The Magic Satchel

working on a post (or series of posts) for the 2009 Folk fest, and believe it or not there is one coming about Sasquatch from back in May, I’ve just been stupid busy for far too long.

more to come… in the meantime, go read a webcomic or two.

http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/

http://xkcd.com/

Excuse me a moment while I chase the dust bunnies away from my keyboard and attempt to pick up the threads of my story where I last left off… almost 2 months ago.

It amazes me how quickly time has gone by, and how often I’ve told myself “I’ll write about that show tomorrow” or “man I wish I had my camera with me, again”. Truth be told I haven’t been doing anything incredibly amazing, life has just got in the way for a while. The good news is it has (mostly) been good times and good fun, so I don’t have anything horrible to relate as a reason for why I’ve been away.

Go go gadget summary mode!

First up, the review for the Watchmen concert will be posted shortly, and when it does it will be as if I didn’t put it off for the last 3 months as it will appear on the day it should have been written. Also, I’ll blab a bit about the Metric / Tokyo Police Club / Dears concert, and upcoming plans for yours truly including immediate and future travel plans. Yay travel!

Next, the cycling map and the total distance I’ve gone is horribly out of date, but I’ll have to fix that when I get to work tomorrow as I kept my records in my daytimer. Here is a picture to show my most recent milestone:

(executes a self high five)

6000km, and it looks more and more like the odometer can display another number (at least a 1) so I wonder how far I can go before the battery dies? More importantly, how much longer will my bike tolerate my abuse and lack of maintenance before the chain explodes due to excessive rust? Hang on until Thursday, I promise I’ll clean you!

Now that I’m sitting here there is a lot I’d like to say, so I’ll break it up to hit some of the “bigger” stuff in posts of their own.

Jingle Bell Rock 2008 brought a solid lineup of Canadian artists to Calgary on December 19th, and it turns out it was well worth the price of admission and braving the sub-sero (-26.8 C to be exact) temperatures. It had been quite a while since I had seen most of these bands live (The Dears played with Matthew Good at the Whiskey in 2003, Metric was back in 2006, and Tokyo Police Club come in at the most recent with their May 18th show at the Warehouse) so to have them all come together on one stage was pretty awesome.
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I was going to title this “who watches the watchmen?” but I figured I’d get a number of angry fanboy comments for misleading them. what the? why isn’t he talking about the movie? what kind of crap is this?

It’s true, this is not a post about the upcoming movie, this is my slightly late reflection on what I called (upon its completion) my best small venue concert ever. At some point I may have to dig back through the archives of cd’s and concert ticket stubs to possibly dispute that comment, but for now I’ll stand behind it as a fact… the Watchmen kicked my ass and did it with a smile.
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No, I’m not talking about the movie (although I’m pretty pumped about that too), I’m referring to the band.

For those of you that have no clue what I’m talking about, go here and read up on one of my favorite bands I always managed to miss seeing live.

Well, that isn’t exactly true as I did see them once before they became “big” (Canadian music big, not international superstars), but something always seemed to come up any time after that when they would roll through town… I even had tickets to more than one show that went to waste for one reason or another.

well, not this time. Thanks to the wonders of the interwebs I’ve discovered that they have decided to do a minor reunion tour and they are coming to Calgary on October 31. tickets go on sale in one minute and I don’t care if I’m going alone, I *will* go see them this time.

If this has piqued the interest of any readers that have never heard them, I’d highly recommend Slomotion. Yeah it is 18 bucks on iTunes, but it covers their best songs (the last 9) and the first 9 songs are their last new material.

what are you waiting for? go buy it!

So how do you follow an amazing day of entertaining music?

well, you start by getting up at 430 in the morning, packing your car and only then noticing you have messages waiting for you as you are about to drive out to Canmore for the 24 hours of Adrenalin bike race.
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Saturday brings the first full day of music, with workshops and individual concerts on 6 different stages that run almost non stop from 1030am until 530pm.

I definitely had some people I wanted to check out from what I had seen on Thursday and Friday, but I really wish I could have been in two (or three) places at once because the overlap from one stage to another made it difficult to get to see absolutely everything I wanted.
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Is there anything better than a gathering outdoors with friends to listen to a constant parade of great music?

I only knew the headliners performing tonight, but sitting through the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Charlie Musslewhite, Wendy McNeil, Be Good Tanyas, Andrew Bird, and Calexico before I got to them (Bedouin Soundclash) was certainly not a chore.. in fact, it was downright pleasant.

Having zero expectations I just sat back and enjoyed everything that was offered to me. In fact, I can’t think of a single performer that had me wishing their set was shorter, or thinking that they were a misfit for tonight… all good energy, good entertainment and great music, which usually means my CD collection is about to start growing again.

I can’t wait for what tomorrow brings

Day 1 brought us Master Musicians of Jajouka, The Weakerthans, Aimee Mann, and Sam Roberts, with 2 of the 4 bands that convinced me to buy tickets for this year on opening night I was certain this is going to be a good show.

The lineup to get in to the grounds was horrendous looking (and kept getting worse), but when we made the decision to line up it surprisingly moved along quite quickly, getting us inside within 15 minutes. Once inside I see Susan selling programs (I talked with her for a bit, long enough to get separated from my group) and in the background I can see and smell food alley…
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Tokyo Police Club rocked the Warehouse last night, with the very solid The Meligrove Band opening. What a show! Down the road we’ll look back fondly at these small venue shows and say “yeah, I saw them when they weren’t even selling out clubs.” This is one of those bands that are simply destined to be huge!
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