Lucky Dip – Tuesday, May 27th

jessicaharrison

Artist Jessica Harrison takes Grandma’s  dust-collecting figurines for a turn, re-imagining them as magnificent tattooed ladies. They’re quite brilliant and fun, but check her website if your taste is even more macabre. Grandma would be horrified! [Via This Is Colossal]

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What If Classical Music Was Performed Like Rock Music?

You know the deal – you WANT to like classical music. You know you should learn more about classical music, but its all just so… classical. The stiffness, the formality… boring.

Salut Salon is an all-female quartet from Hamburg that makes classical music fun, intermixing traditional chamber music with pop and jazz, and throwing fun poses and postures, as would be typical in a rock performance, into their routine.

They’ve been together in various formations (2 core members, violinists and founders of the quartet Angelika Bachmann and Iris Siegfried plus various cellists and pianists), for over 12 years.

They’ve toured extensively, including Canada, but the upcoming year sees them mostly focused on Germany. But check out the video and then even more of their performances on YouTube – they’re absolutely marvellous.

Another Good Reason to Hate Christmas – Gahhhhh!

No, no, no, no, no, no, no! Sweet little baby Jesus who I do not believe in, please, if you really exist, make this stop.

Unless, you know, it’s like that Billy Idol Christmas album where he obviously recorded it drunk and messed up all the words. In that case, we could give it one listen, just for shits and giggles. But otherwise, no.

And what happened to Newton-John’s face?

Some Day My Prince Will (Probably Not) Come

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you know that I got tickets to see Prince on Saturday night, totally spur of the moment, outstanding 8th row seats with an amazing view, regularly $200, available day of for $67. Apparently this happens a lot with big shows, where a block of tickets is reserved for guests or promos and isn’t used, so the seats are sold off cheap. This would be good to know for future shows, except that I am fairly certain that I won’t be going to another stadium show any time soon.

Let me remind you, dear readers, of some facts. Sheryl = agoraphobic. Also, misanthropic curmudgeon. I don’t deal with other people very well, and particularly not in large groups. I work from home so as to avoid crowded buses, etc, etc. So with the exception of one very foolish decision to attend Lollapalooza in 1990, I haven’t been to a stadium rock concert since 1987. Literally. The Cult at the Halifax Metro Centre. And I was so stoned that my girl Sharon and I, in an attempt to get to the front of the stage, crawled on our bellies, military-style, under four rows of seats. So there’s not even a real point of comparison.

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Why Cyndi Lauper Looks an Awful Lot Like Macy Gray

As a teenager, I was a huge Cyndi Lauper fan. I loved her music, wanted to look like her, and for a year or so in high school, modelled my wardrobe after the outfits from the videos for her album She’s so Unusual.

By the late 80s though, I had moved on to other types of music and didn’t keep up on everything Cyndi. One night in the summer of ’88, when I was living in Kensington Market, we came home fairly late to find that the streets were blocked off for a film set. This was the summer of that bad vampire detective show Forever Night, which seemed to be filming everywhere in Toronto at the time, so we assumed that’s what it was, and went a few blocks out of our way to get home.

In the middle of the night we woke up to the same Cyndi Lauper song playing over and over again. It was a song I didn’t recognize but as it was a hot night my roommate Amanda and I left the door to our little attic balcony open to catch a breeze. Restlessly we fell asleep to the sound of Cyndi singing. The next morning, the whole market was abuzz about the Cyndi Lauper video shoot that had taken place the night before. Yep, Cyndi Lauper has been right there, on my street, and I had missed her.

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Yes… The New York Dolls… In Burlington!

The reaction was the same every time; “Burlington? The New York Dolls are playing in Burlington?? In the afternoon??” And then I’d go on to explain how, yes, they were playing a music festival in Burlington, along with The Diodes. No one was interested enough to come, though. They were saving their concert-going energy for Iggy Pop the same night, which was a great performance but was a too-crowded, too-hot mess in terms of actually trying to see the show.

But I’ve always been a bigger Dolls fan than a Stooges fan, so while, in retrospect, I’d have been happy to miss Iggy and the Stooges (not that I actually *saw* any of the stage during the show at all, so I sort of did miss it anyway), I was so not missing the Dolls. Even if it meant getting the GO train to Burlington and back.

And it was worth the effort. David Johansen was in fine form, as was Sylvain Sylvain. New(er) members Sami Yaffa (bass) and Steve Conte (guitar) were also sounding great.

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Old Punk Rockers Never Die

Okay, well, technically they do, eventually.

Last night, Greg and I attended a photo exhibit called Toronto Calling, of photos of concerts that took place in the early 80s in Toronto featuring bands like the Clash and the Ramones. We didn’t actually stick around to see the photos, though, as the gallery space was packed solid with old punk rockers, so much so that we couldn’t get in to see the photos.

The era in question took place before my time in Toronto, with most of the gigs featured taking place between 1979 -1981. I arrived in Toronto in late ’87, so this was not my scene per se, although I was listening to all of these bands back home in Halifax, a no-man’s land when it came to international tours. Hats off to Billy Idol for not forgetting about us in 1984.

But the remarkable thing was that here was a group of people in their late 40s – early 50s… and there was a still a solid punk vibe going on. Piercings, tattoos, oddly-coloured hair. These folks were still flying the freak flag.

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The Girl U Want

As most people know, my photography interests and skills lean more towards food than people, so my concert shots (when I bother) are not stellar. As demonstrated below, I took a pile of shots through the first few songs of DEVO’s set last night with the camera on the wrong setting.

But when you’ve been wanting to see a band live since you were 13, evidence that you were actually there (some 28 years after the fact) is probably in order.

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Getting Up There

Yesterday, I moved into a new marketing demographic. Now in the void known as the 40 – 49 market, I no longer hold the cachet of youth, but have not yet achieved the financial stability or respect of the baby boom. Essentially, I’m supposed to stop caring about being cool and hip and be fully ensconced in paying off my home in the suburbs, while contributing to a RESP for my 2.5 kids. I’m hoping this means advertising agencies will stop co-opting the music of my youth and will move on to early 90s bands such as Pearl Jam and Nirvana so I can go back to listening to the Cult and Modern English without picturing automobiles or cheeseburgers.

I’m not hung up about being 40. I spent the last year working up to it. “I’m almost 40!!” I’d declare when required to admit my age, instead of just saying “39″ and being done with it. I’ve had lots of practice getting it out there. Nor am I self-consciously starting to refuse to admit my age. That’s the one benefit to being festively plump – I look a good 5 to 10 years younger than I am.

No, as usual, my issues are more with where society says I’m supposed to be at this point in my life. At 20, being “alternative”, or “marching to your own drummer” is considered to be a phase of growing up. At 30, it’s a little odd, but there’s still time for you to settle down. However at 40, continuing to be a bit of a freak tends to take on new meaning, and it’s unlikely you’ll ever “settle down”, and be “normal”.

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Thirteen

There was a post the other day on Shapely Prose, a kickass fat acceptance blog, that included a heart-breaking letter from a 13-year-old girl who was considering suicide because of pressure from her classmates and her family. As of this writing there are over 150 responses, the majority of which seek to reassure the girl of how it all gets better because thirteen sucks so heartily for everyone.

The letter caused a lot of upset, sending almost all readers back into the depths of their own pasts to recall being thirteen.

For anyone who has been fat, heavy, plump, etc., their whole life, thirteen was likely a pretty shitty year. I know it was for me. I wasn’t actually the heaviest kid in my class, but as the other heavy kids were athletic in some way, and appeared on the surface to have a higher sense of self-esteem, I was the lucky pariah of the class who got picked on. Constantly.

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