With the ongoing SAG-ACTRA and Writer’s Guild strikes likely to cause a dearth of new movies or television series in the coming months, Calgarians would be well advised to take their search for quality content to the streets, taking advantage of the often under-utilized performing arts scene.
Chances are, if you’ve ventured past Calgary’s Electric Avenue lately, you’ve seen the neon beacon adorning Modern Love’s façade — two crossed daggers and a broken heart.
A listener could be forgiven for assuming, based on exactly the first minute of Into the Night, track one of Shane Ghostkeeper’s new solo album, Songs For My People, that this might be his most ambitious, esoteric and experimental work yet.
It’s hard not to automatically associate the seedier side of things with the term "adult theatre.” Neon matinees shrieking "PEEP SHOW” and “LIVE! NUDE! GIRLS!” on a smoky New York street, as leather-jacketed, bell-bottomed, late night denizens of the ’70s city bustle by hawkers trying to lure late-night lotharios inside.
After a series of pandemic-related false starts resulting in a cancelled 2021 festival, and a revised format, multi-weekend festival in April 2022, Calgary’s BIG Winter Classic is back in a big way for 2023, with a stacked roster and guaranteed stellar performances in the doldrum-defeating January music festival format we once knew and loved.
Meet Me In the Bathroom, the documentarized version of Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 oral archive of the late '90s/early aughts trajectory of New York rock ‘n’ roll revivalists like The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, Interpol, and LCD Soundsystem, though impressive for the sheer scale of its “you had to be there” found footage, might be better served as a visual companion to the book.
Upon first listen, Calgary’s own Preoccupations could easily have named Arrangements, their fourth studio album, Auspices instead. Even the band’s own name change from the controversial Viet Cong to Preoccupations would have been justly apt had they settled on Premonitions instead.
Around the same time Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! was experiencing serious episodes of gender dysphoria, Social Distortion played Calgary’s MacEwan Ballroom.
I turn my camera on, but Britt Daniel does not.
The Spoon frontman’s publicist insisted upon a Zoom interview, so I’m momentarily thrown when I realize the next 24 minutes and 46 seconds will be spent interviewing someone embodied only by an ominous black box labelled ‘BRITT DANIEL,’ that faintly flashes every time his gravelly drawl breaks the silence like some sort of Texan HAL 9000.