Still creepy after all these years

You have to hand it to David Lynch. Even when he's filming Public Service Announcements he still manages to creep you out. This is one scary anti-littering commercial.

Spring blossoms

One of the great things about Vancouver in the Spring is the sudden explosion of blossoming trees lining the streets. At Burrard Skytrain station, the blossoms practically fill the sky.

More photos on my Flickr page.

A musical interlude

My love of culture isn't only restricted to the visual arts. I like to listen to a nice piece of music now and then. I think you'll find the following song strangely moving:

Baby got Bak

If you head over to the Bak Magazine website at www.bakdergisi.com you can download a great design oriented magazine filled with nearly 300 pages (and nearly 30mb - be warned!) of creative content. Don't let the hot chick on the front fool you though, this isn't Maxim. This Istanbul based magazine is packed with some wonderful images from some truly creative guest artists in addition to a handful of interviews with the cream of the crop. If you're a creative type, you'll find this both inspiring and humbling. If you're just looking for some eye candy, I'm sure you'll find a lot to nibble on.

The theme of this issue is 'dream'. If you enter their website here, you can also find six past issues to download with the themes 'wrong', 'white', 'old', '2050', 'game' and 'road'. Great stuff to keep on your desktop if you're stuck for inspiration.



One of my favorites in this issue is the work of photographer Patrick Hoelck. He has sleek stylish portraits of everyone from Thom Yorke to Clint Eastwood. And if you can make Thom Yorke look stylish, you've got to be good. You can see more at his website www.patrickhoelck.com.



I also loved the work of Scottish designer/photographer/illustrator Alan Campbell. You can find lots more of his swirly glossy goodness at www.emohoc.co.uk.

Happy clicking!

Goodbye Winter, hello Spring...

I lucked out again this week with another beautiful afternoon off from work. The last day of Winter went out in a blaze of glory this evening in Vancouver.

More photos on my Flickr page.

Geek mythology

I went to see 300 this afternoon, and I have to say I pretty much got what I expected to get; lots of action, and some very cool visuals. It would have been nice to get a little more than I bargained for (decent script, good acting) but then, I suppose, that wasn't really what I was looking for.

The story's (loosely, very loosely) based on the legendary last stand by King Leonidas and his army of 300 Spartans against the Persian Army in the 5th century. Gerard Butler is suitably imposing as Leonidas; despite wearing eyeliner, he still looks like he could take on an entire army. Even his pointy beard looks like it could be used as a weapon. And as for his army - holy crap, they've got more 6-packs than a liquor store. I felt like doing 2000 sit-ups as soon as I got home. Well no, not really.

The battle scenes were well done though. They made the warfare in Gladiator and Braveheart look like pillow-fights. The footage repeatedly slowed down to a crawl so that you could see every hack, chop, slice and dice. After a while the violence became almost Monty Pythonesque with the amount of severed limbs and heads flying through the air in slow-mo. Each battle tried to top the previous one; first they fight an army with a hulking axe-wielding bald giant, then one with an armored rhinocerous, then one with giant elephants. Almost like a video game with each level getting more and more difficult.

The film has a great visual style too with washes of sepia tones and slashes of red and gold. The movie is based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, author/artist of Sin City, Like that movie interpretation, much of the action was shot on blue and green screen, with the locales and effects digitally composited later. In fact, post production took nearly a year to complete.

Though based on Miller's graphic novel, I also thought the movie owed much of it's visual style to the paintings of Caravaggio. There's definitely a similarity to the use of light, shadow and color.

Or maybe I'm just reading WAY too much into this.



'Judith Beheading Holofernes' - Caravaggio 1598-1599

iConcertCal

(Click on pic to view larger)

If you're an iTunes user and love going to concerts, here's a free plug-in that you might enjoy. iConcertCal searches through your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city. See ya at the Kaiser Chiefs! And maybe Jarvis or Mew or Air or Pop Levi or the Arctic Monkeys...

You can download it here.

Awkward!

Oh dear...

Grim fairytale

(Nobody move... I dropped my contacts)

I forgot to mention that I saw Pan's Labyrinth last week on one of my rainy afternoons off (heavily fighting the urge to say 'One ticket for Ghost Rider please').

It's set in 1944 Spain after the civil war. A young girl is sent with her pregnant mother to live with her new step-father, a sadistic army captain. As she copes with her cruel new life, she discovers an old labyrinth in the woods, home to a faun who assigns her three tasks to regain her crown as the princess of a magical kingdom.

I really loved this film, but many may not be prepared for the level of violence, both in the world of fantasy and the world of reality. This definitely isn't Narnia, and there's a lot of cringeworthy bloodletting and torture, mostly at the hands of Capitán Vidal, the ultimate in evil stepfathers.



That said, director Guillermo del Toro, did a wonderful job of weaving the two worlds together. This isn't the typical case of a child using fantasy to escape from the horror that surrounds her. If anything, her fantasy world mirrors her reality, giving her the context to cope with the painful obstacles that she must overcome. It's not just a story about the loss of innocence, it's also about the ability to find beauty and hope in the darkest of places.

Del Toro is a Spanish director who has made some entertaining Hollywood blockbusters (Blade 2 and Hellboy) in addition to some more subtly creepy Spanish speaking films (Cronos and The Devil's Backbone). The fantasy world of Pan's Labyrinth has a some wonderful imagery that blends the fairytale illustrations of Arthur Rackham with the nightmarish style of Francis Bacon.



'Surrounded by Giant Toads' - Arthur Rackham




'Figure With Meat' - Francis Bacon

In the pink

I really lucked out with my day off yesterday. I usually don't like working on weekends, but since Sunday looked like this,



and Monday looked like this,



...I really couldn't complain.

Today, Vancouver was back to its rainy self, but yesterday, I had a great day. I walked the seawall, took lots of photos (more on my Flickr page), sat outside Starbucks and read my book. And to end it off perfectly, I had a great salmon dinner at my sisters with her new fiancé, drank homemade red wine, ate chocolate cake, watched an episode of '24' and got lots of attention from my nephew Jack.

Big Brother

Given the recent discussions about installing security cameras in 'areas of civil unrest' such as Granville Street in Vancouver, I thought this was an interesting video. It's a stylishly designed animation reflecting on how we are slowly but surely progressing towards becoming a 'police state'. Already in Britain, the average person can appear up to 300 times a day on various security cameras.



Statistics from Beyond Robson.
Video found via pixelsurgeon.

OldFellas

Apparently Martin Scorsese is wrapping up his new documentary on the Rolling Stones. Since he's already used the title 'Bringing Out the Dead' for his Nicolas Cage film, I figured 'OldFellas' would be a good title for this one. Oddly enough, IMDB lists the cast as being the four Stones, plus Bill Clinton. Maybe they share the same groupies...

At any rate, it should prove to be a pretty interesting film. And I know, I know... I really should go easy on the old guys. Hopefully when I'm that age I'll have the energy to get drunk on rum and fall out of coconut trees.

Haven't we grown?

Speaking of how much Vancouver has changed, the City of Vancouver has a pretty cool page on their website where you can see exactly by how much. You can choose from a variety of panoramic skylines, click a button, and see the transition from 1978 to 2003. Vancouver truly has, in the words of Douglas Coupland, become a city of glass.

You can see the website here.

Fred Herzog

(Pender Street, Vancouver, 1959. I'm pretty sure this is the same block I work on)

I finally got around to seeing the Fred Herzog exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery today. Having recently spent a lot of time taking photographs around Vancouver, it was fascinating to see snapshots of life in the city from as far back as 50 years ago.

Herzog came to Vancouver in 1953 and has been taking photographs ever since. Many of the photographs were produced on Kodachrome, a color slide film, and the images all have a very distinctive 'warm' look to them.

It's interesting to see how Vancouver has changed over the last fifty years. I still consider Vancouver a very young city, but the exhibition definitely gave me a sense of the community's history and personality. Many may think of Vancouver's multiculturalism as a relatively new thing, but I was struck by the variety of cultures back then, often contained within the same frame.

It was also a bit of a shock to see images of the West End before all of the highrises started to blot out the horizon. Strangely, some images (particularly of Granville Street) seemed almost more cluttered back then with their overlapping neon signs, billboards and posters.

You can view Fred Herzog's website here. There are also more images at the Equinox Gallery website here.

Another senseless tragedy...

...as the cruel Vancouver rain claims yet another victim.

Music notes

As I continue to read the John Peel autobiography, I'm reminded of how many years I've been listening to music and how important it is to me. It's hard to believe how, in my lifetime, we've gone from playing music on something the size of a dinner plate (roughly 10 songs), to something the size of a pack of cards (nearly 20,000 songs).

People rarely listen to albums all the way through any more - we're more likely to listen to songs on shuffle. We miss out on the flow from one song into another that makes some albums so great. Listening to, say, 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band' or 'Dark Side of the Moon', all chopped up and shuffled around defeats the whole purpose and concept of the 'album'. Nowadays, most bands put out CDs with clearly defined broken up songs with gaps in between - they're almost designed to be collections of songs rather than a stand-alone body of work.



First Album

The first album I ever got (rock album that is, 'Dougal and the Blue Cat' doesn't count) was Elvis Presley's Greatest Hits when I was nine years old. It almost seems a cliche to say that Elvis got me interested in rock music, but thats apparently what happened. I remember after he died in 1977, that BBC had a week long marathon of Elvis movies. The one that sticks in my mind the most is his performance of 'Trouble' in King Creole. That Christmas, along with an Evel Knievel stuntbike, I got the greatest hits double album pictured above. For whatever reason, the album labels were in French, so my first memories of Elvis were of him being Le Roi du Rock 'n' Roll.



First Cassette

The first cassette I ever owned was 'Parallel Lines' by Blondie. I think I got this for my birthday in 1979 and it's still one of my favorite albums of all time. I love how 'Hanging on the Telephone' opens the album - a telephone ringing twice, then Debbie Harry belting out 'I'm in the phonebooth, it's the one across the hall / If you don't answer I'll just ring it off the wall'. Then it goes straight into the great 'One Way or Another'. It's probably safe to say that Debbie Harry was my first serious crush. It doesn't get much hotter than Debbie Harry circa 1979, when you're an 11 year old boy.



First CD

My first CD was 'Whiplash Smile' by Billy Idol. Seems a little embarrassing, but at the time I just couldn't get enough of Billy. It's hard to imagine now, that after buying themselves CD players, people had to slowly but surely start buying CDs to replace their albums and cassettes. In any case, this was my first step towards building my CD collection. I remember thinking how cool the opening track 'World's Forgotten Boy' sounded in CD quality - especially those laser gun and pinball effects that Steve Stevens could do with his guitar. And I could listen to an album all the way through with turning it over halfway!

As for today's technology, I have no idea what the first mp3 I ever downloaded was. Kind of sad really.

Pop concert

Last night I braved the horror that is East Hastings Street on a Saturday night to see the Pop Levi show at the Patricia Hotel. I didn't even realize he was coming until I read an article about him in the Georgia Strait on Thursday. Coincidentally, I had just picked up his new album 'The Return To Form Black Magick Party' on Wednesday.

What a strange place Pat's Pub is to see a live show. On the wall behind the stage is a mural of Hank Williams (looking like Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain), Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger and Willie Nelson (looking like Charles Manson). There's also a conveniently placed pillar smack dab in front of the stage. Other features include two vintage arcade games (Ms Pacman and something else), a smoking room where you can view smokers like monkeys in a glass cage, and a jukebox ('Back in the Saddle Again' by Aerosmith playing when I first arrived).

Excellent show though. He started off with an extended version of his new single 'Sugar Assault Me Now' which was just incredible. His songs are so visual and energetic and he's definitely got the stage presence to back them up. Imagine a cross between Prince and Beck with a little bit of T-Rex. Apparently he used to play bass for Ladytron. I'm sure he'll be back in Vancouver again, hopefully at a venue like Richards on Richards or The Commodore.

I actually ran into him as I was leaving the pub. 'Hey, awesome show' I said. 'Hey, thanks very much man' he said. Pretty insightful eh?

Here's his video for the hand-clapping, foot-stomping 'Sugar Assault Me Now'. Enjoy!

Warning: Contain scenes of tight trousers.

Mystery solved...

Thanks to my Dad, I now know who sang the song from the Dutch insurance ad I posted about a month ago. The song is 'Come Wander With Me' by Bonnie Beecher and it was originally performed in an episode of the Twilight Zone (pictured above). It was also featured in the infamous film The Brown Bunny; according to many critics the worst movie ever shown at Cannes.

Some more trivia about Bonnie Beecher:

- Bob Dylan's girlfriend in 1961 when they went to the University of Minnesota

- Inspiration for Dylan's song 'Girl From the North Country'

- Is still married to Wavy ("What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000!") Gravy, the MC of all three Woodstock Festivals

- Starred in an episode of Star Trek. For the geeks out there, it was the one where the crew found themselves teleported into the centre of the gunfight at the OK Corral. It's probably safe to assume that she played Kirk's love interest - every woman who appeared on Star Trek played Kirk's love interest.

Anyway, you should probably downl... buy the song for yourself. Very eerie but quite beautiful too.

You can see the ad I'm talking about here.