Category Archives: Literary

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.

Hours of Fun!

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Debate Noam Chomsky

And hours, and hours, and hours. Don’t tell ME about attention deficit disorder; I could play that forever!

If only. Oh, if only. This little baby is my dream machine. And they could have a right-wing version with an AI simulation of William F. Buckley for the playoffs. Gore Vidal, William Kristol and Naomi Klein modules! I can see it all now! I could sell a million of them!

Want to take a shot at it yourself? Here you go: the collected assault works of Noam Chomsky!

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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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blog fodder made easy: how to write epics!

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We’ve all been there: When you open the Write Post page, the void looks also into you.

Here is the quick and dirty version of how to feed your blog on a majah scale: with EPICS! Who doesn’t like epics? They’re epic! Epically epic!

First: you need a setting. Rip one off from an existing epic and call it une hommage. We’ve got BiblicalBabylonianCarolingianArthurianGangsterianBeat Generationianand Space Operaamong others. Look at your (comic)bookshelf and pick one.

I’ve got The Book of Murderso Chicago in the Twenties, here I come!

Now you’ll need characters, several of them. Just try to write an epic without any character! We call that a Livejournal.

‘Nuff said.

Now, if you get both the characters and the setting from the same epic, what you’ve got is a retelling (we call it “retelling” or “reworking of the archetype,” we do not call it a “ripoff” for that makes our lawyers quite defensive and we just can’t deal with that right now). And we’re not writing How To Write A Retelling here, are we? We’re talking about writing a brand-new epic! So you’ve got to steal your setting and your characters from, and this is the key, different epics, or even one epic and one Symbolist poem or one epic and an old radio drama or something. That could be good. They had the best hair on those old radio dramas.

If you still can’t find any characters you like, we recommend stealing them from this handy-dandy Characters for an Epic Tale chart from Tom Gauld (via Edenborough).

Epic Characters for an epic tale

As for plot, just use one of these ready-made plot generators. Don’t say we never did nuthin for ya.

If you find your well running dry even so, just have a man come through the door with a gun OR add bo stick wielding flying cephalopod ninjas. Everyone loves the big squids! After that, who cares how you wind it up as long as the hero ends up with the girl and the villain escapes to cause sequels another day?

Flying Octopian ninjas

And, most importantly, it is a truth universally acknowledged that in the online world, every epic blog post must contain a direct link to http://raincoaster.com.

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what we have here is a failure to communicate

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Evian MermaidBut a very amusing one.

Now, I like British newspapers. I particularly like British newspaper websites; sure, the design is horrifically clunky and it’s impossible to find what you want, but you often find what you actually need (hey, is that a British informatics archetype? I seem to have heard it somewhere before). Compared to the CBC, for instance, the layout of the Guardian Online is an impeccable nested article-delivery device. Why the CBC prefers to present no more than a dozen stories on one subject area at one time, no matter how many clicks you may give it, is a mystery to all but the mandarins in Ottawa and they all get the news from their servants. But that is a communications failure rant for another time.

This time, we’re talking about (aboot?) those slight idiosyncratic variations in phrasing and meaning from one continent to the next. You know, how the British sports writing is only seemingly written in English and how we in The Americas still use the word “gotten” and that sort of thing. We’re talking about the truck/lorry issue, really.

Or if we’re not, Britain must be much more lively than I’ve always heard.

We are talking about this harmless-looking article on good places for beach and snorkling holidays with good access to clubs and nightlife. Demanding people, they are. Probably expect to get Newcastle Brown there as well, but that’s beside the point.

The point is that on the front page of The Esteemed Guardian, this article is tagged with the drop-down descriptor:

Can you answer reader questions on water sports holidays?

Well, can you? I’ll start.

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