Manitoba Links Weekly: When Everyone is Essential No One Will Be, December is Inevitably List Month, The Most Winnipeggian Present Imaginable, and Here are the Manitoba PCs Arguing for MORE SPECIALTY LICENCE PLATES (ManLinkWeek S02E07)

Earlier this week I compiled a field guide to Manitoba specialty licence plates, nine of which (NINE of which) have been released and promoted by the governing NDP within the last three years. That dropped on Tuesday; on Thursday, the official opposition Progressive Conservatives circulated a press release to argue that -- wait for it -- MANITOBA NEEDS ANOTHER SPECIALTY PLATE. The orange guys brag about nine specialty plates in three years, the blue guys complain it should be ten specialty plates in three years, and I want to light my ballot on fire. There's your provincial politics update. [ via ]

Hello and welcome to Manitoba Links Weekly! This week on Winnipeg Internet Pundits -- yes it was a full show this week, quiet you -- we discussed the City's preliminary budget, its controversial mandatory-unpaid-leave proposal for non-essential employees (more on that in a second), the continued wave of hypothetical Scott Fielding initiatives, and the death of the Montcalm Hotel so that condos may rise in its place. I have a long and fascinating story about working the front desk of a two-and-a-half-star hotel on Christmas Eve, but I'll save that one as its own special beast for some other time.

Right now, it's time for ManLinkWeek! First things first:

Manitoba Links Weekly: We've Hit Peak Summer, Imagine Being Able to Buy Poutine and Beer Simultaneously, and Hey I Bet the Guy Who Didn't Fully Read or Understand His Own Anti-Crime Bill Would Make a Really Great Judge (ManLinkWeek 44)

And welcome back! This is a Friday feature now, maybe? I don't even know any more. Summers, man! Summers are TOO BUSY, a point that I shall elaborate upon shortly. But first, preamble:

-- I have a column in this week's Uptown Magazine; I have a column in every week's Uptown Magazine, but not always with a central idea as fundamentally awesome as the one I'm pitching this week. So have a look!
-- I successfully defended my Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown championship against all comers last weekend, which is great, because it means I don't have to update that bio paragraph on the right again. (There's quite a bit of livestream footage from the weekend-long event, if you're into that sort of thing.)
-- My poor sad old laptop overheats so quickly now that it occasionally just gives up and dies with a loud popping noise, which is... slightly unnerving to experience, and has not sped my ever-glacial writing pace up any. So I'm increasingly in the market to finally pick up a new computer, and coincidentally -- after a long stretch of the game appearing to be PC-only -- SimCity 5 will be on the Mac after all. Hmm.
-- And, in more encouraging news -- I had the good fortune of being able to attend the beginning of the Joey Elliott Era live, last night, and he won. So, hey! That's pretty cool. (You've never seen a city so energized about its 2-and-5 football team as we are about ours.)
-- BUT ENOUGH ABOUT ME
-- If, for some reason, you don't happen to follow the hashtag #banished on Twitter, you missed Mike McIntyre's coverage of quite the day in court earlier this week. I don't want to spoil it for you, just get in there and experience it for yourself. (Remember: start reading from the bottom.)
-- And speaking of Twitter, here are the details on a beer swag giveaway, so have at that too while you're at it. If you're on the Twitter, I mean. You Facebook types can ignore the whole thing and get back to your busy day of watching people you don't remember very well complain about how Facebook's changing.

(I'm nearing the point now where my preamble is a full post in itself, a rather convincing sign that I need to think about retooling this feature soon.)

All right! Get ready to stare at your calendar in befuddlement, because it's time for ManLinkWeek!

A Big Weekend, in Pictures: Fireworks and a Parade in Oak Lake, the 28th Annual Brandon Folk Festival, a Moody Manitoba Morning, and Other Westman Shenanigans (56k Modems Beware)

Fair warning: there are about twenty megabytes' worth of pictures in this post. I realize that for most of us modern-day downloadin' folks that's barely a blip, like maybe three or four decently-encoded MP3s, but still. Fair warning!

As you'll see shortly, there is a lot more in this post than I was actually expecting to see when I left town Thursday evening. Longtime readers will recall that my father lives out in Oak Lake, off the highway between Virden and Brandon, and Oak Lake is generally not an overly busy destination.

As an example, here's what the hustle and bustle of downtown looked like when we went out the next day:





Not your fancy Virden city-living, to be sure, and Oak Lake residents like it just fine that way. Let me (re)introduce you to a couple of them, not because they're crucial to the story, but because they're adorable:

Manitoba Links Weekly: Summer is Here and Everything is Happening (ManLinkWeek 39)

Hello and welcome to another vaguely-weekly installment of everybody's at least second favourite local link bonanza; it's time for ManLinkWeek!

My apologies for the delay on this post; my week, thus far, has been a maddening one. Those of you who follow me on Twitter are aware of my ongoing... escapades with Visions Electronics, and how I had thought that would make for an interesting blog post when the whole affair was over. Well, as of this writing, the whole affair is not over -- don't even get me started, right now, just don't -- and this is time that I am not getting back.

Anyway, it turns out that simmering frustration, thirty-five-Celsius weather, and the skin-scalding gusts of a five-year-old desktop computer make for a potently poor writing environment when combined. So, heck with it! The last few ManLinkWeeks have steadily skyrocketed into hashtag-longreads territory, and on days like these you should be aiming to minimize your computer time (or maximize its efficiency, whichever) and get outside sooner.

Thusly, please find a crop of links below; the repeat Slurpee championship is an honourary mention, although after thirteen straight years of it I'm not sure what discussion topics remain unmined.

The Brent Bellamy piece on the James Avenue Pumping Station is an honourary mention as well, having been featured in a segment of this week's WIPs; you should definitely add it to the reading list below if you have the time.

WHO AM I KIDDING NOBODY HAS TIME FOR ANYTHING

LET'S GO, GO GO GO GO

Manitoba Links Weekly: Summer Fun, Cottage Booze, Plastic Bags, and... Adorable Propaganda? (ManLinkWeek 36)

I'm embedding the above largely for confirmation that it is indeed a real thing, because I'm still not entirely convinced that I haven't just hallucinated it. [via]

ManLinkWeek is go! These are busy times, my friends; it's summer in Winnipeg, and summer in Winnipeg means all rain all the time events:

Manitoba Links Weekly: We'd Like to Wish You All the Best, From All of Us (ManLinkWeek 11)

Well, hello there! I trust that you all enjoyed a pleasant and comforting holiday season, one filled with tidings of good cheer and with goodwill to all men. Oh, me? Yeah, I was driving down Osborne on Christmas Eve and a guy sideswiped my car. So, y'know. Fun.

But, let us not dwell on that little bit of unpleasantness; let us instead reflect calmly upon the week and the season, with a suitably festive and relaxed ManLinkWeek.

Big Month So Far, or: Concerts and Queens and Parades, Oh My (Plus: Crowdsourcing a Clean Shave)

Whirlwinds of activity around here! (Including, if you've been following the weather, actual whirlwinds.)

Yes, the summer months always seem to be the busiest in this city, and if there's one thing I need right now it's to keep myself busy. I'm currently fighting a bout of a frustratingly lingering cough and cold combination -- just like almost everybody I know, almost as if there's some sort of connection -- so it's important to get some sunshine and exercise, do the ol' up-and-about routine, that sort of thing.

Besides drinking entire cases of fluids, and besides stubbornly dragging myself out of bed bright and early every morning specifically just to watch soccer, what have I been up to? Well, buckle yourself in for a fine photographic travelogue, because we'll start from day one out along the Lake. (There are a lot of photos in this post, so slower connections should consider themselves forewarned.)

James Hope Howard Liveblogs the 2010 Winter Olympics Closing Ceremonies

No tape-delays this time!

I just finished watching the insane Men's Hockey final, which is going to go down as one of those legendary games people bring up for decades to come; good thing we won, because all of our other gold medals would have meant approximately squat if we'd lost this one. I'm not kidding; people would have looked back twenty years from now and gone "friggin' Vancouver". Instead the entire country gets a feel-good moment, and good for everybody involved. (Must be awesome to be out partying in the bigger downtown centres, right now; the footage of the celebrations going on in downtown Toronto right now is quite impressively nuts.)

So! The Closing Ceremonies ought to be a hoot, and if I'm reading this correctly the television coverage should be starting in about an hour. I'm off to the fridge to start pregaming! I'll meet you guys back here in a bit.

James Howard Clears Out November, Part I

Is it seriously December? It can't be December, that's ridiculous. It was minus one yesterday! And there's barely even snow on the ground; hell, it's only snowed twice so far all season, and only half of one snowfall stuck!

Fine, fine. Let's go on the assumption that it's December. Since it's been about a week again since I last dropped in, let's just hammer away at some backlog today; better start clearing out the In bin if we're going to get a fresh start to the next decade.

Is it seriously going to be 2010 next month? fffffffffffffffFFFFFFFF--

ANYWAY

Winnipeg Cat Has a (Local) Flavour, or: James Howard Uses the Internet For Mischief

Greetings from my lunch break! How are you all doing? Good, good.

A whole week has elapsed between my last post and this one, which is really rather unacceptable, but when a lapse like this occurs you can usually assume that I am either A) tremendously busy, B) tremendously lazy, C) up to something sneaky, or D) all of the above. If none of the above apply, it is because I am dead.

However! The correct answer, in this case, is D -- because I have alternated between being preoccupied and being so tired out of my mind that I fall asleep fully dressed with the lights on, but I've also been surreptitiously working away in my rare free time on a project of such importance (and potential entertainment) that it would have been improper to give it less than my full attention.

(Don't think that I hadn't noticed when both the Sun and the Free Press built off some of my stuff in the past week or two. I'm glad they liked it! And if it means that people start paying attention and coming up with ideas, so much the better; it's not like it was much of a big, carefully guarded secret that the area needs work.)

So what ill-advised madness and calamity am I up to this time, you might ask? Well, I'll walk you through the decision-making process I followed, so bear with me on this one.

Scheduling Conflicts

Augh, Saturday. Augh, augh, Saturday.

There's a lot of interesting things to do this Saturday, if you're looking to get out and enjoy the city and its unspeakably-warm-for-November temperatures. The annual Santa Claus Parade will kick off this Saturday at 5:00 PM, and nothing brings me joy like standing in one place and letting free entertainment sail past me. Sometimes they throw candy! Candy is pretty great.

Champion and His G-Strings will also be playing the Pyramid Cabaret later that night, if, y'know, you like music. In fact, if you read these directions before noon on Friday, you -- yes, you! -- can enter for a chance to win passes to the concert! Painting Over Silence is a very fine local music blog.

And another very fine local blog, West End Dumplings, brought to my attention that SilverCity Polo Park will be screening a single showing of Gone With the Wind, in freaking High Definition, at 11:00 that morning. How often does that happen? I dare say, not very often. In fact, if you believe the hype, it happens... once. Sounds like a worthwhile venture to me!

So why am I augh-ing, you ask? What drives a man to augh in the face of a fine lineup like this? My friend, this weekend is also BaseLAN 18, and the video game tournaments that I really want to attend -- Street Fighter IV and Tekken 6, not that I stand much chance of winning a match in either of them -- completely overlap with everything else that day, and particularly the parade.

I am quite, understandably, conflicted. Few things in life entertain me like flailing and dying in fighting game tournaments, and I'm as loyal a supporter of the local fight-game scene as anyone else (who was out of town for a year and forgot everything he knew in the meantime), but anybody who knows me knows that I god damn love parades! And it's the hundredth anniversary parade, so I'm (perhaps unreasonably) expecting a great effort -- maybe not as great as the joint parade with the Grey Cup a few years back, but certainly better than the timid blahfest they ran the year immediately after that.

CONFLICT

AUGH



Of course, for those of you amongst my readers who aren't big into the world of competitive tournament-style fighting-video-games -- and that would be just about all of you, now that I think about it -- there really isn't much in the way of conflict here. So while I'm filling you in on interesting upcoming events, let me add one more that even I should be able to enjoy:



Aww, yee! Bargains! Livin' the Winnipeg dream, baby!

Note of course that this isn't their usual quarterly sale of half-off everything, which means no musical instruments this time around. (Alas.) But it's still easily enough of an incentive to get me out of the house after work, and I figured I would at least let folks know ahead of time in case they want to plan their attack formations.

Anyway -- my internal conflict and I will give the matter of Saturday scheduling some intense deliberation. I'll see if I can't pop in tomorrow evening to whip up some fine miscellaneous bloggin' in the meantime, though.

Lupe Fiasco w/ Grand Analog -- University of Manitoba Max Bell Fieldhouse, Friday, September 19th, 2009

Oh, hey, this was only four days ago! Look how timely I am. (I blame Fight Night Round 4.) Anyway--





They're lucky the headliners came through, because this show was heading straight for disaster territory without them.

Now, let me just note beforehand that I was already setting my standards for the organizational aspects of this show pretty low. It was being put on by UMSU, who I remember well enough from my University of Manitoba days that I wasn't about to put too much stock in their large-scale event planning -- and it cost me literally twice as much for a ticket as it would have if I were still a student there, not that UMSU's choice of Ticketmaster to handle the general admission tickets helped my sense of goodwill any. A $5.50 surcharge on a $35 ticket? For what? For printing the piece of paper it comes on? My little brother, a U of M student himself now, dropped $20 cash at Answers on campus -- no surcharges, no taxes, no administrative fees or convenience fees or handling fees -- and they gave him a strip of paper UMSU had photocopied the information on themselves.

The show was slated to happen on the roof of the University Parkade, but then -- the day before the show, you'll note -- they changed the venue to the Max Bell Fieldhouse. (Not that you would have known this without visiting the UMSU website!) It seems they got greedy and just kept selling tickets, or they got greedy and just wanted a bigger beer garden, or they were just shortsighted to begin with and hadn't thought their idea for a super-loud lights-heavy megashow on an open-air roof near a residential area all the way through -- or some combination of the above, which I am not ruling out. But the overselling part seems set in stone, particularly when they announced they'd hit the Max Bell's capacity of three thousand at seemingly the exact same time as they announced the venue change. (In fact, if you look at their news archive there, the sold-out notice appears to have actually been posted earlier than the venue change notice. What the hell, UMSU.)

But hey, no problem, right? I've been to a few of the SmartPark jazz concerts held in that very fieldhouse, and even though you have to bring your own chair for them they've always been organized reasonably well. Not only does the fieldhouse have several entrances that are perfectly suitable for setting up ticket stations, but some of them are right along the exterior of the building -- perfect for getting people through with a minimum of fuss and keeping wait times as short as possible!

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

So what they decided on instead, get this, this is pretty great -- what they decided to do instead is have one lone solitary ticket station, specifically placed well within the building at the end of a winding path around the building, up a hill, and through the attached hockey arena. (Literally, through; you could actually see the Bisons hockey game, in progress, from the admissions table.) They sold three thousand tickets, they had one entrance with maybe three or four people very slowly taking tickets, and they acted surprised when three thousand people showed up and got upset about waiting in line for up to an hour.

"An hour" is an exaggeration, but only very slightly; my brother and I were in line for fifty-five minutes, and we had the good fortune of getting there before half the crowd showed up. Let me tell you, there's really no better way to spend a Friday evening than standing in a line of three thousand people under a hideous Spirited Energy banner. (Ugh, god, Spirited Energy. There are seriously people who want Andrew Swan running the province? Really?)

Of course, kids these days have no sense of decorum or manners, so the "line" quickly became a source of conflict between people who acknowledge the concept and people who don't. Being unwaveringly self-important is apparently a prerequisite to attending the University of Manitoba, these days, because there was cutting and running to the front and general hooliganry en masse -- my favourite people were the ones who kept their cell phones pressed to their heads as they ran, in an effort to avoid eye contact or interaction with anybody who might make them feel bad about it -- and then, increasingly, the people running by were met with booes and jibes and old-fashioned heckling from the stalwarts (or, depending on your perspective, suckers) still honouring the social order of things. The slings and arrows ranged from whimsical ("Quick, hurry, run! There's no time!") to cutting ("If your dad had stuck around, he would have raised you wrong!") to simplistically profane ("It's a fucken line, buddy! End of the line's fucken that way!" -- and, yes, that's written the way the guy pronounced it), but overall it was the kind of comedically ugly atmosphere that you would expect given the situation.



Ultimately, whether people skipped ahead or not, it wasn't as though anybody really missed anything; UMSU didn't even open the doors until 8:30 anyway, because it was an 8:00 showtime and they are UMSU, and then when people could finally get in they were greeted by one of the most mediocre DJs I've ever encountered.

I'm getting ahead of myself, however. Way, way ahead of myself, because there was still a whole lot of lineup before we actually got into the building. It was fourty-five minutes up the line, almost but not quite within visual range of the door, before we ever saw any security -- and OBO must have ran out of actual security, that night, because they'd instead sent a small crew of the 'before' kids from the old Charles Atlas bodybuilding ads.

Well, no, that's not entirely true; they did have two big intimidating guys who worked exclusively on stage duty. But the rough-and-tumble, take-no-shit types they'd assigned to deal with the public? There was one kind of pudgy guy along the outdoor line who I guess could survive a barfight, and then everyone else in black and orange that night was about as authoritative as my little sister's Shih Tzu. The unarmed, fourty-something 5'4'' woman working the door, the loud but ineffectual college kids insisting that girls go through the left door and boys go through the right door (haha what), the scrawny almost-children conducting the patdown searches inside the hockey arena -- the lot of them are incredibly lucky that the cheesed-off mob of three thousand were behaving themselves, because honestly the lot of them would have been torn apart like bananas in a blender if anything had broken out. I could have carried any two of these security people on my shoulders. I was, as you may have gleamed from the above, not entirely impressed by the security detail on duty. (Not that I'm blaming this on UMSU; I'm sure they did what they could in contacting a reputable agency, and it isn't their fault that OBO sent a full garden of stringbeans.)

But if I wasn't impressed with security, I really wasn't impressed with the opening DJ. (Bam! Segue!) He said his name was DJ Peace, or DJ Quiche, or something that sounded like that; I couldn't make it out, and really it was just as well because I don't think I would ever need to seek him out for anything. His entire repertoire was to play thirty seconds of a (seemingly randomly selected) #1 hip-hop hit, blurt out "AYY WHO HERE REMEMBER THIS SONG WHO HERE REMEMBER DIS HANDS UP IF YOU LOVE [artist]" and then ruin it by singing the last two or three words of every second line before jumping to the next song with little to no transition.

If you were to mute his prerecorded music and listen exclusively to his mic feed, this is what his rendition of Biggie's "Juicy" would sound like:

TILL MY TAPE POPPED

PRIVATE STOCK

HAT TO MATCH



THIS FARRRRRR

And then he cuts the music entirely and blurts out "BLOW UP LIKE THE WORLD TRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADE" and you want to hit him. So DJ Cease, or Sneeze, or Sneech, or whatever was annoying as hell, and for reasons I might never understand they let him just keep going and going and going. I don't know if he got more time than Grand Analog, but his set seemed like forever. If you are the DJ in question and you are reading this right now, I'm sure you're a great guy, but oh my god you seriously need to switch up your schtick some.

The venue itself, such as it was, wasn't too great either. The ventilation system was severely lacking -- for a crowd of three thousand, I mean, I'm sure its ceiling fans work fine for the building's normal use by a smattering of athletes -- and I didn't check out the very crowded beer garden, because I drove to the concert, but it ain't getting good press elsewhere. So organizationally the whole thing was really a trainwreck, but it was the names on the tickets that finally did make the experience worthwhile.

(What also made the experience worthwhile? The crowd booing, bitterly and unceasingly, when one of the UMSU Vice-Presidents came up to emcee. So good! Ah, I love it when entire groups of people mass as one just to be spiteful.)

Bless their hearts, Grand Analog worked their asses off. (As they always do, of course.) The crowd was pretty sluggish about getting into them, but screw those hipsters, this set was great. I picked up their new album once I got back into town, and this was my first time hearing the cuts from it live; rest assured, they hold up very well.

Then Lupe finally hit the stage at 11:00 or so, and the place finally popped huge like it had been waiting to do for hours. And it was awesome -- mostly a hit parade, granted, but that was what the crowd came for. The only real diversion was his new material, which he introed by rambling bizarrely about lasers for a while. LASERS is, apparently, the name of his upcoming third album; he announced that it was an abbreviation of "Love Always Shines Every Time, Remember the Smile" -- or something like that, but I remember that whatever he said would actually work out to something like LASETRES. He kind of rambled and spaced out for a bit about how lasers, man, the thing about lasers is that they always shine. One guy in front of me in the crowd turned to his buddies and made this classic >:\ face during the whole thing, which honestly was kind of hard to argue against.

But this was a minor, passing curiosity, and it didn't kill the crowd very much if at all -- and then he busted out "Kick, Push" and everything was all right with the world. The >:\ guy and his buddies, who had spent the entirety of the show thus far acting completely unimpressed and too cool for the room, marked out like you wouldn't believe for this one -- singing along, doing the hand motions for the "and coast" part, the whole nine yards. And you know what? So did I. It was great.

Every artist or band has their one big crowd-pleaser, of course, and you know which one I'm talking about in this case; "Superstar" was one of my Ten Best Songs of 2007You Haven't Heard -- is it seriously almost 2010 right now? Jesus Christ. Anyway, it lurked under the radar in 2007, it broke out huge in 2008, and now it is 2009 and a packed fieldhouse of three thousand grouchy, poorly organized spectators can sing it almost note-perfectly on command if prompted. Music is great like that.

So what was my personal highlight of the whole show? Better than standing in line and helping people boo cheaters, better than seeing "Kick, Push" performed live, and even better than the UMSU rep getting serenaded soundly as the sacrificial lamb for her organization, had to be the bodysurfers -- and I say this for one bodysurfer in particular, a comely young woman who made the mistake of wearing a skirt. Nice as her legs were, though, that wasn't the entertainment of it; no, the greatest part of the whole concert was one section of the crowd throwing her, a good extra few feet into the air, and then the rest of the crowd completely failing to catch her. There was a sudden heft, a flash of legs and fabric above the mob, and then she completely ceased to exist. Vaudeville lives!



Good lord, this post is like two thousand words long. Can you tell that I just recently got out of academia? Many thanks to you if you read this far! I'll try and keep things short and choppy in the future.

Jose Gonzalez w/ Shuyler Jansen -- Park Theatre, Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Yeah! I actually got tickets to this! I was pretty late in remembering this was coming up, and when I looked into getting tickets there were only six left -- so good thing I remembered when I did!



The show opened last night with Saskatoon country-rocker and Old Reliable member Shuyler Jansen, accompanied by the Edmontonian drummer whose name I have somehow completely forgotten. They were, uh... they really... they were there.

It was okay for the first couple of songs, dark and twisty, interesting sort of stuff -- but then the uncomfortable realization followed that all of his songs were being played in the same tempo, with largely the same dynamics, and they tended to blend together after a while. It might have just been an off day for the two of them, since they'd mentioned that they both drove here from Saskatoon that very day; "I'm so slow right now," Jansen added briefly. Nothing offensive, certainly, but nothing either that made me want to rush out and buy some albums.

Well, that's okay! Maybe I'll warm to them next time I run into them. Besides, the main event was forthcoming! Bring on the world-class headlining act!



They never actually turned the lights on, not all the way. It's an ambience thing.

Jose Gonzalez is definitely as good as you expect him to be, full of guitar majesty and unparalleled songwriting skills -- so I was mostly satisfied with the show. Mostly.

You may remember back when I talked about the Tom Cochrane and John Mellencamp concert that led to my little brother and I taking turns acting indignant about the songs that were left out of Cochrane's setlist. Where my Paper Tigers at god damn it And it's no secret to anybody that my absolute favourite Jose Gonzalez song, cover or original, is Killing For Love; hell, I've posted it on this blog twice, clearly I've got a certain fondness for it.

And I figured, between his two albums and his Joy Division cover, he has a total of twenty-three songs -- and Killing For Love was the first single off his second album! (In Sweden, anyway; it was the third single everywhere else.) Surely he had to play it!

AND THEN HE DIDN'T PLAY IT

WHAT

You can imagine how I was a tad cheesed off by this. I mean, come on! I know his covers draw the lion's share of his popularity, but if a song is strong enough to be released as a single off his second album -- and again, he only has two -- then why on earth would he leave it off his live playlists? Rasserfrackin' mumble mumble what in tarnation.

So there was that. Also curious was the concert's inclusion of a couple pieces that called for a trumpet part; he didn't have a trumpet player handy, so what they did was pipe the recorded trumpet segment over his playing from the control booth. So he's sitting at the microphone, just himself and his guitar, bathed in the entirety of what little light there was -- and then this loud, disembodied trumpet arises from nowhere, and the majority of the crowd starts looking around the small venue as if wondering where on earth the trumpet player is hiding. This sort of thing can kind of take a brother out of the moment, you understand.

And he screwed up the last verse of Crosses, incidentally. I know, I know, maybe I'm being kind of harsh on him for mentioning it, because it was at one of the harder parts -- the turnaround coming out of the bridge, under the line "the streets outside your window". It was a really noticeable flub, too, the kind where you could see him shake his head and then play the last four bars again to centre himself. Now, I've tried playing the song a few times before, and that's usually the spot where I'm going to screw it up too -- so I was all set to commiserate with him for messing up that part before I blinked and remembered, wait, this is his song. If anybody is going to be able to play this song live, we should hope it's him.

He's still leaps and bounds ahead of most any other singer-songwriter you'll catch, of course. From this assortment of nitpicks you might assume that I was disappointed with his performance, and that isn't the case in the slightest; he had his off moments, sure, but damn if that guy can't sing and play guitar. I was tempted to write off his misplays as nerves, since he'd mentioned that this was his very first time playing here -- but the longer I thought about it the more I started to think that he might not yet have full confidence in playing his own material live. It's not an uncommon sentiment, not by any means -- it takes a good long while before playing your own songs to an audience is less intimidating than playing songs by other people. But you could palpably feel how much more confident he was when he launched into any of his three massively popular covers, because immediately he played louder, sat up straighter, sang more enthusiastically. And, not coincidentally, the covers were emphasized by their placement; he closed the main set with Teardrops and closed the encore with Love Will Tear Us Apart. And they're great covers, don't get me wrong! But I really do prefer his originals, ESPECIALLY KILLING FOR LOVE I MEAN COME ON even if he doesn't necessarily, so I hope he puts the same level of energy into his own songs the (hopeful and hypothetical) next time he comes through town.

What else, you might ask, made me think that he was nervous during this concert? He only played for an hour, encore included. And that is really weird. Shuyler Jansen and Jose Gonzalez had almost the same set length, which seems off somehow when one guy is the opener from one province over and the other guy is the headliner from halfway across the world. Alas! So it goes, sometimes.

Heck, I'm just glad I got tickets on such short notice! Man, I've got to start considering these things farther ahead of time. That reminds me, when is that Bugs on Broadway thing coming to t... what? Aw, crap!

Busy Times

Yeah, huh. This week has been crazy for goings-on, hasn't it? You can tell that summer's finally arrived in Winnipeg when everything interesting starts happening at once.

Between the various Jazz Winnipeg Festival events, the tremendous My Winnipeg premiere on Tuesday, my little brother's graduation from high school, putting in overtime at work again, disassembling the metal frame that used to hold my bed up before it got irreparably bent out of shape -- long story -- and going through that giant pile of crazy CDs I borrowed from the library, I've definitely been a busy dude as late.

I'm watching the second quarter of the Bombers opener as I type this, and they've just concluded an interview with the injured Milt Stegall on the sidelines; watching him mug shamelessly for the camera after the interview, then mug for the camera again when they cut back to him after the next play, is some pretty awesome stuff. Not a great game so far, though, more of a penalty-fest than anything else.

When this game is over I may or may not head out and catch the free concerts at Old Market Square for tonight, depending on what the weather's up to; I'm interested in finally catching Ivana Santilli live, but the rain's been so demented today that there's no guarantee of her actually performing tonight. (It is entirely possible for the Jazz Winnipeg Old Market Square weekend concerts to be rained out, as Moses Mayes fans like myself will remember from that one wet Sunday a few years ago.)

The Old Market Square Opening Closing Weekend runs through Sunday night, then the Osborne Village Canada Day mini-festival goes Monday and Tuesday, Tuesday being Canada Day there's also the Forks to consider, then Bugs on Broadway will be either Thursday or Friday depending on which night has better tickets still left, and -- oh, crap, wait! The Jose Gonzalez concerts on the first and second! Are there still tickets left for one of those? Craaaaaaaap -- I, uh, I have to go. Check something.

Busy times, yes. Oh! Do drop by here on Canada Day, though; I'm going to have something you've just gotta get a load of, because it's patriotic and hilarious and historical and awful all at the same time. Something to look forward to!

Video Games Live -- Centennial Concert Hall, Thursday, June 5th, 2008

Yeah, I know, I made you wait a little; I'm working hard well into the night on this one. Time to bring the goods!

Thursday night saw the Centennial Concert Hall host Video Games Live; I hadn't realized this until that very day, of course, and Thursday being my day off I had pretty much intended to sleep through to Friday. When my little brother woke me up in the afternoon and asked me if I wanted to go, I ruffled my brow in confusion and went "is that today?"

So we got pretty good tickets, considering we bought them only hours before showtime. The show itself was to start at 8:00 PM, but mysterious 'pre-show festivities' were listed for 5:30; we arrived at around six or so, to about as large a turnout as we had been expecting.



Not too crowded, right? Good time to poke around, see what there is to see. For example:



Slow news day at Global! It was obvious to watch these guys that they didn't want to be here; they could just as easily have been out covering a story about crime, or asking people their thoughts on the Hockey Night in Canada theme, but they drew the short straws that day and sadly shuffled off to document Dorkfest.



"That's right, Bob -- I'm here tonight at the Centennial Concert Hall, surrounded by halfwits and dweebenheimers. One of them, apparently crazed from a sleepless marathon of the video-games, made off with my necktie just moments earlier."



I looked at this for a good few seconds before concluding I had no idea what it was about. So I walked up, grabbed one of its promotional handouts off the table, and gave it the old once-over;




We have a games industry? And a 'game studio incubator'? Really? Best-kept secret indeed, they must have been hiding this stuff pretty well so far. Has anyone out there ever seen anything to this effect before? Because I'm not ruling out the possibility that they might just be making stuff up now.



Future Shop was out in full force as a sponsor, providing a few game stations and a Guitar Hero section; they were also offering a free draw for a PlayStation 3 and handing out five-dollar-off coupons to anyone within arm's reach. I ended up with four or five of them, because they just kept walking over and handing them to me, so I guess I'm all set if I want to save five dollars off of something.

"Do you guys sell sassy, smart-talking robots that say amusing technology-themed one-liners like 'gigabyte me'?" I asked one Future Shop employee.

"That was actually me in the suit in that commercial," he replied.

I filled out a ballot for a potential PS3 and deposited it in the ballot box, figuring why not.



I also dropped a ballot in the free draw for 'A PIECE OF VIDEO GAME HISTORY', albeit a very small piece. A poster or program with a bunch of autographs on it; not really 'valuable', per se, but a cute story starter. I had fun reading the list of luminaries and their accomplishments, if nothing else.



Of note:
-- Tommy Tallarico's byline is specifically way longer than anyone else's, and apparently he's proudest of his Earthworm Jim work. Good for him!
-- what the hell is elijah wood doing there
-- Nolan Bushnell, the original founder of Atari and a man rightfully recognized as a founding father of video games, is nonetheless still credited here for his founding of Chuck E. Cheese. Pong and Atari alone aren't accomplishments enough to brag about at a video game event; get me my giant robot mouse!
-- Dweezil Zappa?
-- Dave Perry, you've had a long and storied career, and you've done a lot of things in your life that you should want to take credit for and establish as yours. But, dude, seriously -- Enter the Matrix is not the title you should bring up if you want to endear yourself to people. I'm just saying.
-- Hey, Michael Giacchino! Awesome!
-- Gary Coleman?



The crowd, around quarter to seven. Definitely more people than before.



I don't know why this photo came out blurry, it wasn't like the bartender was doing a lot of moving around or anything. "Any of you nerds want some booze? Anyone?"



Merch table! Well, of course there's a merch table; it's a concert, after all. Get a load of the ultra-Japanese Mario World shirt, too.

I bought a set of Pac-Man pins and an Earthworm Jim CD, both of which I was briefly surprised by. I was surprised by the Pac-Man pins because the counter girl read the posted prices wrong and gave me five dollars off (big night for five-bucks-off deals), and I was surprised by the CD because about a quarter of the Earthworm Jim album was comprised of OverClocked Remixes.

I suppose it isn't that strange an idea, really; any composer would be flattered to see their work remixed, and any remixer would be flattered to have their remix included on the composer's album. I hadn't considered it until I bought the album, but I guess it makes enough sense. Still, though, they aren't exactly a necessary inclusion; I bought the CD because I like the original music, you know?

Tommy Tallarico - Tangerine (Earthworm Jim Anthology, 2006)
[buy | site | info | myspace]

Yeah, like that. Man, those were the days, huh? Good times.

This wouldn't be the last we heard of OC Remix that night, oddly enough. But we'll get to that.



Hey, Space Invaders! It's weird how much Video Games Live loves Space Invaders, considering the game's 'music' only has four notes. Even the event's logo is from Space Invaders! But, then again, the industry had to start somewhere.

There were a crapload of signatures on either side of the cabinet, various video game music luminaries having scrawled their names (and occasionally their companies or signature games) onto it. Let me see if I can cram the two pictures together--



Yeah, that'll do. That blue button could not be more obvious, could it? You might surmise that it resets the machine -- and since I later walked by the machine and saw them hastily setting it up again, I'd suspect you were on to something. (They were actually running the game off a copy of Taito Legends, which I got a bit of a kick out of. Taito Legends is awesome.)

There was a prize for the high score, I think, but I never actually heard what the prize might have been. No matter; I didn't bother trying for it because A) I was busy taking pictures, B) the score was already set prohibitively high and C) I am no great shakes at Space Invaders, solidly average at best.

My little brother was willing to give it a shot, though!



Yeah! Puttin' away this dreadnaught with a hammer blow! That high score is as good as



dammit

wait

dammit



Not too shabby! Just over half the high score! Yeah!



My little brother just really likes rocking the thumbs-up, I don't really question it any more.

He insisted on getting a picture with this dude, because we were at a video games concert and this was the one guy who got confused or missed the memo and instead dressed up like an anime character.

Just keep doin' your thing, you crazy funster!



Nothing to add here, really, I've just always liked the chandeliers in the Centennial. They're neat.



The bathrooms are just past the merchandise table and to the right of the coat check, but to use them YOU MUST FIGHT THE MASTER CHIEF



Hypothetically, let's say you're wandering around in a full suit of space armour when a baby casually leans over and smacks you one upside the head. What do you even do in that situation?

Well, obviously nothing. Especially not if you're carrying a Needler.



It's an awesome looking gun, of course, but all it does is fire useless purple anime speedlines around the room -- so the baby would have more than enough time to slap you to death before you could so much as muster any resistance. Shouldn't have pissed that baby off!



The crowd, around 7:30. Half an hour to showtime and pretty well populated; you can see a bit of the floor in there, but I think that was because nobody needed a cappuccino.

7:30 was also the listed gathering time for the advertised costume contest to start, so the entrants gathered around to--



--to eat some souls, if the Link in the middle is any indication. Run for it!





The basketball-jersey dude in the middle there? He is definitely scopin' out that ass. Hey, no shame in it, brother!

It became increasingly clear that the Ulala cosplayer (the one in the pink) was the one who knew what she was doing; you'll notice she poses just so for the cameras, turning her chin this way or that, while other costumed folks chat amongst themselves or mill around.

It also became increasingly clear that the general quality of costume wasn't quite evenly distributed along the line. To wit:



On the far left side of the line you'll note a surprisingly convincing Mario, a complete Master Chief and one of the best SEGA costume jobs you'll ever run into.

On the far right side of the line?



I can't help but appreciate that this man even showed up. What a brazen dude! You go, Cube Guy!

The entrants were paraded through the lobby and to the main stage, which was the cue for we the audience to go find our seats and get ready for the show proper to finally start.



Four finalists were designated by the time they hit the stage; Cube Guy was unfortunately left out, and I'm sure he must have been disappointed. The final four entrants were then narrowed down to two via audience applause, which really is the best way to properly measure anything.



Please note at this time that my brother and I are both very eccentric and both very loud, so we pushed the Ulala girl into the final two almost by ourselves. If you were at the show and you'd wondered who kept chanting "SE-GA! SE-GA! SE-GA!" at various intervals -- yes, that was us, and no, there really were only two of us. We're kind of goofy like that.

The Master Chief entry won, of course; it was an impressive full-armour costume, and the closest competition was a rarely-recognized second-string SEGA character. (I'd like to take this time to strongly recommend that you the reader buy SEGA Superstars Tennis; I recently spent a few weeks refusing to play anything else, and I'm usually a pretty finicky guy.)

But enough preamble! The formalities were dispensed with and the wait was over at last; after a couple of sorta-kinda-relevant YouTube videos were shown, one of which was okay and one of which was relentlessly terrible, the lights dimmed and the orchestra came to life. It was time to get down!



Ha ha, yeah, okay.

Setlist:
Arcade Medley
Metal Gear Solid
God of War
Space Invaders
MYST
Civilization IV
Metroid
Zelda
(Intermission)
Frogger
Kingdom Hearts
Video Game Pianist
Sonic the Hedgehog
Warcraft
Mario
Halo

Encore:
Final Fantasy VII
CastleVania

The opening shot of Pong up there sparked the opening number, a medley number of old arcade classics. The highlight of the medley was OutRun, as you might exp... well, no, that's not actually true. The highlight of the medley was the inclusion of Rastan, because ha ha holy shit nobody in that audience has ever played Rastan in their entire lives. Go Rastan! But the musical highlight of the medley was clearly OutRun; the orchestra could have just played OutRun music for ninety minutes and I would have left feeling that I got my money's worth.

Tommy Tallarico, best known for composing the score to Earthworm Jim and for being an annoying human being who does video game reviews on television, is also one of the co-creators of Video Games Live; he served as the master of ceremonies for the evening, and would contribute guitar work for the last few pieces. We will get to the part about the guitar later (oh, boy, will we ever); know for now that he means well but is kind of an aggravating dude most of the time. We the audience were encouraged to cheer loudly and openly whenever we saw or heard something we really liked, so that was nice.

The rendition of the Metal Gear Solid main theme was well rendered, and the accompanying video footage of the series' four games indeed started the trend of the crowd cheering when they recognized or really liked something onscreen. (The crowd popped huge for Psycho Mantis and was completely silent for Vulcan Raven, which was kind of goofy.) The highlight of the piece was Tommy Tallarico crawling across the stage inside a box, and I'm glad that a lot of my readers follow video games or that sentence would look completely ridiculous.

As for the God of War piece, well, across the entire God of War series I've played maybe an hour total; I keep meaning to play the games, I just never get around to them. Oh, well! One of these days. The music is about what you'd expect, all mythological and thundering and angry, and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra handled the piece well. David Jaffe, the game's creator, introduced the piece with a taped greeting and just wouldn't stop rambling -- but once it got going, it was perfectly acceptable entertainment.

It was at this point in the evening that they brought a member of the audience onstage for one of the show's selling points, an interactive live-action game of big-screen Space Invaders; the idea is that the orchestra plays along to the game's movements, the player has two minutes to clear the first level as the game tracks his or her movements, and a wonderful prize awaits the player if he or she succeeds. The concept is a very cool idea, and I'm sure that they've run it before somewhere else without a hitch, but on this particular night the interactive aspect of the show was a profound and multifaceted trainwreck.

Tallarico was tasked with picking out an audience member, and he chose a noticeably overweight eleven-year-old boy; the game tracks the player's movement through a t-shirt with motion sensors in it and a Space Invaders ship on the back. Between Tallarico and the boy, the two of them couldn't quite wrap their brains around getting the t-shirt on; it was initially put on the wrong way, then sort of tangled up, and it took a moment or two before they got everything straightened up.

To be fair, t-shirts are pretty tricky. And they don't come with instructions or anything on them, either! You can't expect people to just automatically know how a shirt works.

The garment finally secured, Tallarico flourished to the screen and announced that the two-minute timer would now be put up; no timer appeared, and after a couple more prompts he started asking around for a stopwatch. The timer did eventually get put up, or at least they said it was; we never actually saw it from where they were sitting, but it was stated that the timer did very faintly get up there.

The goal was to complete the first stage of Space Invaders within a time limit of two minutes; the boy cleared maybe a third of the stage and then got a Game Over before the two minutes expired. This wasn't necessarily all his fault; he'd obviously never played Space Invaders before in his life, and I guess nobody told him that you can keep hitting the fire button to keep shooting. So he would shoot one bullet every five seconds, hide halfway behind a shield, come out to fire a second shot, and get killed.

The prize up for grabs was a $2500 Katana tabletop arcade something thingamajig, I'm not exactly sure. It wasn't described particularly well, except for the price point and the idea that it had a thousand or so arcade games in it. Kind of a moot point, because the boy definitely didn't win it. But he got something just as good! His consolation prize was a Future Shop gift certificate for maybe fifty bucks, and -- this was specifically mentioned and displayed by Tallarico as though it was a really swell product -- "a CD collection of the first five hundred OverClocked Remixes".

It takes a few steps to fully explain why this prize is so funny. First off, the first five hundred OC Remixes are quite publicly available for free; in our modern age of widespread technological savvy and high-speed internet connections, you can legally download the whole package within a few hours. Second off, a lot of these songs are ones you wouldn't download individually in the first place; these are from the very early days of the concept, and a great many of the first five hundred OC Remixes are emphatically the worst ones. Third off, the only way they could fit five hundred of them things onto one CD is by burning a data disc, and data discs specifically won't play in many (if not most) conventional CD players. So the standout prize this boy received for his public humiliation in front of his peers was a mostly inoperable slice of plastic that, if generously appraised, can be valued at one dollar and twenty five cents -- and that's for the physical media used, not for the (free) content on it.

I hope he at least buys something nice from Future Shop, the poor kid.

Next after that debacle, to the surprise of all, was a MYST medley. A what? It just so happens that the conductor (and other co-founder) of Video Games Live, Jack Wall, composed the music for MYST III and MYST IV -- so there was one person in the whole building who cared about the MYST series, and it was the guy holding the baton.

(Side note: Barry Bonds Enters the World of MYST should be considered required reading, and I'll wait here while you go read through it. Let me know when you're done.)

It was a very well-arranged medley with a very well-produced video montage, but unsurprisingly the crowd mostly sat on their hands for it. I appreciated it, but then again, I was also right indignant because the medley left out Peter Gabriel's contributions to MYST IV and Uru: Ages Beyond MYST.

In particular:

Peter Gabriel - Burn You Up, Burn You Down (Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, 2003 / Hit, 2003)
[buy album | artist site | game site | artist info | game info]

Jerks! Ah, well.

Keeping in the theme of point-and-click games that virtually nobody in the audience even acknowledged, the next piece was a nice Civilization IV tribute; it featured some nice chanting from the choir and had a nifty Lion King vibe, but again you could almost hear it running headlong into a wall of apathy. And gameplay footage would have been understandably underwhelming, so the video accompaniment involved a lot of landmarks appearing in pencil-sketch format and then being fleshed out by the graphics engine. It came off like a tech demo, truthfully. But a nice tech demo.

The Metroid segment was added by popular demand, Tallarico told us. Apparently not that popular a demand, since it ostensibly took three years' worth of emails and message board comments to earn it -- but the audience here certainly seemed glad to have it, and it was received well. My favourite part of the piece was that the video package waited until halfway through the song and then started throwing in clips of Metroid Pinball, which definitely got a laugh out of me.

The first set concluded with a Zelda medley, which had no business being as low on the card as it was; this was one of the better arrangements all night, a strong ending to the first set with enough variation and video shenanigans to keep everybody guessing and entertained. I felt kind of bad when nobody cheered the Majora's Mask footage; my brother and I popped huge for Wind Waker, and the rest of the audience cheered as one for Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess, but amidst all this was some lonely footage of Link popping on masks that elicited a sudden screeching silence. It wasn't that bad, you guys!

Now, seating capacity for the Centennial is just over 2300, and there only were a few rows left empty here and there; we'll say there were, oh, about two thousand people in attendance that night. So when the intermission was announcedand Tallarico added that the Future Shop booth was having a draw for a PS3 -- guess what happened?



Yeah, huh. Glad I'd filled out that ballot earlier! Saved me some time.



The hell if I was walking into all that if I didn't have to, so I went back to my seat and waited for the second set. Unfortunately, and little did I know, the second set would be when the wheels started to come off the whole thing.

While the orchestra filed back in, the video screen was kept active with a long collection of clips from all kinds of games; it was set to Weezer's 'Perfect Situation' for reasons that nobody could understand. This rapid-fire stream of quick footage shots actually ended up being one of the more enjoyable parts of the whole show, as people would take turns cheering encouragement when something they loved decades ago appeared suddenly and then disappeared again.

As you might expect, my brother and I were making most of the noise for a lot of these choices; as mentioned earlier, we're dudes whose tastes don't necessarily jive with everyone else's. The majority of the crowd watched the montage silently, and the only widespread cheers were for Super Mario RPG and -- strangely enough -- Donkey Kong Country. In the meantime, the two of us were the lone voices shouting out approval for the crap nobody else cared about; cheers of "YEAH COMIX ZONE" and "R.C. PRO-AM~!" rang unchallenged through the hall, and one girl in another row turned to look at me in astonishment when I applauded for Ecco the Dolphin. "That dolphin sure can jump!"

The second set opened with an interactive live-action game of big-screen orchestrated Frogger, I guess because things hadn't gone badly enough with this idea the first time around. The faint or invisible timer was put up once more and audience members were canvassed; to make a point, Tallarico randomly pulled two girls out of the audience this time around.

"Who here is a girl gamer? Yeah! And they said girls can't play video games! Let's show 'em how it's done!"

And then, as if to mock him, the two girls immediately displayed that they can't play video games. Neither participant got enough frogs across the screen to complete the stage; the two participants combined didn't advance enough frogs to clear the first stage. Space Invaders, I can kind of see somebody getting confused. You might not figure out immediately that you can shoot one bullet as soon as the last one disappears, or that you can hide behind the shields to regain your composure, or that the best starting strategy is to clear the columns on each end. But Frogger? Seriously? Is this an elaborate prank? Frogger doesn't even have buttons! The timing patterns are painfully obvious, the controls only extend to moving in four directions, and you can beat the entire stage without ever needing to move down or right! IT'S FROGGER

The second player beat the first handily, with something like 2700 points to her opponent's 950. The winner received a Future Shop gift certificate and (ha!) a CD of the first five hundred OC Remixes; the loser received the home game of Frogger. Everyone had a good laugh.

Next on the docket was the theme from Kingdom Hearts, but something must have gone horribly awry along the way; the first warning sign should have been when Tallarico grabbed the mic and went "Who here tonight likes Disney?" After getting the crowd to chant the name of the series, a game series best known for combining Disney characters and Squaresoft game characters in the same universe, Tallarico introduced the video package as... a collection of clips from the Disney movies that the characters came from.

It was, I don't know, okay. I guess. At this point the Video Games Live show had a tenuous connection to video games at best; if I want an orchestra to accompany old cartoon clips, I can just grab tickets for the upcoming Bugs on Broadway show. And I might! Warner was always better than Disney anyway. YEAH YOU HEARD ME

Following the not-Kingdom Hearts segment was the show's featured special guest, Martin Leung, better known as 'the Video Game Pianist' or 'The Blindfolded Pianist'; he rose to fame by being the guy on the internet who (wait for it) plays video game songs on the piano while (wait for it) blindfolded. Tommy Tallarico, not terribly helpful at this point, played up how big a deal it was that this dude plays blindfolded ("Fourty million pageviews!") -- and then out came Martin Leung, the Blindfolded Pianist, very specifically not wearing a blindfold. Just that kind of a night, I guess.

His selection this night was a Final Fantasy medley, and a bizarre one at that; he must be a particularly big fan of Final Fantasy VIII, because he actually launched into its main theme twice during the middle third of the piece. That is a pretty bizarre decision to make in a medley, and I say this as a guy that has heard a lot of medleys. This aside, of course, the performance was magnificent; I wouldn't have minded more variety, but damned if the Video Game Pianist isn't really good at what he does.

My highlight of the second set, unquestionably, was the Sonic the Hedgehog medley. ("SE-GA! SE-GA!" It's not something you ever hear any more, let alone have an opportunity to chant. Which is precisely why it must be done.) This was by far the best use of the orchestra-and-video-screen format that I'd seen yet; the medley drew from an appreciable variety of sources literally spanning systems and decades and eras, where most other pieces stuck to two or three songs, and likewise the video montage went crazy throwing in scenes from games that even SEGA rarely acknowledges these days.

If you were at the show you'll pardon me if you heard me marking out like crazy during this segment, and I don't doubt for a second that you could hear me perfectly fine. They were playing Sonic Spinball! And Sonic 3D Blast! I was cheering solidly throughout the majority of the piece, and then I cracked up laughing when the footage switched to the 3D era. The screen turned on a dime from oldschool Sonic action (Sonic running really fast, Sonic hitting something and losing all his rings, Sonic running really fast again) to an expensive CGI sequence of Sonic throwing himself out of an airplane on a wakeboard and then spinning in place for no reason as he plummeted towards a vast cityscape below. I mean, what the hell. The medley ended at Sonic Heroes, probably out of mercy if nothing else, and from here on out the show basically proceeded without me.

I'll be honest with you; I have never been anything but awful at real-time strategy games, and I could not give two hoots about Warcraft. To my surprise, the rest of the audience reacted pretty mildly as well -- except for one lone guy in maybe the tenth or eleventh row, who leapt to his feet and applauded the selection vigourously even before the music actually started. I'm glad that guy liked it. I'm told the music performed was the World of Warcraft theme, but of course I had no idea; it sounded like Soul Calibur music, and for all I know it might have been. Interestingly, they never once showed any gameplay footage; I guess it is really hard to make point-and-click footage alluring, so the video montage was a series of clips from the games' opening videos. Some Lord of the Rings-looking army scenes broke out, and then a bear chased a dwarf in the snow or something, so I really had no idea what was going on. It was alright, though.

I mentioned earlier that I found the second half of the concert decidedly less interesting than the first, and granted that this is partially due to my declining interest in the chosen material. But the crux of the problem, once I gave it some thought, was less with the source material and more with the arrangements; as the show went on, the arrangements became noticeably lazier.

I bring this up because the next selection was the Super Mario Brothers series. Have you heard the Orchestral Game Concert symphony arrangement of the Mario theme before?

Tokyo City Philharmonic Orchestra - Super Mario Brothers (Super Mario Brothers) (Game Music Concert: The Best Selection, 1991)
[info | review | it's eighty bucks on ebay]

They played this exact arrangement. Same woodblock hit on beat one and everything, I'm not even kidding. It was pretty disappointing, considering the quality of the other medleys to that point; you could tell with the previous arrangements that you were hearing something fresh, lovingly drawn from many historical sources and then arranged with great care and effort into a new approach to the material.

The Mario arrangement here went main theme, water theme, Bowser theme, main theme, pause before ending, done. Same as it ever was; same as it ever was. Not to say it wasn't good -- it was! The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra did a great job all night, and the best you can ask of an orchestra is for its musicians to play a piece exactly as written. No, my concern here is with the conservative handling of the source material; Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall are both composers, and you would think that between the two of them they could come up with even one contribution to the existing take on the series.

The next piece did nothing to bring me back onside, of course. I'm notoriously awful at first-person shooters, so I'll admit that I'm not that big into the Halo series. That's not to say it's a bad series, of course; far from it! Occasional missteps and multiplayer balance issues aside, the games are very well done and deserve every bit of the success they've earned. But with that said, Halo music is... well... it's not very good, it really isn't. It plods, it trudges, and it sounds like something Killer Instinct threw away. This was also the point where Tommy Tallarico joined the orchestra on lead electric guitar, and -- to my surprise and horror -- it turns out that Tommy Tallarico really cannot play guitar live very well at all.

You may think initially that I'm exaggerating, but dear lord. The whole concert came apart at the seams when he brought out the guitar; not only did he begin playing over the orchestra, but he seemed genuinely incapable of staying on the beat and at one point in this piece he completely muffed the dynamics by fuzzing right through when the orchestra came to a full stop. Mute the strings, Tommy! Come on!

Man alive. I want to like Tommy Tallarico, I really do; he's done a lot for video games, and he's done a lot for video game music, and I really would like to be a Tommy Tallarico supporter. But ye gads. I don't know if he gets stage fright, or if he can't fully harness his impulses to skitter around like a five-year-old, or what, but he is genuinely a liability when he's performing onstage. And he plays guitar like old people play Super Mario Brothers; instead of paying attention and playing at the right time, he swings with his guitar and aims with his body like he's going to physically guide the sound to where it needs to go.

The Halo piece was the final segment of the second set (take that, Mario), and it was a pretty rubbish way to close out what had been an otherwise great show -- but then they came back for the encore, and somehow the encore got worse.

The first song of the encore was One Winged Angel from Final Fantasy VII; as with the Mario segment, this track was left almost entirely unchanged from its original arrangement. (Same as it ever was.) The one change, and not for the better: Tommy Tallarico, and his electric guitar, noodling over the whole piece. Not playing, not accompanying; noodling. Loud unnecessary solos, over-emoted and way too loud and apropos of nothing, the guitar stopping only long enough for Tallarico to chew the scenery and clown around on his tippy-toes in front of the orchestra.

He can't even keep time! I think my brain legitimately started to sizzle in protest when I saw this happen. He started a clap-along as the chart began to near its end, but he started by clapping way too fast; since he had all of the spotlights trained on him and he was clapping way out of time with the song, the audience clapped along with him and then ended up nowhere near the time the orchestra was keeping. It was all a mess, a terribly disoriented and disappointing mess, and I was just happy to see it end without collapsing under its own weight.

The final song of the evening retained Tallarico on guitar and brought Martin Leung back out to play the organ; Tommy drew out the big reveal for a while before finally announcing that the show would close with Castlevania. My brother and I are both tremendous Castlevania dorks -- he was wearing a Castlevania shirt to the show, for heaven's sakes -- and since the Space Invaders attendant had casually mentioned in passing that Castlevania would be part of the setlist, we had both been sitting anxiously the whole show hoping for something awesome.

The arrangement was written well, Martin Leung was stellar on the organ and the video montage was mostly great with a few awkward 3D shots thrown in. But! But. I don't know if I mentioned this yet, maybe I might have touched on it in passing, but Tommy Tallarico was really not very good at playing the electric guitar live on stage this particular evening. Since the piece involved a heavy focus on the guitar parts -- it's Castlevania, after all -- it all kind of balanced itself out and was just sort of there, albeit very loudly. There would have been worse ways to end it, so I was happy to see the concert end on a higher note than it otherwise might have.

We skipped the post-concert meet-and-greet with Tallarico and Wall; we were hungry, and honestly we were also kind of underwhelmed. It was well worth the price of admission, and I definitely enjoyed myself both during the concert and during its pre-show gathering, but... damn, did this show rocket downhill in the last hour or so. Yipes.

On their way out they offered that they might come through here again on their next tour; I'll definitely go if they do, figuring that they would likely switch the setlist up almost completely and offer more new and exciting stuff. And I should hope that Tallarico's unfortunate performance could have been a one-time anomaly; maybe he was ill, who knows? Maybe he'll be better next time. Hope springs eternal!



Oh, crap, I have work in the morning. Night, folks!

There's a New Meanies Concert on Friday

For serious, you guys! I can't imagine a scenario where I'm not going to this show; I'm a longtime devotee of the group, and at ten bucks or twelve at the door it's a steal of a deal at twice the price. (I love that line.)

They don't play very often any more, so it's good to get out and see them when you can -- and hey, it's Friday night! Live a little! If you find yourself with nothing to do this Friday and you think you can scrounge up a dozen dollars, rest assured that this expenditure will be well worth your investment.

I keep meaning to make a giant all-encompassing New Meanies post, one of these days, but somehow I always end up getting distracted by something and letting it fall by the wayside. And I'm not a guy who distracts easily, so I don't know what ooh hey is that a dime on the floor

John Mellencamp w/ Tom Cochrane -- MTS Centre, Monday, February 11th, 2008

Well, all right! Louis Riel Day is upon us, and we've already established what my plans are for the day -- but before I get around to that, let's get started on working through the various backlogged items of interest that I've accrued during my extended tour of canine service.

It's not often I do this, so gather around -- I'm about to express some strong civic pride, in the form of an anecdote about a show I went to last week.

This past Monday I was in attendance for the John Mellencamp concert at the MTS Centre; I'm no more familiar with Mellencamp (Cougar-Mellencamp?) than the next twentysomething who's really tired of hearing Our Country in truck ads, but he's had more albums than I've had birthdays and it's usually a safe bet on general principle that you'll get a good show out of a Grammy-winning Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. Besides that, Mellencamp wasn't even my primary reason for going; the main draw for me was the opening act, because I believe very strongly that there is no such thing as paying too much money to see Tom Cochrane live.

(Mind you, the last time I saw him in concert was years ago at the Red River Ex, and as such his show was included in the minimum admission -- so I figure I'm running a decent price average on his live performances. Parenthetical aside! Moving on.)

Of course, the problem with Tom Cochrane as an opening act is that you know you aren't going to get enough Tom Cochrane, and sure enough that was the case with this show. My little brother and I spent the drive home alternatingly listing our favorite Cochrane tunes that weren't included -- "He didn't play Paper Tigers!" "He didn't play Pictures from the Edge!" "There was no Just Like Ali!" "Or Good Man Feeling Bad!" "He didn't even play I Wish You Well! How is that possible?" But such are the dangers.

Tom Cochrane is a hometown hero, as we all know, and the crowd of eleven thousand was stoked to see him; the value of playing to your home crowd is that they're going to cheer anything you say, and Tom had a grand time milking the dickens out of this knowledge.

"I grew up fishing at Lynn Lake! I wrote this campfire song about it! Here's Good Times!"
"Minor-league hockey is what keeps our Manitoba communities strong! This one's called Big Leagues!"
"My mother is from Gimli! Manitoba women are tough women! That's why I wrote this next song!"

It was a nice sentiment, but dude, come on. We're already proud of you. My loyalties are secure and unshakeable; you don't need to go "CHURCHILL HAS POLAR BEARS HERE IS OCEAN BLUE" or whatever to ensure my continued support.

Anyway, so Tom Cochrane was as awesome as always, and everybody marked out for Life is a Highway just as you'd expect. As much as I love Cochrane, this isn't the part of the story where my sudden civic pride comes into play. No, that part came during the headlining act -- and what an act it was!

As I'd said earlier, I've never been too big into Mellencamp's studio work; his softest singles are his most played, I'm tired of hearing him in advertisements, I could live my entire life without listening to Jack and Diane ever again, how many songs can you write about America, etcetera etcetera so on and so forth. But holy damn, does that man ever work hard on stage. His songs are all pretty simple, but he gears up and just gleefully rampages through them like King Ghidorah across the Japanese countryside. You have never seen a fifty-six-year-old white guy dance so well in your entire life.

He played all the hits you would expect, and he played them well; hell, he even played Human Wheels, and I'd forgotten (assuming I ever knew) that it was his song in the first place. Nine-year-old me loved that song! I hadn't remembered what the words were or what it was called or who had written it, because I was nine at the time -- but when the band launched into it on Monday, I recognized it within two bars and gave this excited little gasp of happiness because fifteen years of mystery had just cleared themselves up. Human Wheels! Whooooooooo!

Eventually, perhaps inevitably, he took the stage by himself halfway through the show and performed Small Town; I've never really liked the song, but I was one year old when it came out so I am willing to acknowledge that there may be a generational disconnect in play. Anyway, while he was playing it, the stage crew production team threw up a reel of Winnipeg-themed images onto the giant screen behind him; I'm sure they've done this without fail a million times, and I wouldn't doubt that it pulls the cheap pop every time in every city.

It worked this time, too, of course; when our local landmarks and our old maps popped up on the jumbotron, a big cheer went up just as you'd expect. Bizarrely, though, the cheering trailed off and disappeared just a few images into the slideshow; I thought this was pretty funny, and it might well have died down for the exact reasons I was thinking. "Hey! Winnipeg! Yaaaay! That's us! We're a small town! Yaaa--er... wait..."

So Mellencamp kept playing, this PowerPoint presentation of local interest images kept scrolling, and the crowd reaction remained tepid after the initial reaction. The fishfly bridge came up on screen, a few people clapped; the 'One Great City!' sign came up on screen and the cheering increased again.

Now, this is the kicker. This was the highlight of my night. The final photograph of the collection, the shot they'd specifically saved for last, was a full-screen picture of the green "Manitoba: Spirited Energy" banner -- and when that last picture hit, the crowd of eleven thousand strong united as one voice and booed the living shit out of it.

Man alive, it was glorious. You've never seen a crowd turn on something so suddenly, so viciously and so vehemently, as if shocked and wounded and insulted all at once -- and, if you have seen a crowd turn like that, I'd imagine you were endlessly thankful that the crowd wasn't turning on you.

I can't credit Mellencamp enough for his complete lack of reaction; he just kept playing the song, didn't miss a beat, never lost his composure once. Maybe the whole thing was an elaborate rib and he was in on the joke to begin with. Either way, well played; I know I sure enjoyed it, albeit for entirely the wrong reasons.

I'll admit it was a strange thing to gleam a sense of civic pride from, but you know what? Hell with it! This was the most kinship with my fellow citydwellers that I've felt in a long time. It isn't easy to try and define what brings Winnipeggers together; the city's biggest successes were eighty or ninety years ago, our downtown has been a crumbling husk for decades, our public community television was mercilessly exterminated eleven years ago, and our professional sports teams (or rather, the professional sports teams that we still have) have ranged from disappointing to soul-shatteringly awful. But for all the difficulty one might find in trying to establish the city's common character traits, it's nice to know that there are still some things we can all unite around -- or at least, some things that we can all find common ground in opposing strongly.

Togetherness! That's what it's all about. If we could sandbag Spirited Energy, we would!

A Turbulent Week

Good evening. It's been a while, hasn't it? Mine has been a life of turmoil and chicanery, of late, so let's get caught up.

Tuesday.

I had a brief flash of curiosity about the fallout of that Quebec byelection; imagine my surprise to read the followup news reports and see Stephane Dion accepting full responsibility for the Liberals' ill fates that previous night.

Now, keep in mind that I'm twenty-three years old; I don't think I've ever seen a Liberal leader take responsibility for anything in my lifetime. Granted that this is probably because Jean Chretien headed the Liberals for over thirteen of those years, and Jean Chretien never met a problem he couldn't either purchase or punch his way out of.

Good on Dion for doing such a thing, of course, but the shock of the whole affair understandably left me incapacitated for the rest of the night. I mean, the very idea.

Wednesday.

As you'll recall, Wednesday was the NHL exhibition game between the Coyotes and the Leafs at the MTS Centre.

I wasn't actually inside the arena for the game; by the time I remembered it was happening most everything was sold out, and besides, between the two teams' rosters there are maybe six players I care about.

(Georges Laraque, Alex Steen, Kyle Wellwood... who else... Shane Doan, although that was mostly for his accidental political hilarity last year... I like Mats Sundin, I guess... and, uh... okay, there are five. Hey, I tried!)

But on the way home from work that day, just all of a sudden and out of the blue, I thought to myself -- "hey, wait a minute! That exhibition game is tonight! And I own a guitar!"

Yes, this is genuinely what I did. As soon as I got off that bus and got home (which takes a while, mind you -- my god but our transit system is abhorrent), I set to work; I printed off a few tabs to quickly study en route, tuned my acoustic guitar, and set out downtown.

It went pretty well; it was a nice night, the game was being shown on the building's external bigscreen (!!), and in between periods I caught a few bucks from passersby.

I was pretty rusty, actually; I hadn't played anything on the acoustic in a good long time, and it took me a while to get back into form. Fortunately -- or distressingly, I'm not sure which -- nobody seemed able to tell the difference, and the scratch I made playing an initially shaky rendition of Stompin' Tom's "The Hockey Song" at the end of the night effectively doubled what I'd made to that point.

So:



$24.26 garnered over the span of three hours -- which means about fourty-five minutes of actual playing time, and the rest of the time spent sitting and watching a hockey game I would have sat and watched anyway. I also got a complimentary hot dog, valued at $2.75, and a pack of smokes with one smoke still in it. (Mind you, I don't smoke -- but thanks anyway, random guy!) Not bad for a guy who started the night actually whiffing some of his chords.

If you're wondering -- I took some of my spoils and bought cat food, which is why there's a receipt in that picture. Nothing screams 'damn right I am a rock star' like paying for a bag of cat food with seven dollars in small change. I'm big time, baby! Whoo!

Thursday.

I spent all Thursday holed up at home working on a different writing project entirely. I can tell you about that one later. Be patient with me.

Friday.

Remember back in the summer when my temp job kept getting extended and I ended up working through the entire summer, a notion I wasn't all too pleased with? Well -- ha ha -- at the end my shift on Friday I was abruptly informed that my position had now expired, five months and three weeks into what should have been a seven-week stay.

Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha. I figure there must be some sort of actual employee benefits that kick in after six months at the same place, and that said hypothetical benefits were why they had to jettison me after all of that. Lucky me! Boy, I can't wait to get out and enjoy that October sunshine! Ha ha! Kill me!

Saturday and Sunday.

As a bit of background, I had decided months ago that the end of September would be when I would move back to my Mom's house and start the long haul of saving up money for another run at postsecondary education. (My initial degree has been quite thoroughly useless, and any skeptic who doubts this claim would be quickly convinced by one look at my resume to date.) I don't know where I'm going to go yet -- there are a lot of options, and currently I can't afford a damn one of them -- but I know for certain I have to start scrounging some scratch if I'm going to make it to one of them.

Well, the end of September is now almost upon us; quite serendipitous that my current job dried up a week before the intended move time. I know full well that I've accomplished a great deal with my life since graduating, and I know full well that everything that I'm doing I'm doing for right and justifiable reasons, but nothing makes a man feel small and pitiful quite like the knowledge that he's about to be unemployed and living with his parents.

And I guess I'll be missing both the Loreena McKennitt and Chris Cornell concerts; I mean, I was going to automatically miss one of the two anyway, but fifty bucks is a lot of money to throw at a concert ticket when you don't know how you're going to recoup the cost later.

So the hell with it all, I said, and I spent the weekend asleep. You would have, too. It was for the best.

Monday.

Ha ha. Ha. Ha.

So today I got a call from the temp agency. Starting next Monday they're sending me right back to the same company, at the same building, for the same payrate -- in a slightly different department.

Ha, ha, ha. Boy, are you guys ever lucky that I desperately need money to escape the lightless pit of my current employment prospects! Semper fidelis, I guess!



So anyway!

To answer your question, gentle reader, yes, I have been very busy. And next Monday I start all over again from day one, working at a not-exactly-new job and living at a not-exactly-new place.

In the meantime, I'll have a lot of moving to do before then -- but I'll also do my best to get plenty of blogging done too, during this downtime, and I may have a couple of choice declarations to make by this coming Thursday or Friday.

Ah, life.