Radiohead cover)

And of course, unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the last two days, Radiohead has announced that their very brand new album has just been completed. It’s called “In Rainbows,” and is being released on October 10. And get this: you can pay however much you want for it. PAY WHAT YOU WANT. All I can say is, this is rad news. Read more:

* The official “In Rainbows” website
* In more understandable terms, from Pitchfork

Number of days since I last blogged: 29
Number of kilometers I’ve moved since last post: 979
Population of my previous city of residence: 28,927
Population of my new city of residence: 202,799
Square footage of previous residence: Over 2000
Square footage of new residence: 805
Time it used to take me to get to work: 25 seconds
Time it now takes me to get to work: 45 minutes
Number of co-workers I used to work with: 1
Number of co-workers I now work with: 4 - 150
Number of years I’ve been married, as of August 27, 2007: 1
Number of meals served at Union Gospel Mission each year: Over 280,000
Number of graduate students enrolled at UBC: Over 8,000

If you do the math, crunch the numbers, analyze the data, you should deduce that it’s been a tremendously busy period for us: from packing up our house in Airdrie to moving into our Burnaby condo, starting new jobs and new studies, adjusting to new commutes and new schedules…we’re as busy as Lower Mainland copper thieves. But hey, life is good, and if you’re in the “GVRD” anytime soon, drop in and we’ll serve you some tea.

It’s good to be back.

I have recently detected a surprising resemblance between the president of Iran, and two notable movie stars. The two young Hollywood meat-cakes are commonly known as Jake Gyllenhall (of Donnie Darko, Jarhead and Brokeback Mountain fame), and Ryan Gosling, who was in that one movie about the history teacher on drugs. The president of Iran is best known for being the 6th president of Iran, and for being the latest excuse for the US to get all war-mongery on our asses.

It is clear that Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is taking fashion and grooming cues from his Western counterparts. Image savvy is very helpful when you’re the president of a country, because I hear you have to be on TV a bunch.

If anybody starts talking to you about invading Iran, please calmly explain that Iran poses no threat, that it might be kind of deceitful, and that besides, why interrupt a leader who is busy being that handsome?

Addendum: My wife’s friend Julia pointed out that I should add Mr. Steve Carrell to the line-up: his beared appearance makes him an exact stunt-double for Mr. Ahma-daba-doo-dad. I then subsequently discovered that this co-relation has already been unearthed by The Frank Report. Well, I’ll be. Anyhoo, here’s Noah the Suicidal 40-Year-Old Boss Virgin, looking more ready than ever to lead a conflicted Middle Eastern nation:

The 2007 Calgary Folk Music Festival, a four-day foray into the world’s best music, took place during the last week of July 2007 at Prince’s Island Park, and the resulting noises and sounds made me wonder what on earth I’ve been doing with my ears my whole life. For posterity and for your perusal, I present to you, The 10 Most Amazing Performances of the 2007 Calgary Folk Music Festival.

(All photos taken by Kevan Gilbert, unless otherwise noted)

10. Final Fantasy

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user Gunn]

Owen Pallet (who performs as Final Fantasy) is not a solo violinist, he’s a one-man orchestra with shirt-tails and foot-pedals. The virtuosic kid has so much talent and innovation that it makes me want to scream, but that would interrupt his music – and that would be blasphemous.

I don’t know how long he’s been playing the violin, but it’s as if he reached the limit of training and theory and started thinking, “In what other ways can I use this violin? Can I pluck its strings? Can I play it lying flat, like I’m sawing a two-by-four? Can I yell at it? Can I sing while I play it? Can I use guitar looping pedals to make a symphony?”

The answer to all these questions was yes, and Pallet’s innovation was transcendent. He used dissonance only as necessary, careful to employ nausea and noise only to make the beautiful passages even prettier. His lush loops let him accompany himself, sometimes stepping up to his keyboard to introduce new layers, and regularly offering his voice as an additional instrument, his unassuming tenor giving way to a heavenly falsetto. Owen Pallet’s performances this weekend were groundbreaking tutorials on how to subvert the cold rules of reality to instead fulfill a fantasy.

9. Nathan

“Trans Am, take me away,” she sings, a careful, child’s voice from a mouth on a face that belongs on a living room figurine. Her name is Keri Latimer, and her two pom-poms of hair atop her head only add to the precocious music that sounds much, much too mature to belong to her. Evoking Eisley and the Innocence Mission from verse to bridge to chorus, the dark folk songs of Nathan disarm, unhand and enchant with startling force.

Harmonizing from stage-right with line-for-line precision is Shelley Marshall, whose black Johnny Greenwood locks obscure her face as she pumps a purple accordion in time to a shuffling beat. The beatkeeping is done by an aggressively talented percussionist who somehow manages to balance and play his guitar atop his drums while keeping rhythm with his feet, occasionally switching it up to blow breezy solos into a mounted harmonica. Meanwhile, the ironclad bassist keeps the band rocksteady with his grounded fretwork. This band, hailing from Winnipeg, is a lighthouse on the plains; they’re a unique prairie beacon that gave us some beautifully unified performances, and managed to upend all our best guesses as to who this mysterious “Nathan” really is.

8. Six String Nation

The arbitrarily chosen assortment of musicians that filled the side stage on Saturday morning were not what you’d call a natural fit. The ensemble was made up of four members from Lubo Alexendrov’s Bulgarian gypsy group, two Americana country-styled bluesmen on lap and pedal steels, an unseen bass player, very Canadian songster Hawksley Workman and his everpresent sidekick, Mr. Lonely (aka, Todd Lumley).

While many of the mixed-musician sessions that took place this weekend found the performers taking turns to perform their own songs, Six String Nation was an hour-long jam session. Each musician would get the chance to set the pace with a rhythm, a chord or a riff, and the other players would weave in and out with surprising dexterity. You’d be amazed, as we were, how well the pedal steel can get along with gypsy folk, or how a disco beat set by Hawksley on the drums can accompany a country dirge. This was beautiful improvisation, on-the-fly inspiration that came to define what it means to be folk.

7. Bettye Lavette

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jenniedo]

Since when do legendary soul divas from Detroit stop by to pander to placid white audiences on the Canadian prairies? The Calgary crowd was preoccupied with emitting friendly vibes and folksy expectations, and suddenly Bettye Lavette brought the funk. Her very serious, very incredible backing band set up an infectious groove, and with a Jackson-esque yelp into a wireless mic from backstage, Lavette strutted out in an all-white outfit to begin breaking our hearts en masse.

Out here in the Canadian west, the closest we come to funk and soul is odor and theology. I’d wager that after her show concluded and Lavette swaggered backstage again, at least half the audience pulled out their “to do” lists and wrote down, “Get some funk.” The Bettye Lavette concert was an astonishing explosion of Motown energy that made all of us wish we had even 10% of the rhythm, soul and sexuality that was bring broadcast from the stage. But in true soul form, the sensation was not called inadequacy, it was empowerment. Soul powah.

6. Sarah Slean

“I wore pink for you, Calgary,” teased Ms. Slean, striking a pose at the lone grand piano at the centre of the mainstage. Slean is both cute enough to get away with that, and talented enough to still be taken seriously playing the piano in a pink dress with pink heels. She’s got arms and legs as thin as two pairs of chopsticks, which is half sexy and half hellish, her shrunken frame making us all think about metabolism, anorexia, drugs and other things that make people skinny. Whatever experiences Slean has struggled through, they inform a dark, deep and soaring collection of melodies and words which must be some of the must beautiful songs ever written.

Sarah Slean’s rich, angelic alto never once missed her intended note. Her classically-trained fingers seemed to know the piano’s needs and wants, with five microphones dipped into the open grand’s torso to pick up and transmit every key played. Slean’s performance was transcendent and charming, intimate and explosive. With no accompanying band and no backup vocalists, Sarah Slean sat alone at the piano and provided one of the most pitch-perfect solo performances of the festival.

5. Rufus Wainwright

Surrounded by nine talented men in stripes, and himself decked out in an absurd costume of brown lederhosen, Rufus Wainwright was clearly in his element. Bursts of cinematic jazz from a brass section of three, caterwauling piano rhythms from Rufus himself when he wasn’t busy gesturing grandly at the mic, and surround-sound choir backup from all nine of his band members made for a lush, well-orchestrated sound. There was nothing but bliss and revelry from Rufus, whose little boy smile never left his face during the whole performance.

Rufus had the privilege of being Thursday’s closing act, and his Broadway-style performance sent people home to bed with a pleasant buzz of satisfaction. His decision to conclude the concert with his cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was brilliant; he had the whole crowd in a swaying singalong. While the Folk Fest was just another tour stop for Rufus, his presence was meaningful, and gave attendees a hopeful pride in the future of Canadian music, as well as for the rest of the Fest.

4. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings

Funk is hard work. Demonstration: the Dap Kings, possibly the hardest working band at the Festival. Their extremely tight dress code supplied an extremely tight sound, but their formal suits didn’t stop them from sweating the night away. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings poured their hearts into their soul — they did it with brass, they did it with class, and they did it with pure, unstoppable funk.

Sharon Jones herself is from the hometown of James Brown, and it seems like soul runs freely in that city. “Lock up your sons!” the guitarist (moonlighting as MC) declared, before Jones overtook the stage like freshly freed prisoner, wild eyes ready to woo you, voice ready to vindicate you for the sin of being a boring-ass white person. During the performance, she taught the crowd how to dance (instructions, demo AND danceable music included), and her capable MC/guitarist did a phenomenally classy job making us all feel good. Besides Bettye Lavette and the New Orleans Social Club, no other show came close to showing off the sheer muscle and discipline of the fabulous Sharon Jones and her Dap Kings.

3. New Orleans Social Club

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user Digg Doug]

The very existence of the New Orleans Social Club makes me want to permanently disown irony. While many bands (let’s say, Tokyo Police Club, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and other similarly-named groups) choose names that “ironically” have nothing to do with their group affiliation or place of origin, the New Orleans Social Club is overwhelmingly, breathtakingly, unapologetically legitimate.

Consisting of some of New Orlean’s most accomplished, elite instrumentalists, these five black musicians got together after Hurricane Katrina claimed their equipment, their homes, and some of the city’s best music venues. The NOSC play a devastatingly cool blend of funk, jazz and blues that is so gritty, it exfoliates your heels. Check it: piano man Henry Butler is blind, and lead guitarist Leo Nocentelli unleashes blistering solos upon your head while staring you down from behind his foreboding shades. The performance by the New Orleans Social Club was probably the most unexpectedly awesome showdown of the whole weekend.

2. Hawksley Workman

Mr. Workman dispensed three eclectic performances this weekend, and none of them ended with the audience still sitting down. From Hawksley’s warbling “Oooo”s to the listeners’ adoring “ahhh”s and the eventual standing Os, these performances featured Hawksley’s expert manipulation of vowels and consonants into blistering, poetic rock and roll.

On Friday night’s mainstage, Hawklsey’s brisk performance mingled with purple stage lights, blue twilight and his delicious backing band The Wolves, and steadily coerced the frightened crowd into believing that his brazen songs really were as colourful and tasty as they claimed to be. Tracks from his latest album (a sedate, folksy affair called “Treeful of Starling”) blossomed from bleak saplings into living, breathing, walking forests, and songs from his older albums found themselves injected with unexpected interludes, alternate words and surprise endings that demonstrated Hawksley’s restless, experimental spirit.

1. Bela Fleck and the Flecktones

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user Digg Doug]

Let me set the scene for you: On the far right, we have a black man with natty dreads in a pirate hat, holding a beastly-looking guitar with yellow and red buttons, held together with electrical tape. His name is Futureman, and the device he is clutching is an electronic drum kit that he invented himself. He plays it with one hand while holding a drumstick in the other to play the kit, standing up.

To his left is the saxophonist, a bald man with a pointed goatee who managed to play two saxophones at the same time, different notes harmonizing with each other, his glowing red head about to explode.

On the far left, we have a man named Victor Wooten, who has been called the world’s bass player. The concert ended with a solo from Wooten that spanned over five minutes, involved his hands warping into impossibly twisted configurations, moving so rapidly over the fretboard they were virtually invisible (all the while expelling notes in a sequence that was still completely awesome to listen to), and then concluded with Wooten spinning his guitar in a circle around his neck while continuing to play.

And in the centre, holding it all together, alternating between a regular banjo and a purple MIDI banjo with horns, was Bela Fleck himself, the most normal looking man onstage. Dressed in jeans and a red New York t-shirt, Fleck defines “unassuming,” and yet was likely the most prodigious player of the performance. His lightning-quick picking joined with the over-the-top eccentricity exuded by his bandmates, creating a show so terrifyingly wonderful that the standing ovation would not go silent for a full five minutes after the lights went out.

This Wednesday, my friend Harrison arrives in Calgary on a magical jetplane. On Thursday night, a trio consisting of myself, my wife and Harrison will be attending something called the Calgary Folk Festival. Our weekend passes guarantee us four days of concerts by world-class musicians like Neko Case, Rufus Wainwright, Hawksley Workman, Sarah Slean, and about six hundred billion more artists. In honour of this occasion, I’d like to introduce you to the three musicians whose acts I am most looking forward to:

Hawksley Workman

Sarah Slean

Rufus Wainwright

To take a look at the other acts that will be present at the shows, check out the line-up posted on the Folk Fest’s website. And if you’re planning to attend the Festival yourself, then see you at Prince’s Island!

Greetings, friends, strangers and heads of state: in this post, I present to you the five most interesting things I have discovered recently. Why bother telling you about them? Because I think you’ll be interested in them, that’s why. Please, enjoy and interact. Take your time, and if you’re feeling friendly, leave a comment below.

1. Walk Score: How walkable is your neighbourhood?

Have you ever stared outside your kitchen window and thought, “Man, I should get outside more,” and then continued to stay seated and not do a damn thing about it? Well, it’s probably because your neighbourhood sucks for going on walks. Check your neighbourhood’s Walk Score - it’s a site that uses the magic of Google to scan your neighbourhood for coffee shops, restaurants, walking routes and parks, and gives you rating that tells you how good (or bad) your ‘hood is for taking a stroll.

Our current location in Airdrie gets a 6 out of 100. Yikes.
Our new neighbourhood in Burnaby gets a 57 out of 100. Sweet.

What’s yours? No need to divulge your home address to the public, but give it a spin and post your result in the comments below. (Note: there will likely be a javascript error that pops up. Just pretend it’s a message that says “Your calculation is complete!”)

2. Detroit without groceries, war without tears

A few months ago, I reported on the death of Detroit: enormous numbers of Detroit’s inhabitants are leaving the city abandoned, desolate and dirt cheap. Now, it seems grocery store chains are pulling out too, leaving the dying city a little closer to the grave.

3. What do you call that glow-in-the-dark insect?

Here’s a surprisingly interesting survey on American dialects conducted by the University of Wisconsin. After polling over 10,000 Americans, the survey provides region-specific, map-plotted answers to questions like these ones:

• What do you call the insect that flies around in the summer and has a rear section that glows in the dark?
• How do you say the final consonant in “garage”?
• Which of these terms do you prefer for a sale of unwanted items on your porch, in your yard, etc.?
• What is “the City”?
• What word(s) do you use to address a group of two or more people?
• How do you pronounce caramel?

4. Find good, affordable art

I love Boundless. I haven’t bought anything off it yet, but my wife and I have spent hours browsing through the selections, imagining what each piece would look like in our house. It’s compelling and addictive, mostly because it’s so fun to use. So you’re looking to buy a piece of art, right? Use the sliders to indicate your price range. Click on a colour swatch to make sure it matches your house. Select the type of piece you want by clicking an icon. Drag the sizer-squares to decide on a minimum and maximum size. Add keywords, if you want, and then start browsing.

If you find a piece you like, post a link to it in the comments below so we can all see it.

5. Talking to robots

Meet Eliza. She’s a chatbot. That means you can talk to her, just like you’re using IM, and she’ll talk back, as if she understands. Only she doesn’t, because she’s a robot.

Originally designed in 1966, Eliza has been adapted for the web for all to interact with. She was initially conceived of as a type of automatic therapist. You input a statement, and she responds to it by rephrasing it in the form of a question. You’ll quickly discover that this type of conversation goes nowhere fast, and tends to end with the human participant feeling much more frustrated than before. Try it out, though, because it’s ridiculously fun. And if you’re feeling somewhat irreverent, I highly recommend trying out iGod, another chatbot– this one offers “repenting made easy.” Yes, you can now chat with God (or at least a reasonable facsimile).

Isreali design & animation student Gal Shkedi, for his final project, has created this sweet animation of Tom Waits’ song, “Starving in the Belly of a Whale.”

When I first slammed into its old school front page, I didn’t expect “Cargo Law” to be anything more than a cobbled-together, behind-the-times, corporate hack-job of a website, filled with uninteresting, unpleasantly patriotic, law-related content. But after being utterly hypnotized by the incredible photos and stories featured on this site, I am now convinced that Cargo Law is one of the most fantastic websites I have ever come across. Make no mistake: this is also one of the most poorly organized, poorly designed, difficult to navigate and outrageously impractical websites I have ever seen, but somehow, the content actually makes up for it.

Cargo Law is a website that keeps track of major shipping disasters, as they are happening, providing pictures, stories, webcam images, stats and fresh updates. It’s been in operation for over 8 years, and is still regularly updated. The website is basically an enormous repository of giant ships running into reefs, ships being assaulted by waves at high sea, ships losing their millions of dollars in cargo overboard, smashing into cliffs, and sometimes, eventually being set free.

The site is edited by three lawyers at Countryman & McDaniel, all of whom have “Esq.” at the end of their names (which is awesome). Their offices are at the LA International Airport, and they have a webcam pointing out their window, which overlooks the runway. This is all essentially useless filler information, just to give you some background about these guys. These lawyers are into shipping — they know their freight and cargo — and the website is a mind-blowing demonstration of what to do when you have very industry-specific knowledge of something obscure: blog the hell out of it.

This feature wouldn’t be complete without photos. Please be amazed:

Carrying Coal To Newcastle

The Date: June 7 2007
The Time: Morning
The Place: On The Australian Coast
Vessel Type: M/V Emerald Bulker
Vessel Name: Pasha Bulker
What happened: Click here to read the whole story (you have to scroll very far down before it begins). Click the picture to see the huge version.

Stack Attack

The Date: June 22 2007
The Time: Morning
The Place: At Port of Trieste
Vessel Type: M/V Ital Florida
Vessel Name: Ital Florida
What happened: Click here to read the whole story.

Disaster in Real Time

The Date: January 18 2007
The Time: Morning
The Place: In The English Channel
Vessel Type: EX-M/V CGM Normandie
Vessel Name: MSC Napoli
What happened: Click here to read the story. It involves millions of dollars in cargo, included BMW motorcycles, beauty cream and bibles, getting washed up on shore and looted by the scavenging locals.

Cargo Law’s website is a navigational puzzle to figure out, but if you can stomach the distinct smell of a website launched in ‘99 and maintained by a team of lawyers, the content is its own reward.

Found on a bulletin board in Airdrie’s Towerlane Mall. I hope she found someone to knit her that awesome-looking…housecoat?

This plastic kid’s toy sword was found hanging on a wall in a dollar store. Your englishes are have broken!

No, but I could use that fur to knit this sweater I’m working on.

These enormous boxes of Aviv “Passover Matzos” are now on sale at your neighbourhood Costco. Oy vey!

Found in the “Rare Book Room” at Powells, the world’s largest bookstore, in Portland, Oregon.

I drew this on the butcher paper tablecloth at Montana’s, where Kendra and I dined before catching Pirates 3. Kendra wrote the “Ahoy Mateys!” part, and the speech bubble, which are awesome.

Also found in Powell’s, this sticker stands for the cry of artist’s wives everywhere, once they realize that marrying an artist means they will never have money, practical household items, or joy.

This is MY wife, who married a quasi-artist, and who is clearly happy about it.

Lastly, here is a sweet vehicle decal we saw near Revelstoke. “Creating your grandchildren’s heirlooms,” is the company’s motto. Great. As if you didn’t have enough junk of your own, now your grandma’s gonna offload that giant wooden weaving loom that’s been in her attic for 76 years.