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.
can you buy Neurontin over the counter 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.
So the start-up I’m working for is in a converted nineteenth-century brick warehouse in Yaletown, which is an interesting experience. Yaletown, for those not familiar with Vancouver’s neighbourhoods, is the ultra-trendy downtown yuppie neighbourhood, a high-density mixture of expensive condos, tech start-ups, tony fashion boutiques and chic restaurants. It would be pretty hypocritical of me to denounce it, given that I work there and all, but I will say that the Yaletown lifestyle looks… exhausting. Physically, financially and quite possibly spiritually.
And frankly, it makes me feel underdressed in my grad-student uniform of sandals, shorts and thrift-shop shirts.
On the plus side, it is definitely one of the more successful examples of urban regeneration and mixed-use, high-density living. If you live there, you’re in easy walking distance of dozens of restaurants and bars and a huge variety of shops. Being more Main Street than Mainland Street, it might not be a place I would ever want to live, but a lot of people obviously do, and it’s cool to see a viable alternative to suburban sprawl and freeways.
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Last night the Orpheum turned, for an evening, into the land of the Chuck Taylors for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The trio was joined by the first opener, Dave Burke-impersonator Imaad Wasif, who played his rather excellent set alone with his guitar and some kind of drone box electrothingee. He has gotta rank as one of the more humble performers I’ve seen, mumbling appreciation of the quiet audience between his songs.
The second opening act, Blood on the Wall — um… wow. I guess being from Williamsburg is now enough to qualify you to start a band and open for the Yeahs. Because it sure wasn’t musicianship, songwriting or stage presence. As Gillian said, for three bucks you can see better bands in Saskatchewan. Needless to say, Pitchfork Media loves ’em (or so the 8.1 rating suggests; the review itself seems to be a bunch of random sentence fragments from the author’s diary).
The YYYs were great though. Karen O came on stage with an ear-to-ear grin, a Renaissance squire costume, and a stiff-legged bounce, the sum of which made her seem like a particularly musical marionette. She ripped through a high-energy set, singing, whispering and screaming, and it’s obvious she loves to perform — everything you want and need in a punk-glam frontwoman. I’m sure she was a handful for her parents.
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Well, I made it back to Vancouver, trading my shorts and sandals for a wool overcoat and umbrella. I would have loved nothing so much as to stay in New Zealand another week/month/year, but I comforted myself with the thought that I will certainly be taking another trip there one day, hopefully not too distant in the future. And for longer next time. There were several places I stayed a few hours or a day I would like to stay for longer, and other places I wanted to see but didn’t.
I posted a bunch of pics on Flickr today, though I still have plenty to sort through. After that, I want to post a little write-up of my trip while I still have that post-holiday glow about me.
My only real regret about my travel is that I didn’t go to NZ first and then done the summer school. I was highly motivated by the school at the time, but now… let’s just say it’s gonna be hard going back to work.
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Yesterday was the first Vancouver Zombiewalk. I’m a huge fan of zombie movies. I usually zombify myself for Halloween, and I even wrote a short (unfilmed) zombie movie back when I was in film school. So naturally, when I heard about the Zombiewalk, I was pretty excited, but maybe a little apprehensive. The thing didn’t really seem to have much central organization, and it seemed to be spreading only through a few local blogs and word of mouth. How many people would hear about it and be enough into zombies to put together costumes and spend a Saturday afternoon in August wandering around Vancouver?
A lot, it turns out.
I was expecting maybe few dozen people, tops. But we were an army. A mighty army of the living dead, lusting after the brains of the living.
We shuffled around the Vancouver Art Gallery, past the war protesters, into the the Pacific Center mall to the shock of the shoppers, stumbling down the escalator and into the bowels of the earth to catch the train. The skytrain passengers could only watch helplessly as their train pulled up into a sea of zombies which invaded the cars, only to be disgorged at the Main Street station. We staggered up Main Street, surrounding buses and police cars, past the trendy restaurants and hipster hangouts and into the residential streets and parks. People came out to their front lawns and balconies to gawk at us, until finally we lurched into Mountainview Cemetery to rejoin our resting brethren.
It was a fantastic experience — unexpected and surreal and pointless and bizarre. The people we passed were (mostly) completely surprised and amused to see this invasion of the dead. Even the police escort we eventually picked up was entertained, joking and posing with the zombies. Hopefully, we made helped make everyone’s day just a little more surreal.
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.
So the start-up I’m working for is in a converted nineteenth-century brick warehouse in Yaletown, which is an interesting experience. Yaletown, for those not familiar with Vancouver’s neighbourhoods, is the ultra-trendy downtown yuppie neighbourhood, a high-density mixture of expensive condos, tech start-ups, tony fashion boutiques and chic restaurants. It would be pretty hypocritical of me to denounce it, given that I work there and all, but I will say that the Yaletown lifestyle looks… exhausting. Physically, financially and quite possibly spiritually. 
