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.