Going to a Wilco gig on Super Bowl Sunday is like stepping into an alternate reality. Prior to the veteran Chicago alt-rock group’s show, Granville Street was experiencing Saturday-night levels of bedlam as jersey-wearing yahoos, sozzled on Jägerbombs, spilled into the streets to celebrate America’s high holiday. Inside the Orpheum Theatre, it was as if the game never took place, even though the much-loved band—fronted by the even more-loved Jeff Tweedy—hit the stage two hours after the New York Giants had claimed the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

The crowd wasn’t made up of kids who only discovered Wilco after 2011’s The Whole Love bagged a Grammy nomination for best rock album. No, the audience was largely long-timers who’ve been around since the band’s inception, the seats packed with hip grey hairs and cool dads of all kinds. Though there wasn’t a Nudie suit in the building, there was a guy in a tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirt who looked like Wavy Gravy if he attended business school and hit the gym.

This was Wilco’s first show in Vancouver since a free outdoor concert during the 2010 Olympic Winter Games that, presumably, older fans didn’t brave the rain and massive lineup to get into. Factor in that there hasn’t been this much hype for the band since 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and it was unlikely the hungry crowd was going home unhappy. On just the third song in, “Art of Almost”, the love-in was on.

How good was it when they launched into that number from The Whole Love? Even the ladies behind me stopped screeching at everyone to sit down so they could see the show. They got off their asses, stood with the rest of us, and started having fun because we were in the midst of a psychedelic freakout. The visuals quickly got trippy enough to make you think you were about to lapse into a K-hole and you just knew that somewhere in the audience, Wavy Gravy, CA, was having the time of his life.

Wilco played all the songs—“Heavy Metal Drummer”, “Impossible Germany”, and the current single “Dawned on Me”—that those south of 30 would know. At the same time the band was very aware of the old-school contingent in the audience, and dug deep into its catalogue. A third of the two-hour set was pre-Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, with the final three tracks of the evening—“Red-Eyed and Blue”, “I Got You”, and “Outtasite (Outta Mind)”—coming from Wilco’s second album, 1996’s Being There.

Tweedy and those other guys even tapped into their 1998 collaboration with Billy Bragg, Mermaid Avenue, the singer musing that it would be great if “ ‘Canada’ was pronounced ‘Ca-nah-dee-ah’ ” so he could incorporate it into the song “California Stars”. Wilco performed that song as “Ca-nah-dee-ah Stars” for a verse, then Tweedy reverted back to the original lyrics and Woody Guthrie’s ashes were once again at peace.

Though addressing the faithful infrequently, the bearded singer appeared to be in good spirits. At one point in the show, he playfully singled out an interloper in the crowd—a woman in a New York Giants jersey. “You must be excited. Your favourite sportsball team won today,” he kidded. For fans of Wilco, this was an inarguably memorable show. But for that woman in the Giants jersey, Sunday, February 5, 2012, was a day she won’t ever forget.

photo by rebecca blissett www.rebeccablissett.com
this article was originally published in the georgia straight in february 2012

I recently completed a site for Edward McKeever’s eco-friendly, decorative painting and design company, Strong River. Check it out…

www.strongriver.net

Recently I helped coordinate the design and construction of 1000 masks that we gave to attendees of the massive NYE Party at the Waldorf Hotel in Vancouver. We contacted 8 talented artists, got them to submit two designs each, printed them, cut them out with scissors or boxcutters, then strung them. I would not recommend attempting to do this unless you’re insane.

Have a look at all the designs…

Dubstep might be the new heavy metal. It’s dark, it’s aggressive, and it’s already conquered North American suburbs with little mainstream media support. Born in the clubs of south London in the early oughties, Dubstep is a hybrid of dub, drum and bass, and glitchy electronica. At its most inoffensive, it’s moody restaurantica. At its best, it’s an obnoxiously fun and angry assault on your ears; the kind that makes you say, “What is this shit? That’s not music,” just like every generation of old people has uttered when they were confronted with a new and exciting musical genre.

Maybe you love it, maybe you hate it, maybe you’ve never heard of it. Regardless, it’s impossible to ignore anymore as it’s gradually popping up everywhere. You’ll hear a Rusko song between whistles at sporting events, read a great review of Burial on your favourite blog, see a hilarious YouTube video with a dubstep score or watch a stripper dance to a Skream remix of La Roux at the No5 Orange (it was an incredibly classy performance). And it’s only going to keep spreading. This past week, Justin Bieber announced his next album is going to include some dubstep while the biggest name in the genre, Skrillex, was receiving five Grammy nominations — including Best New Artist.

Skrillex, who seemingly appeared overnight, is so huge YouTube will probably make you sit through a Procter & Gamble ad for VapoRub or a digital pregnancy test before you can watch his excellent video for “First of the Year (Equinox)” (It received a Grammy nomination for Best Short Form Music Video). Or maybe give a listen to this one, “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites,” which is closing in on a stupefying 50 million views. To give you a little perspective, the first single from Jay-Z and Kanye West’s album Watch the Throne has nearly 30 million views. Skrillex is a pop star that’s never had his music played on commercial radio or television.

In his previous life, when he was 18, Skrillex went by his given name Sonny Moore and was the lead singer of screamo band From First to Last (Yep, that’s him screamo-ing.) Now practically geriatric at 23, it only seems fitting that a kid who was signed to Epitaph Records and played the Warped Tour is the one to triumphantly bring dubstep from the trendy areas of London to the Hot Topics of every mall in suburban America. Feel old and out of touch yet? I sure do, and I’m the one writing about this shit.

Purists of the dubstep genre, of course, hate him. They say he looks like a jackass and his music lacks subtlety; that it’s too in your face. His sound has petulantly been labeled Brostep — the connotation being that only jockish idiots and frat boys listen to it. Having observed his fans closely when Skrillex was in Vancouver for two sold out shows at the PNE Forum in October, I’ll attest that they do look suspiciously like participants in the Stanley Cup Riot, only groovier. But maybe hockey’s not the violent sports reference I should be making. The dubstep snob’s critique of his music is comparable to a boxing fan ragging on MMA Fighting. Can’t we just all agree that, so long as someone’s face or ears get viciously maimed, it’s great entertainment?

this article was originally published in the tyee in december 2011

The premiere issue of Bag is now available for purchase from the Bag Store. Part monograph, part magazine, each issue of Bag is devoted entirely to one emerging Canadian artist. The first issue of Bag is about Vancouver artist Devitt Brown.

Let’s have a look at it…

On (Black) Friday November 25, the first issue of Bag was launched with an art show by Devitt Brown at Dynamo Gallery in Vancouver. Here are some photos from the show.

On Friday November 25, join us for We Will Buy Your Dreams, an art show by the dark (Devitt Brown) and the launch party for the premier issue of Bag.

This event will take place at Dynamo Gallery located at 142 West Hastings in Vancouver.
RSVP on Facebook

About Devitt Brown
Devitt Brown has been an undeniable force in Vancouver’s art scene for the past decade. As an artist on the street, using the moniker the dark, or in galleries, using his given name, Devitt’s work is unsettling, at times hilarious and always thought-provoking. Regardless of the technique—be it stencils, photographs, paintings or collages—his work captures our incredibly fucked up zeitgeist with a grin.
www.wewillbuyyourdreams.com

About Bag
Part monograph, part magazine, each issue of Bag is devoted entirely to one emerging Canadian artist. The first issue of Bag is about Vancouver artist Devitt Brown. It’s 40-pages, it’s tabloid-sized and it’s printed on the cheapest newsprint we could find. The cover was stamped by hand because the printer feared a lawsuit (it’s a long story but we like to think that this makes each copy unique). I. It comes in a cheap cellophane bag, it’s signed by the artist and is a numbered edition of 250. Unnumbered copies of Bag will be given away for free in Vancouver via our mobile newspaper box. Its location will change every week, if not sooner.
www.bagpublishing.com

I recently had the pleasure of working with too many brilliant and talented people to help produce the Artists Midway for the Waldorf Hotel’s 4-day Halloween bash. Attendees were invited to play carnival games of luck and skill designed by some of Vancouver’s best artists to win incredible prizes.

Have a look at all of the games after the jump

There’s something about M83’s music that’ll make you feel like a teenage girl. Though we’re talking about a band from France, a country whose cultural producers have a proud history of picking fruit that’s not fully ripe, I don’t mean in the tactile sense, creep. M83 just have this way of making you curl up in your bed and ponder all sorts of stupidly dreamy and romantic thoughts until the iTunes play count quickly hits the triple digits. They might even make you call up a friend to gab about that boy you have a crush on.

M83 are essentially Anthony Gonzalez plus some other guys — most notably, a drummer with an unpronounceable first name, Loïc. (I dare you to try and figure out the keyboard shortcut for an i with an umlaut). Because they’re French, predictably, their sound is retro and runway-friendly, their videos are especially slick and their design sense is impeccable. French electronic musicians just have an innate gift for being the complete package — it’s a through line M83 share with countrymen Air, Daft Punk and any number of artists on the Ed Banger label.

Whatever you want to call their sound — dream pop, synth pop, shoe gaze or electronica — M83 are wonderfully cinematic and intelligent, but fun and with just the right amount of fromage (did I mention they’re French?). The vocals are soft, the synths are loud and the build-ups are always momentous. If John Hughes were still making movies, it’s not hard to imagine an M83 song playing as the destitute nerd triumphantly leaves the prom with the misunderstood rich bitch.

Their latest album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is the band’s sixth and it’s a mix of synth-driven songs, ambient tracks and a few rockier numbers that sound eerily similar to Peter Gabriel. The single, “Midnight City,” which was released for free this summer, is an especially euphoric anthem that might actually get the shoe-gazers to look up and pump their fists a little.

Despite being a little long — it’s a double LP — Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is an interesting and welcome addition to M83’s oeuvre and a worthy follow up to their 2008 classic Saturdays=Youth. However, if you’re a fan, 22-songs probably aren’t enough to tide you over until the next time you see them perform, as they’re one of the better live acts around. One thing is clear, M83 are getting better with age, much like… like a… shit, it’s just on the tip of my tongue. It smells like alcohol. You keep in the cellar. Oh, I know: like my Grandpa!

this article was originally published in the tyee in october 2011

Here’s a zine I made for Bag Publishing and you can buy it from the store on that site, the Waldorf Hotel in Vancouver, Art Metropole in Toronto and a few other places. It’s 24-pages of posts people made on Facebook event walls about why they can’t attend. It includes over 200 perfectly valid excuses you can use the next time you can’t make an event. The cover is printed in colour on card. The insides are printed in black and white on the cheapest paper we could find. It was stapled by hand so the spine is likely off centre. It comes in a cheap cellophane bag and is a stamped and numbered edition of 150.

New site I’ve been working on. The design might look a little familiar.

www.bagpublishing.com

Many years ago I helped on the Vice Guide to Vancouver. In wake of this year’s Stanley Cup Riot, Vice republished an article I wrote the History of Riots in Vancouver on their site.

At any given moment a riot can break out in Vancouver. Michael Barnholden wrote a 112-page book about it recently called Reading the Riot Act, but like anyone who’s spent too much time in school, he keeps trying to explain everything in terms of class conflict. Yeah, there’s a big gap between the rich and poor, but this is no different than in any other city. Besides, all our poor people are too strung out on heroin to wipe their own asses, much less huck a rock at the cops. You might think it’s because we’re so multicultural and we have a lot of pissed-off visible minorities. But we don’t and, honestly, we’re really not that multicultural. In fact, Vancouver doesn’t have any black people. And it’s not that we’re on the “Left Coast” either, because the ridiculously high rent keeps all the real troublemakers and subversive artists far away from Vancouver. No, most of the time riots simply happen as the result of drunken stupidity. There’s no predicting it. It just happens, so be prepared. Here are some highlights from Vancouver’s proud history of rioting.

Gastown Pot Riot of 1971
A couple of hippie journalists were unhappy that their buds were getting harshed by the man for possessing marijuana, so they organized a smoke-in and promoted it in this hippie rag they all worked at. Included in the ad were instructions on what to do if the cops showed up – destroy the evidence, take down badge numbers, that sort of thing. Two thousand people showed up to get stoned, bang on drums, and smell bad. Then a bunch of cops raced in on horses and started beating people over the head with batons. Pot is great for a lot of things: Driving, falling asleep, “getting” Pink Floyd; but it won’t enhance your abilities in a fight. The stoners fought back and had their asses handed to them. Rocks were thrown, skulls got busted, and, conveniently enough, none of the police happened to be wearing badges that night as they detained over 50 people. Sadly, these kind of gatherings still go on every week. While this was cool back in the early 70s, we’re all kind of over weed now and wish the police would still ride in and kick the crap out of these fucking hippies. You can smoke pot freely in Vancouver and the hippie rag that promoted the smoke-in generates more advertising dollars than all the other papers in Vancouver combined.

The Stanley Cup Riot of 1994
The Canucks are having an epic playoff run and nightly parties are happening on Robson Street after each victory. It’s the night of game seven, the entire city has been drinking for hours and is ready to celebrate. Only the Canucks lose to the New York Rangers and fuck up a golden opportunity to bring the Stanley Cup back home to Canada. Dejected, everyone decides to congregate on Robson Street anyway. A little glass gets broken, then suddenly all hell breaks loose. Rioters tear apart the shopping district and loot all the stores. Police move in with full riot gear and tear gas to try and disperse the angry hockey fans. This doesn’t do much because everyone is piss-drunk and ready to fight for the cause. The cause being: “We lost a hockey game and we’re upset.” Of the 70,000 people in the downtown core, 200 were injured, 50 were arrested, and one person was killed when police shot him with a rubber bullet. Pretty good odds if you’re a rioter.

APEC Riot of 1997
The University of British Columbia is the most overrated post-secondary institution in Canada, but they have a great swimming pool and it was the scene of an epic riot. The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit was one of those gatherings where the leaders of the world’s good countries gather behind closed doors to discuss the fates of those countries you can’t find on a map. Troublemakers were preemptively arrested and a gigantic perimeter was set up to keep all the riff-raff away. Rather than take the hint that they weren’t exactly welcome, protesters stormed the fences and tried to rip them down. Forty-nine were arrested and a whole bunch more got pepper-sprayed, including members of the local media, which is never a good idea. There was a big public inquiry afterward that amounted to nothing more than a massive waste of taxpayers’ money, life in the Third World is still shitty, and most of the people involved in the protest now work at anarchist bookstores, still live in their parents’ basement, and enjoy the music of Michael Franti.

Guns N’ Roses Riot of 2002
This was our most recent riot and probably the one with the best rationale. Guns N’ fucking Roses are back together and in town at last. Then, ten minutes before the doors are supposed to open, it’s announced that the show is canceled because Axl can’t make it. Fans, remembering the cancelled GN’R show in 1992, use barricades, rocks, and garbage cans to smash $100,000 worth of glass at General Motors Place. Police move in with riot gear and tear gas, around 20 people are arrested, and a cop knocks all the teeth out of some innocent bystander. Local papers make bad Appetite for Destruction puns and refer to the band as Guns AND Roses, which is just lame. Guns N’ Roses never make up for the cancelled concert.

As heartbroken hockey fans from Atlanta grieve the loss of their second NHL franchise to the Canadian prairies, those dozen or so Thrashers supporters can console themselves with the fact that they’ll always have the Black Lips to call their own. And that’s no small consolation. With the release of Arabia Mountain, their sixth studio album, the Atlanta-based flower punks might just be on the verge of a mainstream breakthrough.

Black Lips play a tight blend of 13th Floor Elevators-style psyche rock mixed with Stooges-style garage punk. Known for their onstage antics as much as their music, at any given Black Lips performance you could witness this four-piece vomiting, peeing and spitting all over each other, setting off fireworks and lighting their guitars on fire, or stripping naked and kissing on stage. The latter of which, at a show in India, forced them to flee the country for fear of being jailed for committing “homosexual acts” (You’d think being from the South, where it’s a felony to make eye contact with another man for too long, would have taught these enfants terrible to keep it in their pants in public).

Arabia Mountain is 16 tight tracks to get drunk and shake your tambourine to. From their wonderfully juvenile subject matter (they sing about Peter Parker being molested, and ex-Atlanta Braves mascot Chief Noc-A-Homa), to the recording techniques (they drummed on raw meat, and used a human skull as an echo chamber), to their videos (where they’re either getting drunk or getting stoned), everything about Black Lips just seems to ooze a youthful exuberance, despite their retro sound.

Producer Mark Ronson, along with being an accomplished musician, has a production resume that read like a who’s who of contemporary pop princesses (Adele, Lily Allen, Christina Aguilera, Ghostface Killah). But perhaps most famously, he taught the whole world to doo wop when he was at the helm for the majority of Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black album. So it should come as no surprise that Arabia Mountain is an especially slick and soulful album start-to-finish.

If there’s one minor downside, it’s that this release just doesn’t have the snarl of previous albums. You’re really unable to shake the feeling that you’re going to be hearing some of the catchier numbers on ads for hybrid cars and tablet devices. But given that Black Lips are perpetually on tour and have six studio and two live albums under their belt, and too many side projects to list off, surely they’re due for some of the spoils of mainstream success. Factor in that they only boast one member in his thirties and it’s pretty safe to say the legacy of Atlanta’s Black Lips will outlast that of the Atlanta Flames or Thrashers.

This article was published on The Tyee in May 2011.

Recently did a redesign of Raif Adelberg’s site.

www.raifadelberg.com

Apparently they recreated Rammellzee’s Battle Station for the Art in the Street exhibition at the MOCA in Los Angeles. There are some pics here but I would like to see that in person!

I just finished Swords & Sworcery. If you own an iPad you should really buy this game. It’s incredibly clever.

When you finish the game, you’re given a phone number in a rather demonic sounding voice.

408 634 2806

It’s a San Francisco number. I called it and got this message.

[audio:http://www.whatsupmann.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/message-at-the-end-of-swords-of-sworcery.mp3|titles=message at the end of swords and sworcery]

If Cy Twombly or Jackson Pollock grew up brandishing spray paint cans under the cloak of night, their work would probably look a lot like José Parlá’s. Inspired largely by his roots in Miami’s graffiti scene and travels around the world, Parlá’s work is a contemporary take on abstract expressionism. Highly personal, emotive, intricate and labour intensive, his trademark style and subject matter bring out the history and beauty of decaying city walls. We caught up with the Brooklyn-based artist as he was preparing to unveil his latest body of work, titled Walls, Diaries, and Paintings, at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York City.