crows to burnaby

This Wednesday, Jan 30 I'm playing a solo set at the Railway Club as part of the Super Robertson Supper Show. I'm excited about this for a variety of reasons:

• I get a 25-minute set.
• Interior Design is also playing a set, very cool ambient music.
• The Rail is probably the nicest venue to play in Vancouver. Well, I suppose the Commodore is probably nicer to play, but I haven't gotten there yet.
• I have a new pedalboard and hopefully it'll all be assembled in time to put it through its paces that night.
• After the Supper Show, there's some really good bands including The Hermit, who are always good. So it's worth sticking around afterwards.

The show runs from 7:30pm-8:30pm and hey, it's free. The only thing I'm not looking forward to is dragging my gear up the stairs. I'm trying to decide if I do or don't want to bring my amp and cab, or just run straight into the soundboard. I love my amp, and it would sound really nice, but I ain't getting that cabinet up the steps without some help.

Then on Friday, February 8th, ARCTIC has a show at the Railway along with Stride Elementary, Windows '78, and Go Ghetto Tiger. That one starts at 9pm and it'll cost $10 but totally be worth it. It's worth it just to hang out at the Railway anyway - it's cozy and pleasant and has great sound and a lot of character, and you can either go up front and listen to the music, or hang out in the back and talk to people if you prefer. And there's a model train that runs on a track up by the ceiling, and a peanut dispenser. What more could you want?

if you like, say, Tetris.

Because you might like this one too.

And don't say I didn't warn you.

We need to fix our condo up before selling it. Can any of you recommend good painters (or bad ones we should avoid)? Also we need some cleaners to go over everything; there is probably dog hair embedded in every possible surface that will need to be carefully extracted.

Post here or send a note to kirsten at crows to burnaby dot com.

Thanks!

to blog more, 'cause I'd be failing it already, wouldn't I?

I've been pretty busy, and/or preoccupied. I keep idly thinking of topics to blog about, and then by the time I have a moment to blog, I don't feel like it. Here's what I've been up to. Maybe I'll elaborate on some of these things later:

• Booking ARCTIC's May tour, to Ontario/Quebec and back. It's a time-consuming task requiring a lot of persistence and patience and the ability to handle people turning you down, which has never been my strong point. But I had myself braced for it this time round, and I'm honestly finding it more fun and more rewarding than I had expected. Expect the worst, enjoy the best.
• Being a hermit, staying in and finding my bearings. Catching up on occasional iffy sleep. Dealing with some of the practical logistics of the separation and getting ready to sell the condo in time.
• Being a social butterfly, going out with good friends, seeing bands and winning at 5-pin bowling and staying out too late.
• Rehearsals and open mics (well, one open mic, anyway).
• Watching Twin Peaks on DVD while I still have a TV. What a wonderful show. I'm partway into Season 2, though, and it's going to start getting weak in probably 3 or 4 episodes... but oh, the first season is pure gold.
• Pretending to be a cyborg while talking on a Bluetooth headset for the first time.

I also have to mention that I just got the coziest white sweater-coat in the world, and it's insanely warm even though it has a very loose weave. It is very snuggly and I'll have to do my best not to wear it at home too much and get it covered in dog hair.

So I'm doin' alright.

A while ago I ordered a bunch of Switchcraft cable ends from a place in Philadelphia, which had them at a terrific price and I was mighty pleased to have found them. They ship UPS, and I didn't know any better, so I okayed them to be shipped UPS Ground.

Today my UPS parcel arrived. It has a value of about $45. Shipping was $16.

The driver asked for $35 COD.

Note that NONE of that is duty - it's an American-made product so it doesn't qualify. $31 of it is UPS's brokerage fee - the price they charge to handle bringing it across the border. The rest is just tax.

I refused the package. Where do they get off charging 70% of a package's value? I called them and complained, and they offered a "one-time goodwill" discount of 50% of the brokerage fee, so now I'm "only" going to be paying $20. Since I do need these cable ends sometime within my lifetime, and if I let them get returned I'd just have to pay another $20 in shipping from somewhere else, or a higher price on the ends, I said okay. Now I have to wait for them to redeliver the package, of course.

Rest assured I will not use UPS again in any situation where it can be avoided. The lady on the phone told me there aren't brokerage charges on air shipments, only ground. That's nice, but I've been burned by UPS once, and that's enough.

In the meantime I also had to arrange for shipping of a large, heavy package from the US, and since it was much bigger, I did my research first. It seems that UPS is notorious for ridiculous brokerage fees. There's even a lawsuit filed. So I used USPS, which has a flat rate of $5, and hopefully will not have to deal with this nuisance. Lesson learned, but too late for my cable ends.

Project Opus has long been one of my favourite music communities. It's Vancouver-developed, and though the scope of the site isn't limited to Vancouver at all, there's a bit of an emphasis on local music just by default.
The developers have just released Mixx, a very clever Facebook app that allows you to not just make typical playlists of your favourite songs, but request songs from friends based on themes: "I want music that will wake me up in the morning", "I want music that makes the rain go away", and so on. It's quite legal, because although you're uploading an mp3 to the site, it can only be heard by your friends and they can't download it - basically as if they were hanging out at your place and you had it playing on your stereo.

I like this concept a lot, because I find the only times I get into new music is when a friend recommends it and I look it up. This skips the "looking it up" step altogether.

It's an addictive little app - I had to force myself to go to bed the other night when I was having too much fun putting together a Mixx of music that I was finding particularily resonant (starting with "Go Slowly" by Radiohead). There'll be more where that came from. Do check it out.

I wasn't that sorry to see the back end of 2007. It had some nice highlights - travel to Tunisia and elsewhere, the release of the ARCTIC album, playing some of my own shows. But heaviness dominated the year, as I started to notice several months ago. By the close of this year, my grandmother had died, my friend's mother had died, and slowly but surely, my marriage ended. Now so many things I'm used to, so many things I've only known one way, so many things are going to change completely.

I'm not generally one to fuss much about holidays, but New Year's is one of the only ones that has much symbolic significance to me. I like markers for time. I like watching the clock change over from 11:59 to 12:00 on any day, really, noon or midnight; there's something about the evenness of the numbers that is pleasing. I like dates that have patterns, like 9/9/99 (I have no idea what I was doing then, though). And I like New Year's to represent in some way what I want for the rest of the year. And I want this year to be better than last year.

So New Year's Eve had some importance to me, but it was also complicated. I wasn't sure I wanted to be at a party - I haven't been feeling all that social lately, or when I do, it might only be for half an evening and then I'm just done, I want to get away. But I also didn't want to sit at home feeling sorry for myself. What I ended up doing was making a reservation at the Wynken Blynken Nod hostel in Gibsons, BC, which is just a 45-minute ferry ride from North Vancouver, up the Sunshine Coast. It's right on the water, and that seemed important to me; I wanted to be outside at midnight, looking at the water.

It turned out to be exactly what I needed, even better than I had hoped, actually. The private rooms at the hostel were all booked, so I'd booked a bed in the shared room. But I was the only one, so effectively I had the equivalent of a cabin by the water all to myself - a big bedroom, kitchen, common room, and bathroom - all for $23. I got some food & drink in town, brought some books and music, some paper to write on, and settled in for the night. When I realized I had more time than I knew what to do with, I loaded up the hostel's VCR with Metropolis, which I'd never seen.

It was quite cold last night, so I didn't spend as much time outside in the evening as I'd intended. The hostel is heated by a most wonderful woodstove. It's been so long since I've used a woodstove, I'd forgotten how magical they are. I loved tending the fire, prodding it and adding logs and being rewarded with cuddly warmth. I wished I'd had something to cook on top of it; I have wonderful memories of warm slow-cooked oatmeal on cold Newfoundland mornings.

Several minutes before midnight I bundled up and sat on a driftwood bench by the water and listened to the waves. I didn't look at the clock; I knew I'd figure it out somehow. And before long, I heard the long deep honk of a ferry horn and distant whoops and cheers echoing across the water. Directly across Howe Sound from me, someone set off some very nice fireworks, which seemed like a personal display just for me. Up the coast a little, multicoloured flares fired into the water. My phone beeped a happy new year text from a friend. It was a wonderful, completely unique and new experience for me - and what made it great was the realization that I'm going to have so many more unique and new experiences like this, starting this year. Maybe they won't all be so joyous, but they'll all be new to me, and I'm very excited about that.

Happy new year.