September 16, 2012
Thomas Anselmi of Slow singing Have Not Been The Same, circa 1985
Slow at UBC’s Thunderbird Stadium, dressed in bloody nurse’s outfits, circa 1986
Slow was a legendary 80s Vancouver band sometimes credited with spawning grunge.
November 22, 2011
Megaphone speaker by the Italian company Enandis. Why do I like this? I shouldn’t like it, but I do. It’s so wrong for things to pretend to be other things, like early cars resembling horse carriages, or high-heeled runners.
August 6, 2011
Summer yard sale, Strathcona, Vancouver. Not sure what caused me to fail to buy this. As art.
September 8, 2010
These photos of Mick are in honour of my Uncle Bob, who kindly pointed me to Rolling Stone’s large collection of Jagger portraits. It’s particularly interesting to watch the 60s morph into the 70s with a crazy loss of style in the 80s.
July 29, 2010
This is current electro dance/music from S. Africa. The Shangaan people (or Tsonga) live in the Transkei area near the border with Mozambique. This is a bit of an aside, and it’s going back a bit farther, but when I worked in South Africa I had a thing for Shangaan jive though Zulu jive was more popular then.
July 15, 2010
“You don’t have to call me sir.” “No, I don’t have to… I forgot your name.”
(For those who don’t know, the late Peter Gzowski was Canada’s most beloved CBC TV and radio interviewer.
July 10, 2010
Grimes is the one-woman musical outfit of Claire Boucher, an artist and musician from Vancouver currently living and working in Montreal. Her album “Geidi Primes” has recently received a lot of alt press including Altered Zones and Gorilla vs.
June 10, 2010
The decor at Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s residence in Ottawa is almost as bad as the very fact of this distasteful event, which – can this really have happened?
March 18, 2010
For those who don’t know, Mary Margaret O’Hara is a cult Canadian musician who produced only one album, the weirdly perfect Miss America, in 1988. It’s said that she never released another album because she’s reclusive, but in fact she never stopped working publicly.
December 12, 2009
I guess this is ruining the surprise but I’m buying this album for quite a few people for Christmas. It’s ridiculously good, very catchy, it topped fancy local charts, it features internationally known art and music stars, and it’s published by Vancouver’s Or Gallery, one of Vancouver’s best non-profit art centres.
