Who DOESN’T like breasts?
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.
Originally written like, a week ago, and been sitting in the Draft bucket since. For whatever reason, my internet connection also went down. And according to all the news sources, the following never happened.
Sure. Sure…
It’s 2:21am on a Tuesday morning and the BC Hydro “Oh Canada” blast horns have just treated us to an impromptu performance. This (well, a regularly scheduled performance rather than an impromptu one) is something they do every day at noon from the top of the Electra, formerly the BC Hydro Building, and notorious for it’s very Progressive International Fifties poison green and royal blue colour scheme. The horns are a quaint (and, for residents of the building, no doubt extremely annoying) relic of Vancouver’s maritime past.
And every night at nine o’clock a cannon is fired off in Stanley Park, and the ships used to set their various and esoteric timepieces by the sound. At Coal Harbour, you’d hear it at nine o’clock and one second. At further points, later times. Carinthia once listed them all off for me, each of the geographic coordinates and their coordinating time coordinates, for verily she’s a storehouse of information like that, or was, until she started forgetting things, and it’s true that ever since then she’s refused to try to remember things, in case she finds that she cannot.
But I repeat, it’s 2:21 in the morning in Vancouver. It is not noon in Vancouver. In fact, it is not noon anywhere.
I blame Anonymous.
UPDATE: Oh. Oh, this is swell.
I blame Anonymous.
Don’t you hate it when you live somewhere for years and years and years and they change something and they don’t tell you and then you’re taking a bus through that neighborhood or walking by or blogging about the horns on the top of the building that you know o-so-well and you trawl through Google to find something to link to which will familiarize your readers with these things in your memory and so you will move forward with at least some crazy-quilt of a patched-together background of shared memories and THEN AND ONLY THEN do you find out that they moved the freaking horns to Canada Place!
So now the nine o’clock gun fires at Stanley Park as it has every night since 1894, and every noon the horns on Canada Place blasts back at that incendiary upstart with the first four notes of O, Canada and the next day they do it all over again. That’ll teach ’em, yep.
What a wonderful metaphor for Canadian Regional Separatism, really.
Speaking of Canadian Metaphors, I was rather proud of this one.
VFS and YouTube have just announced an international scholarship competition that should knock Chris Crocker off the front page and into the obscurity which has hungered for him ever since the Leave Britney Alone fifteen minutes started.
The prize is a full tuition scholarship to internationally-respected Vancouver Film School, the school out of which Kevin Smith dropped to go on to produce the magnum opus, the veritable Big Chill of his generation, Clerks. Like I ever saw that.
I’m old, yo.
Anyhoo. The challenge is to make a compelling YouTube pitch explaining just exactly why you’re the natural choice to win. Anyone with enough self-confidence to go into film should have no problem with this part. The school picks the finalists, and then the viewers on YouTube make the final choice.
A few more details, from the FAQ:
This competition is about making film school accessible to everyone. The YouTube community will award three aspiring artists (that includes directors, animators, actors, sound designers and more) with full-tuition scholarships to the Vancouver Film School program of their choice.
Between March 18th and May 9th, submit a short film, animation or creative pitch addressing the theme “What Matters to You.” You must start your video by identifying the VFS program you wish to attend and you must limit your video to no more than three minutes. On May 20th, we will announce the 10 finalists, selected by Vancouver Film School.
From May 20th to May 27th, the YouTube community will view and vote for their favorite videos.
On May 30th, we will announce the 3 scholarship winners.
What programs are up for scholarship awards?
1. Foundation Visual Art & Design
2. Acting Essentials
3. 3D Animation & Visual Effects
4. Classical Animation
5. Digital Character Animation
6. Houdini™ Certification
7. Acting for Film & Television
8. Digital Design
9. Entertainment Business Management
10. Film Production
11. Game Design
12. Makeup Design for Film & Television
13. Sound Design for Visual Media
14. Writing for Film & Television
Some handy tips:
Be creative. Don’t just tell us what’s important to you – show us. For example, if you’re a director, make a short film or documentary about an issue you care about. If you’re an animator, animate a story about an issue, person, place, etc. that matters to you. If you’re a writer, pitch a fresh screenplay concept about something that matters to you. If you’re a makeup artist, transform a stranger into someone who matters to you. These are just ideas and we know you can do better, but the point is: think creatively!
What gets into the shortlist?
Vancouver Film School will judge submissions based on the following criteria:
a. Creativity and Originality (up to 25 points)
b. Relevance of the video to the particular program of study selected (up to 25 points)
c. Technical Execution: Camera/Sound/Lighting/Editing (up to 25 points)
d. Overall Impression (up to 25 points)
And after that, it’s all up to the community on YouTube, so start sucking up building relationships now!
These allegedly endangered Moon Jellyfish don’t look so all-fired rare or endangered to me; they look exactly like the loathsome, throbbing masses of protoplasm that make kayaking in Indian Arm such an unpleasant experience at migration time. Seriously, with those damn paddles it’s like lading up jellyfish soup and watching it slide down the ladle onto your hand, then taking another stroke and ladling up some more on the other side. And the herds, swarms, masses, go on for literally miles.
No wonder people love motorboats: puree!
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raincoaster 