Weekly Arts Preview: Sept 13th - 25th

I don't have time to make both an arts and music preview today, and if I stagger them out, something is surely going to fall between the cracks. Besides, I've already abstracted out theatre, and since when is music less a subset of arts than, say, dance is? (I suspect this artificial distinction was the brainchild of some marketer somewhere... we put in a different compartment cultural events people go to where alcohol consumption and hooking up is on the agenda, little realising that to the true patron of the arts... these items never leave the agenda!) All of which is a roundabout way of saying: here's an arts preview for you, now fortified with a few extra musical recommendations!

Tuesday, September 13th

-- Sean Cullen is our bearded man on the mandolin, rocking out tonight as though it were an electric guitar with Jonas and Matt of Headwater, one of our stompiest roots duos, at Cafe Deux Soleils (2096 Commercial Drive at 5th Avenue), by donation, which adds up to an enormous bang-for-your-buck factor.

-- also, tonight is the Railway Club's first Tuesday evening this year (through to December 6th) of CiTR 101.9 fm's annual Battle of the Bands tournament -- Shindig! I could tell you the names of the bands competing on tonight's lowest ladder-rungs, but let's face it: you don't go to see anyone in particular; you go so you can say "I saw them back in the day!" when "they" finally break... Cast wide nets, my friends. (579 Dunsmuir Street at Seymour. Be sure to tip the doorman.)

This concludes the musical portion of tonight's recommendations.

Wednesday, September 14th

-- The 2nd Wednesday of every month, Pandora's Collective and Bolts of Fiction team up to give you a literary double-header down at the Our Town cafe (245 E. Broadway). It starts off at 7 pm with the Word Whips timed writing exercises - spontaneous and random 5-minute challenges that may be as close as you can get to being enrolled in a university Creative Writing workshop without having to pay tuition or brown-nose the Writer In Residence. Immediately following, the tone changes slightly as yarn-spinners begin signing up (and ponying up) to participate in the Story Slam -- a storytelling competition modeled after the Poetry Slam, where orators tell tall tales up to five minutes in length, hoping to earn high scores from judges in the audience and win not only cash prizes, but publication in Common Ground magazine!

Thursday, September 15th

-- At 7:30 pm tonight, the Central Branch of the Vancouver Public Library (350 W. Georgia) presents First Writes, an evening of free readings by a number of authors. I don't mean to cast aspersions on the entertainment value of the writings of featured authors Antonia Banyard, Annabel Lyon, Joan Skogan, and Rachel Wyatt, but I'm confident most of the audience is going to be there primarily to see what antics bill bissett will be up to this time around, his last appearance there at the West Coast Poetry Festival having broken the 30-year spree of his never having had a reading at the VPL without it being crashed by a streaker. 7 pm in the Alice MacKay room.

-- Today through September 24th -- the New Forms Festival will be in effect at various venues throughout town. I'm not terribly well-equipped to recommend specific events and panels, but John "Plunderphonics" Oswald's Robot Piano performances at the Western Front on the 22nd do tickle the old fancy.

Friday, September 16th

-- I don't mean to toot the old horn too extensively (only twice in the past two posts, by my count) so I'll just casually mention that I do run a monthly open stage at the Butchershop Floor the third Friday of every month. "57 Varieties" is its name and diversity is its game. The draw? Well, it's by donation. Unplugged, it runs (must be on batteries) from 8 pm 'til everyone's done. Best of all, it gives you a chance to come up to this hack in person and let him know (creatively, please) what you think about his flagrant self-promotion. (195 E. 26th Avenue at Main.)

-- Can't bear to encourage me? Swing on down the Drive tonight instead and catch a great musical performance from Christy, Jess Hill and the ladies at Cafe Deux Soleils. I wish I could be there but I'm, uh, running a show. You might have heard about it.

Saturday, September 17th

-- Somewhere remote in a forested cabin, a sinister cabal arrived at an agreement: the nefarious organization would be called SWAN -- the Spoken Word Arts Network -- and its first action would occur simultaneously throughout the country on September 17th, a day that will live forever in infamy. The distributed action would be undertaken by a fifth column of guerrillas and sympathisers in every city in every province, all geared toward one nefarious aim: Liberating the Voice.

That's right: SWAN wants your day to be somehow informed or enriched by the public performance of poetry or spoken word, alone or with your friends, for free and open to the public. They want us to whisper haiku in the crooks of tree trunks, write them on the napkins left behind after your morning tea in the corner cafe, mumble them on a crowded SkyTrain car and recite them at the top of your voice to the ducks in the pond. If any human beings intercept these transmissions, so much the better! Accounts and documentation of spontaneous readings and performances committed this foul day have been solicited by our no-good-nik SWAN overlords, reachable at rcarcee@yahoo.ca and wcpf@shaw.ca.

Sunday, September 18th

-- The weekly Sunday night Thundering Word Heard spoken word / music fusion open mic (ring a bell?) presents a special international feature this week, gruff everyman Jack McCarthy -- a rugged old fellow without the more, er, assholish traits (cf. Al Purdy, Milton Acorn, George Bowering -- what we in more diplomatic times might have called "strong-willed") needed for poets of his generation to have achieved their highest successes. It's a treat to have him on a stage this intimate.