Category Archives: Art

Downtown Eastside Artist Opportunity

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Fearless City Logo

**please post and forward

Fearless City Mobile Call for Participants
Short-term contracts for Downtown Eastside Residents,

We are fast approaching Fearless City Mobile’s exciting upcoming project-
Parade of Lost Souls, on Saturday October 25th, and are looking for 10 people to bring the Mobile Souls and Digital Shrine to life.

The Parade of the Lost Souls is a Grandview-Woodland’s Community
Halloween event that celebrates the cycle of life & death, and
encourages us to face our fears in order to live life to its fullest.
It is a time and a place to share losses at one of the many shrines
and celebrate life and to enrich our community. It takes Place on
Saturday October 25th, beginning at Grandview Park at 6:30pm. A
parade/procession will snake throughout the commercial drive area,
beginning at the NE corner of the park at 7pm.

Mobile Souls is a montage of live streaming video of the Parade and
installations along the route, as well as ‘mms’ texts and digital cell
phone images from festival attendees, that will be sifted, VJ’d and
projected. The montage will be projected on a screen at the corner of
Kitchener and Commercial and animated by live shadow puppet performers.

Fearless City Mobile will also be supporting the Digital Shrine
installation in Grandview Park. The shrine consists of digital images,
text and video sent in by community members in advance, as well as
mms texts sent in throughout the event.

Parade of Lost Souls is produced by the Public Dreams Society. For
more information on the event you can visit www.publicdreams.org.

Fearless City Mobile is a project of the Fearless Media Cluster of the
DTES Community Arts Network. For more information visit
www.fearlesscity.ca.

———

We are looking for 10 people in total to fill the following positions.

You do not need to have any experience with the following equipment,
software, or technology to apply for this opportunity.
**** All technical
equipment will be provided by Fearless city Mobile:

a) 1x VJ Assistant (Mobile Souls): Assisting VJ Jesse Scott in sorting
through incoming live streamed mobile video, still images and text. Text
will be manipulated in Livetype and exported into Modul8, the software
that will mix the video, text and still images.

b) 1x VJ Assistant (Digital Shrine): Assisting VJ Suez Holland and
Cultural Curator Flick Harrison in sorting through incoming live streamed
still images and text. Text will be manipulated in Livetype and exported
into Modul8, the software that will mix the text and still images with the
video material that flick has collected prior to the event. Video will not
be live streamed to this station.

c) 4x Mobile Videographers: Shooting mobile video of the event and
live-streaming it to the Mobile Souls VJ Station via Livecast.
Videographers will be positioned throughout the parade.

d) 4x Mobile SMS/MMS Outreachers: Outreaching to Parade of Lost
Souls attendees and introducing them to the Mobile Souls cell phone
texting platform. Instructing attendees on how to text in their
thoughts,
reflections and comments about the event to a specified Mobile
Souls phone number. These texts will be downloaded by a sift tool to
the VJ Stations.

You are also required to offer to text peoples comments for them
on your own phone, and to demonstrate the process.

The responsibilities for this contract include:

1. Attending an orientation workshop on Wednesday October 22 from
1-6pm at the Lori Krill Co-op at 65 W. Cordova

2. Attending the event on Saturday October 25th from setup at
5:00pm until the event ends at 12am. Wearing Halloween Costumes is
encouraged.

3. Completing a participant feedback form.

The Artist Fee for each position is $200.00.

Please submit a short paragraph stating your interest in the
project and a position to amy at fearlessmedia.ca by Tuesday October 21
at 12noon.

Amy Kazymerchyk
Fearless City Mobile
DTES Community Arts Network.

dances with fish

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Eat your heart out, Kevin Costner! Stolen from Defamer, here are two dancing with fish videos, American style. I believe you’ve all seen it done English style, yes? There is also (in escalating order of insanity) the Filipino fish dance, the Nigerian fish dance, Greek fish dance, Brazilian fish dance, the Nine Inch Nails Nation fish dance, and the traditional Naked Canadian fish dance.

First, robotically-enhanced animated anime figure Olivia Munn from Attack of the Show, trying and failing to perform a sexy duet with (in order) a trout (doesn’t look that old to me), a salmon (no word on if it was pink), and, in her pièce de résistance (and longtime readers will have seen this – so to speak – coming), a Squid.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Next up, a long-forgotten starlet shimmys with another cold fish in this clip from the transcendant Vixen by that Leonardo of schlock, Russ Meyers.

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Violence. The word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favourite mantle still remains – sex. Violence devours all it touches, its voracious appetite rarely fulfilled.

Operation Global Media Domination: the Banksy Situation

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For as long as I can remember (which, at my age, admittedly isn’t very long, perhaps twenty minutes at a time and then I need to take my rememberer out and let it cool down for awhile) on this blog the #1 post in terms of hits, year after year, has been Britney Spears Sex Tape, which, once I realized wasn’t Britney in it at all but rather someone else who looked like Honeymoon Britney (which many people would watch happily, I’m sure, over and over, the way they close their eyes and think of The Country or The Postman or The Hot Guy In Marketing Who Wears Those European Suits) I edited the title of to read Britney Spears (?) Sex Tape but it made no difference: they still kept coming.

So to speak.

Which reminds me of the ad I saw yesterday at the Skytrain station; the first ad for an “adult recreation” product I’ve seen in a mainstream location. It was for something called Stallion, and it was unspecific to the point of complete opacity. Basically, it just said “Men, buy this stuff right now.” That’s how I figured out it was dirty.

For I am way clever, yo.

But as I was standing there, running over all the stallion references in my head (alas, I’m not in top form when I’m on Concact-C, for the only thing I could think of was Bill and Ted’s band Wyld Stallyns) I saw some fine print at the bottom of the ad, and if there’s one thing I love, it’s fine print on adult product ads. No, really.

“Product contains Lidocaine.”

Topical anaesthetic. It’s the stuff I spray on my legs before waxing, to deaden the pain.

Whoa!

But (and not to make an abrupt transition, but whatever) now we at the ol’ raincoaster blog have encountered a phenomenon more powerful than a sloppy ersatz-Britney blowjob.

Behold the power of Banksy in Birmingham:

Banksy stats, baby!

Banksy stats, baby!

And yes, that baseline is 2,000, not zero.

Comme J’ai Mal by Mylene Farmer

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Given the transition of Faceless Day into a new face for raincoaster, this seems like a good time to introduce this video by Franco-Canuck Mylene Farmer. It’s the first song that made me aware of her, and it only did that because of the awesome power of this particular video, which just happens to be near-perfect.

Sorry, my French is a bit rusty, but I think you get the gist.

Faceless!

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Faceless on Facebook, faceless on Twitter, faceless on WordPress, on Gravatar, on OpenID (which, it must be said, I’ve never gotten to work anyway) in fact, faceless anywhere is a powerful statement, especially in an increasingly-overpopulated world where everyone wears their MySpace pruneface at all times, lest they be caught on CCTV looking humdrum.

Just ask Anonymous.

With that in mind, here’s your chance to make a powerful statement and reflect on the importance of cultural expression and how much a part of your life it is, whether you think of yourself as a cultural creative or not.

From NativeEarth.ca:

Faceless

It only took 2 days for our “Faceless” facebook group to reach close to 2000 members.

Here’s what it’s all about:

This is a roll call to all people who believe that Arts and Culture is a part of their lives and is important outside of the political spectrum. This is for artists, families, parents, friends, co-workers, relatives, enemies, neighbors, acquaintances, to all people who enjoy the arts and culture of this country and feel that it must be nurtured and cultivated. We need to send out a message to our politicians to let them know that there are more of us than they think and congruently that we are not going to vote for any person or party that plans to cut funding to arts and culture in the impending election. This is for all of us; people from all sides of the political landscape. This is not about what party you belong to, but how you feel about arts and culture in this country.

So on Monday September 15th (the first day of Parliament) we want you to do one thing. It’s very simple. It will only take a small amount of your time. About the same amount of time it will take to cast your vote for the candidate you feel best represents what you want.

This is it: We would like you to leave your profile picture blank for the day. Use your faceless profile picture as a symbol of the loss of identity Canadians will experience if funding to the arts is cut.

Be a catalyst for change and put your best face forward on election day, but on Monday September 15th leave it blank and send a message so that we can count how many people have joined the fight.

signed