Category Archives: hipsters

Shebeen Club: Gonzo Vancouver

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The Shebeen Club: Gonzo Vancouver!

When: 7-9pm, Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Where: the Shebeen, 7 Gaoler’s Mews, behind the Irish Heather, 217 Carrall Street, Vancouver BC

How Much: $15 includes dinner: limited to 40

What: mingling, door prizes, eating, drinking, fornicating!

Who: Heather Watson (Civixen), Gonzo Journalist and founding columnist at Terminal City

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.”
Hunter S. Thompson

Well, we probably won’t have that, but we will have a great introduction to indigenous Vancouver Gonzo journalism with the hyperkinetic and internationally infamous Heather Watson, alias Civixen (http://www.civixen.com/ and http://cvxn.tumblr.com). Coming at you straight down the Mojo Wire at 95 miles per hour, it’ll be an evening of raw, uncut literary power. Bare-knuckling her way up the ladder from the wide open frontier of the Wild West to the mean streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Heather has seen it all, done most of it, and has a damn hell solid alibi for everything else.

Bio: Heather Watson created the satirical op/ed column “Civixen,” which became a source of enjoyment and irritation for political bright lights and dim bulbs alike (including the current mayor) in the four years it ran in two local alternative newspapers. Besides a brief tenure as editor-in-chief of the 30,000-circulation Gonzo-inspired Terminal City (now sadly defunct), Heather Watson also presented a popular seminar on Gonzo Journalism at the request of the Western arm of the Canadian University Press in 2006. She is a published poet, a produced playwright and her essay “Vancouver Today” is featured in the Time Out Guide to Vancouver. In addition to a few years at Vancouver’s éminence grise of independent bookstores, Duthie Books, some of her more surreal side jobs have included voice-over and motion capture for a video game and six years spent hand modeling toys from Star Wars figures to Barbies in dozens of TV commercials.

Meet and Mingle 7-7:30
Listen and Learn 7:30-8
Drown Sorrows and Vow to Buck the System 8-9 or, really, the rest of your life.

Quentin Crisps

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Sometimes the volleys of blogger tennis get a little heated, resulting in a strange and hitherto only mythical phenomenon. Like Ourouboros swallowing his own tail, a fleeting tangent on the Mummified Fairy post has spawned its own spinoff on FFE‘s blog, to which I’m linking back here. Now all someone needs to do is post in the mummified fairy post linking back to this and all will come full circle and the universe will end.

Presenting the original mummified fairy: Quentin Crisps

Quentin Crisps

Sure, great in the can but pretty sharp anywhere else, come to think of it.

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Don’t Tase Me, Bro

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funny dog pictures


Siriusly!

Heath Ledger’s Nick Drake video: Black-Eyed Dog

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Unfortunately, the video is marred by the incessant nattering of a group of twangy Australian talking heads, some of whom grin in the most merciless fashion while discussing Nick Drake‘s suicide and Heath Ledger‘s depression, no doubt thinking all the while of their ratings. If I find a version without them, rest assured I will post it.

For those who don’t know, Nick Drake is a formerly-forgotten British troubadour who, for the past year or so, has been experiencing a Renaissance along Tim Buckley lines. He wrote this in 1974, not long before committing suicide by overdose; the “Black Dog” was Winston Churchill‘s term for the clinical depression that marred his life from time to time. Lyrics over the jump, courtesy of APlaceToBe – Reflections of Nick Drake.

(they take video down, someone re-uploads it; let me know if it goes missing again)

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while my ukelele gently weeps

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I know, it’s not an original title, but after watching this a couple of times I can’t really think straight; I can only sit smiling blankly, Buddha-like, into the face of the full moon. Watch and listen as Hawai’ian Jake Shimabukuro takes the ukelele to places in the human heart and the heart of the universe that we never knew it could go.


When will that stupid network stop taking these videos down and let us tell people how good their stuff is?

Jake on Myspace

Jake on NPR

Shimabukuro named his latest CD Gently Weeps because of his affection for George Harrison. The late musician, whose primary instrument was guitar, also played ukulele and would take one along wherever he went.

“I really believe he got a lot of his ideas from the ukulele because they work so well with the instrument — songs like Something,” Shimabukuro says.

And here’s Jake performing one of my favorite Beatles songs, In My Life. Can’t disagree with the list of reasons he makes the Babewatch radar, either.

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