Seeing Cat Power is an experience. If for some reason you don’t know her, Cat Power is Chan Marshall, famously neurotic singer-songwriter behind some of the most soulful and beautiful Southern-gothic-flavored indie ballads of the past decade.

She played a long, spare solo set without a backing band or opening act, accompanying herself on guitar or piano or sometimes just singing a capella. She stopped in the middle of songs to complain about the sound or tell jokes or take cigarette breaks, she forgot the words to some of her own songs, and one time just walked off stage (she came back, though I’ve heard sometimes she doesn’t). Turns out when you can sing with such an achingly beautiful voice, people will put up with a lot of eccentricities.

You’re a fat guy in zombieland with a shotgun and a grindcore soundtrack. And fire is bad for you.

• Link

The literal translation of curriculum vitae is “course of life”.

I finally updated and reposted my own course of life and list of publications this morning. Not that I’m applying for anything, but I figure it’s best to keep these things up-to-date.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been using a graphical CV to visualize some of the things I’ve done. I figure this was useful, since the course of my life is less the road to success and more the spastic dotted lines left behind by Billy from The Family Circus. My educational and professional life has taken a few twists and turns since high school, from filmmaker, to amateur writer, to corporate programmer, to high-society gigolo, to grad student, to AI researcher, to helping build art gallery installations and a Yaletown Web 2.0 start-up.

Just think how much more impressive it would be if I had ever done any of these things well.

(Note to future potential employers reading this: just kidding! I do all these things really, really well! Except the gigolo thing. I might have made that one up.)

• curriculum vitae
• publications

Hey, the 1998 CBC TV series Twitch City is finally coming out on DVD! I managed to find some poor-quality rips from VHS online, and showed them at my movie nights, but it’s always kind of frustrated me that I couldn’t get a decent-quality version anywhere.

I really like Twitch City, and not just because I have a longstanding crush on the freckly and always slightly-off-kilter Molly Parker (she’s played a rabbi, a prospector’s wife, a prostitute and a necrophile; not at the same time, but still, that’s pretty hot). The show came out in the late 90s, in the wake of the indie movie revolution, and it has a very strong indie-slacker aesthetic, thanks to Canadian indie auteurs Bruce Macdonald — who directed — and Don McKellar — who wrote and stars as Curtis. Curtis is an amusingly amoral TV-addicted slacker, who tries to hit on his roommate’s girlfriend (Parker) by offering her expired oysters and her boyfriend’s cognac. In the first episode, the roommate is arrested for accidentally killing a homeless man with a can of catfood, and the rest of the series is about Curtis rotating through a series of weirdo roommates while his old roommate goes through the Canadian legal system. Is that a brilliant concept or what? Combine that with wintery Toronto location shooting (in Kensington Market) and McKellar’s deadpan writing and line delivery, and supporting performances from Callum Keith Rennie, Valerie Buhagiar, two of the Kids in the Hall (playing the same character), and pretty much every other actor working in Canada at the time.

Actually, not to disparage the mother corp too much, but it kind of surprizes me that the CBC ever actually made and showed a series like this. How much cooler would they be if they had made more BBC/Channel4-style cultish sitcoms like Twitch City? A Guy Maddin show about a hockey-playing Icelandic-Canadian family in Winnipeg! A David Cronenberg version of MPD: Psycho! A headbanger sitcom by Michael Dowse!

• Twitch City on amazon.ca (if you buy from this link, I get a kickback, but I don’t really mind if you support your local video store and rent it there instead)

Note to aspiring YouTube auteurs who would take existing characters and put them into “hilariously” violent situations: if what you are doing is not at least as clever as Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown, you’re wasting your time.

This includes you, Robot Chicken.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the director is Jim Reardon, who later became a director on The Simpsons. I first saw this as a crappy third-gen VHS bootleg back in my filmschool days. By the looks up it, they’re still using the same tape.

• Link (via boing boing)

You know, my little handheld Canon ELPH might not be the best equipment on which to shoot zoomed-in videos of things falling into False Creek.

That’s pretty much the Flugtag experience. Watching things fall into False Creek from a couple hundred meters away. It was entertaining enough, but I’ll admit, walking through downtown after and running across groups of cute hipster zombie chicks returning from the Zombiewalk made me wish I’d done that instead.

Oh well, with any luck there will be a Zombiewalk 2007, and they might take a cue from the San Francisco Zombiewalk. There, they encouraged people to take the role of victims along the walk route — you wore a piece of duct tape on your shirt and zombies would attack you, slather you with blood and makeup, and you could join the ranks of the dead. Sounds a blast, it does. Plus, they invaded the Apple Store.

This Saturday offers an embarrassment of cool, and I have a decision to make. On the one hand, there’s the Zombiewalk. Last year’s zombiewalk was stupendously cool. Marching down Main Street dressed as the walking undead, freaking people out… it was truly an unlife-affirming experience. I enjoyed every minute of it.

And now, Zombie Beach Party From Hell.

Zombiewalk 2006: Zombie Beach Party from Hell! will happen on Saturday, August 19, 2006 . . . still lots of time left to decompose properly.

Starting at 3pm at the Vancouver Art Gallery (Howe and Robson).

To combat zombie exhaustion the route will be shorter!
To combat zombie boredom the route will be different!

However, on the same day, at the same time (roughly) is the Red Bull Flugtag!

The first Flugtag took place in Austria in 1991. Since then, the dream of flying hand-made machines into unsuspecting bodies of water has spread like wildfire. From Ireland to San Francisco, inspired pilots have come out of the woodwork to construct their own outrageous craft. And while the flights have never been record-breaking, the pre-launch showmanship has always been unparalleled!

Normally I would gravitate toward the Zombiewalk, which not only involves zombies, which are near and dear to my heart, but in which you get to do an actual cool fun thing. The Flugtag, on the other hand, involves standing in what is sure to be a huge crowd, watching other people do a cool fun thing. However, I’ve done a zombiewalk, but I’ve never done a flugtag. And while the zombiewalk does seem to be going ahead, it seems to be a lot less publicized than last year’s, so I wonder if it will be quite as awesome.

I’m truly rent asunder.

• my post about last year’s zombiewalk

Maisaieed Golf Challenge 019 originally uploaded by Lee Boy.

My brother Lee got bored in Qatar and decided to play golf on hottest course in the world on the hottest day at the hottest time. Nine holes in 53-degree heat. In true Qatar fashion, the course also happens to be a barren grassless wasteland next to a petrochmical plant. The description on his blog is pretty amusing.

• Link

In other international travel news, we were expecting Tamy back at die Kommune on Friday, though on further thought, none of us are really sure about the date he’s supposed to be back. However, if you see this man wandering the Eastern seaboard and talking about efficient rendering and parallel systems with a French accent, please contact the Kommune and/or la consulate général de France, as the case may be.

I knew taking all these mug shots would pay off. Another week, and I’m sending him an email.

UPDATE: He’s back. Call off the search.

The main reason I’m working so hard this month is that I want to earn me some extra money to go travelling in Southeast Asia this winter. I don’t have a specific plan yet, but I’m thinking Thailand for sure, and possibly one or more of Vietnam, Cambodia or Japan.

I think the idea of going to Thailand entered my head after seeing the offbeat, but quite lovely Christopher Doyle-shot film Last Life in the Universe, by Pen-ek Ratanaruang.

Not that the film really comes across like an advertisement for the country, but it has such a dreamy, slow-paced beauty and strangeness, and hearing Christopher Doyle’s brilliant commentary track made me appreciate how much locations can influence films. I like that.

In that way, it reminds me a lot of Lost in Translation, which makes me want to go to Japan. But Thailand is a whole lot cheaper.

Plus, if all goes well, I would like to take an extended period of several months to travel after I finish my PhD in a couple of years. This will allow me to dip my toe into the water of more exotic travel and find out how I deal with being in a country where I don’t speak the language.