quoperative

Apparently the only blogging I do these days is posting YouTube videos every 3 months. Well, I’m going to show you — me write words before make show movie picture.

I actually found this trailer on the site for Mr. Lee’s General Store & Haberdashery, a cozy little shop nearby that sells things like shaving blades, baseball gloves, mustache wax, switchblades, steel wool, handkerchiefs and fedoras — man stuff. It was from this store that my daughter bought me some wool socks for my birthday. Yes, today is my birthday.

Let’s do this again, shall we?

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted so here’s a recap of what happened…

I went to Toronto for FITC… and we won an award! Also got a super cool gift from Relish for the whole famn damily. Gosh you guys are clever.

I became an uncle. I just missed meeting Dylan Matthew (no Facebook profile to link to yet) by an hour and change. He was literally born as I my plane was taxiing on the runway to head back to Vancouver. To be honest, I’m kind of mad that my sister couldn’t push him out sooner but I’m sure I’ll forgive her in time.

Mish and I went to see night #2 of the Weakerthans and Constantines 2-night stand of the Rolling Tundra Revue at the Commodore. That was a seriously good show. It’s probably been 5 years since I’ve seen the Cons play (I’m pretty sure it was with the now-defunct Royal City at Babylon) and they quickly reminded me that they are a smoking live band. Huge sound and tight as hell. Even though I think I’m an album or two behind I forgot how many of their songs I knew.

Monday night we went to the Showbox in Seattle to see the Shins. I find those drive-there-and-back-the-same-night shows always sound like a good idea on paper when you buy the tickets but not so much when you’re jet-lagged and have to hit the road at the end of a long work day. All that aside, the show was great and it was super sweet to see the band in a cozy venue like that. It was all ages and Mish and I ended up standing next to David Bazan (who is – or was – Pedro the Lion) and his little daughter… who was dancing up a storm. The set finished at midnight, which was decent, but the drive back was especially painful. Since I was tasked with driving I loaded up on a concoction of sugar and energy drinks designed to keep me awake for the required 2 hours. I think my sugar buzz was just trailing off as we entered Vancouver but I managed to hold it together and not launch the car off the road into a ditch. Lesson learned… stay in a hotel room next time, cheap ass!

Last night we went to see a screening of the documentary film Objectified at the Rio, which is a great old (recently restored) theatre in town. The director/producer Gary Hustwit was there and answered questions afterwards. Pretty good film all in all… it’s a nice overview of the massively huge topic of “design” and how it fits into our everyday lives. Obviously he featured designers from great brands like Braun and Apple but there’s a notable absence of any kind of analysis into the IKEA phenomenon — “high” design at low prices that basically falls apart if you ever have to move it. Mish was going to ask him why he basically glossed over IKEA but was way too chicken to put her hand up and ask it in front of everybody. Fortunately somebody else asked a simliar question and his response was basically that IKEA is a bit of a touchy topic in design circles and he didn’t want to take sides. Fair enough. Here’s the trailer… enjoy.

This track will be queued up on the iPod (if I’m paying attention) as we hit Portland en route to San Francisco next week on our road trip.  It’s a duet with Jack White from her 2004 album Van Lear Rose.  White produced and played on the album and it features 2/3 of the Greenhornes supplying the bottom end.  Patrick Keeler and Jack Lawrence also happen to be the rhythm section for White’s other (and much more famous) band The Raconteurs but I gotta give props to the Greenhornes when I can.  Dual Mono is one of my desert island discs.

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Weather cleared up yesterday so we took it out for a drive around UBC and got a couple more pics…

It’s ok that I was triple parked.  Nobody else was in the lot.

Actually the guy in the Volvo did make a comment…

The dashboard…pretty basic.

The seats… this is where we sit.

Hey ladies… goin’ my way?

Actually to be honest I’ve been told that old cars like these are the opposite of chick magnets.  The only people who pay any attention to you are older men.  Which is unfortunate because they’re usually into cars and will very quickly trip me up with any kind of question beyond “What kind of car is it?” (answer: Valiant  — it says it on the side) or “What colour is it?” (answer: green).  The compression ratio, displacement and bore stroke are not things that concern me… so please don’t ask.

I didn’t think that Mish and I were contributing enough to global warming so I figured we could increase our collective CO₂ emissions by getting a second car.  But not a newish car… their engines are too efficient and don’t release nearly enough exhaust.  I needed something old that burns gas like a real American car should.

Enter the Valiant…

I had to have this car.  So I came up with a plan to get the money by playing online poker.  Bullet proof.  I went to the bank to get a line of credit so I could have some money to gamble with but they weren’t too keen on helping me out.  Whatever.  I just went with my backup plan of buying it with the money I had.

Yadda yadda yadda… I am now the proud owner of this 1973 Plymouth Valiant.  I know the picture kind of sucks but it was raining so I had to do it in the underground lot.  I’ll post a few better ones when I can take it outside.

The thing that’s cool about this car is that the guy I bought it from (the original owner) somehow traveled back in time to get this car and bring it back to 2008 to sell it.  No shit this car looks like it’s 6 months old.  The upside is that it’s a super-sweet ride but it also means it doesn’t product that much CO₂. Ah well.

Took in a couple good shows on labour day weekend…

Thursday night Mish and I went to see Beck at the Orpheum — a pretty incredible venue when you’re blessed with decent seats… and blessed we were — but I was more excited to see the openers Band of Horses.  I don’t know where I first heard these guys — I picked up their 2nd album a couple months back and let me tell you: they’re the fucking real deal.  South Carolina via Seattle kind of Allman Brothers meets Skynyrd meets the Pixies. I’m fully aware that makes zero sense in the band-identifying spectrum of references but that’s what I’m hearing.  These guys play big beautiful rock music.  The sound was fantastic and the songs just filled the room. With the aid of special guest keyboardist (picture medium-sized John Popper with a massive beard and a voice like an angel) they totally blew the doors off the place.  Fortunately they were able to be re-hinged by the maintenance staff prior to Beck hitting the stage.

As you might expect, Beck put on a helluva good show himself.  Not quite as wild and ruckus as the time I saw him on the Midnite Vultures tour but in a venue like the Orpheum things are a little more high class, ya dig? Despite not being a devout Beck fan (I think I only have maybe half of his albums) I pretty much knew every song he played… except for one that he opened the show with called “Loser“… apparently this song enjoyed mild popularity in the mid 90s.  Pretty solid repertoire of songs he’s got these days.  Good mix of hard-rockin’, dance-ish and folkier numbers. Kudos goes out to Beck’s female guitar player who was both incredibly attractive and ridiculously proficient at her instrument.  Unfortunately I can’t find a picture of her.

On Labour Day we ceremoniously torched our white clothes before heading down to Stanley Park for day 2 of the Stanley Park Singing Exhibition, a 2-day musical event held in an outdoor amphitheatre smack dab in the middle of the park.  Sweet sweet musical lightning struck twice this week as I was able to see another great band I had yet to experience live: Black Mountain.  (Direct order to all readers:  go and buy In the Future, acquire a pair of large headphones and listen to this record at maximum volume).

Absolutely K-I-L-L-E-R set.  So loud. So heavy. And so good.  These guys are just loose enough to rock the jams (not as cheezy as it sounds) on a regular basis but tight enough to nail the jam-ending changes without any visible nodding or onstage communication.  Unbelievably big sound from five people.  And a bonus treat to finally put a face to the incredibly haunting voice of Amber Webber. I highly recommend checking them out if you get the chance.  They’re heading to Toronto and Montreal later this month.

Rounding out the Stanley Park show was Visqueen, the 1900s, Stevie Jackson (of Belle and Sebastian) and the New Pornographers.  Pornos drummer Kurt Dahle continues to provide more entertainment value than the rest of the band combined.  The guy chucks drumsticks, talks to his buddies, drinks beers and moves his cymbal stands around… while playing.

Pretty awesome video from the New Pornographers’ last album Challengers…

As seen at an intersection near our place.  I wish I’d thought of this.  Maybe I’ll start tagging Diana Ross on my own signs.

Who knew?

Today man’s best friend let me down — my cat Sherlock barfed on my MacBook Pro keyboard. Technically it wasn’t even a real barf. Just bile. Kind of like a couple teaspoons of saliva — smelly, rotten, bubbly saliva if you must know. Bottom line, there wasn’t that much liquid.

I got mildly annoyed when I discovered said bile deposit and wiped off the keyboard with some Bounty towels as best as I could. Wiping it up seemed to anger the bile and it released some pretty nasty smells to communicate how upset it was that I was cleaning it up. I didn’t care… obviously. I just had to get back to work. To finish the A-1 clean-up job I decided to shoot some compressed air into the crevices of the keyboard to blow away any bile that I couldn’t reach with the paper towels. As anybody who knows anything about computers will tell you, nothing cleans a computer like compressed air.

Surprisingly, this did very little to actually “clean” the keyboard and when I pressed on the keys in the affected area I could still hear slooshing and bubbling. I decided to kick it up a notch and remove the keys to get under them and clean out the residual bile. This in turn released more unpleasant smells — kind of like sweaty feet dipped in rotten milk. My mood quickly went from optimistic to pissed off as I popped off nearly one third of the keys.

“Ok,” I thought to myself, “I’ll just get these little buggers rinsed off and dry off the keyboard and we’ll be back in business”. Turns out we didn’t get back in business quite so fast.

After letting the keys rinse and the machine dry off for a couple of hours I put the keys back on one by one and realized pretty quickly that basically all of them stopped working. Plus about 10 or so that I hadn’t removed. Turns out getting small amounts of bile into expensive electronics equipment can cause serious damage. I had no idea.

So, I’m left with an essentially non-functioning keyboard that I now have to get replaced. And because this is my primary work computer — and therefore a rather indispensable tool that I need to make a living — I have to somehow get this repair done without being left computer-less for very long.

And how did Sherlock react to this whole thing?

He feels terrible.