Smoke Break #951: “A Grain Of Sand” Details A Newspaperman’s Idyllic Seychelles Escape

“Brendon Grimshaw was editor to some of the most important newspapers in Africa. But in 1972, he gave it all up to go and live on Moyenne Island, which he purchased for ten thousand pounds. In the thirty-six-years that he has lived on the island, Brendon and his friend, Rene Lafortune, planted sixteen-thousand trees, built 4,8 kilometres of nature paths, and brought and bred 110 giant land tortoises, creating an island of incredible beauty now worth 34 million Euros. Come with us on this journey and discover why an 82-year-old man fears his island will one day be destroyed by the ever-expanding reach of our insatiable desires…” (via). Watch the hour-long documentary here.

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The View From Your Window #130

From E.D. | Graveley & Woodland | Vancouver, BC | 3:06pm | SHARE YOUR VIEW

We love posting the photographs that reveal the views from our reader’s windows. Whether it’s a back alley in the fall or a sandy beach in high summer, we’re always stoked to see what you see from home, work or while on the road. Some of our all-time favourite reader submissions below… Read more

Seen In Vancouver #361: Virginie & Bastien Go Looking For Strathcona With Fresh Eyes

Virginie Lamarche and Bastien Desfriches Doria are two photographers from France currently hosting awesome film photography workshops in Vancouver. They’re also exploring/shooting our neighbourhoods with the fresh eyes of keen imports. Bastien uses black and white films in various formats while Virginie focuses on colour negative films. For their second Seen In Vancouver session with Scout, they ventured around our own neighbourhood of Strathcona…

If you’re into learning more about film photography, the pair offer everything from a basic 4-hour crash course to darkroom skills and intermediate courses in documentary photography. The workshops are held at the Cineworks space in Railtown, so dust off the old manual and get going!

EVERYTHING SEEN IN VANCOUVER

Northern Zulu Sessions: Scenes From The “Great Lake Swimmers” Gig At Zulu Records

Scout Magazine and Northern Transmissions are proud to present the third instalment of The Northern Zulu Sessions, a series of in-store concerts taking place at Kitsilano’s Zulu Records (the home of our weekly Zulu Report) to showcase local and international talent. The films are a collaboration by Warmland Films, Zulu Records, and Overgrowth Productions. This week, it’s Ontario’s phenomenal Great Lake Swimmers!

Seen In Vancouver #360: “This Is East Van II” Community Photo Book Starts Taking Shape

Remember the 2011 awesomeness that was THIS IS EAST VAN? The project’s creative directors, Erin Sinclair and Rob Forbes, are busily making a second book, again based on photos submitted by community members who are keen to share their individual visions of East Vancouver. Following the “making of” process on Twitter has been great, but we’ve asked them to keep us updated with images as well (without giving too much of the finished product away). These are the first 14 shots that they’ve sent over, with captions. More to come…

Zulu Report: Everything That You Should Listen To This Week

Nic Bragg over at Kitsilano’s Zulu Records once again present his weekly Scout feature, the Zulu Report. Within, staff from the West 4th music store provide The Track, the song that is on heavy rotation that week; The Playlist, which is pretty self-explanatory; The Gig, the must see show of the week; and The Glance, which details the best gigs on the immediate horizon. From their ears to yours, enjoy…

THE TRACK

THE FLAMING LIPS The Supermoon Made Me Want to Pee

Last weekend’s RSD event was a totally life affirming moment. Each year it gets bigger and bigger as we greet more and more new faces who are disenfranchised with solely interacting with music on their hard drive… when was the last time the size of your hard drive helped you make a friend? Anyway, one band that has never wavered from the vinyl charge is long-time Zulu faves The Flaming Lips! They rule. It is me or do they actually keep getting weirder and weirder? This track from their ultra-limited edition RSD release is really really amazing, and the visuals are simply stunning. What’s next? I can see Wayne and the guys being asked to design a theme park ride. Now that would be scary! Read more

Seen In Vancouver #359: Lewis Bennett Is Worried That He Might Be In An Asian Gang

Another solid effort from Lewis Bennett, a local filmmaker who has taken it upon himself to create 12 movies on Vancouver and its surrounds in 2012. This is his third (made with Calum MacLeod and Benjamin Taft), and it’s the best we’ve seen yet. Bonus: holy ukelele teacher in the end credits! That dude is rad!

EVERYTHING SEEN IN VANCOUVER

SWAG: Win Tickets To Laura Marling’s Show At The Commodore Ballroom This June 27th

British singer/songwriter Laura Marling is coming to Vancouver this summer. Haven’t heard of her? She’s been compared to Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, a combo that translates into awesome. She’s played with Andrew Bird and taken the stage at Coachella, so she’s been getting around and scoring high on the critics’ “Best of Year” lists in the process. Even though tickets don’t officially go on sale until this Friday, we’ve got a pair to give away today. Here’s what you need to do…

Follow @scoutmagazine and retweet the following: “I’m fixing to win two tickets to Laura Marling’s #Vancouver show via @scoutmagazine http://wp.me/plxHU-d7h“

We’ll pick the winner by random before the weekend.

Concert: Wednesday, June 27 | 9:30pm | Commodore Ballroom | Tickets: Friday, May 4 | get ‘em here

SOUNDTRACKING: On The Prevalence Of Phones In Pop Music From Berry To Blondie

by Daniel Colussi | The other day I was listening to The Spinners’ funky soul classic “It’s A Shame,” in which the singer laments having to sit around by his telephone and wait for his girl to call him. I love this song and listening to it for the umpteenth time I realized how many telephone pop songs have been written over the years.

“It’s A Shame” is paradigmatic of the lovesick telephone song: the narrator helplessly waits for a call from his girl, in this case all the worse because the girl in question is a two-timer who’s messing around with other guys. Our Spinner knows this but she’s got him by the balls so bad that the only thing that he can do is wait for the telephone to ring and hear her voice on the other end of the line. The telephone is his lifeline but also a noose around his neck, and it’s such a shame. The Seatbelts’ “Call Me Call Me” tells the same story, though its way less funky. The Beatles and The Stones both vent their frustrations with waiting by the phone (“You Won’t See Me” and “Off The Hook,” respectively). But it’s The Cure who take it to a characteristically gloomy extreme on “10:15 Saturday Night” with the implication that the existential anxiousness of waiting for the phone to ring could lead to suicide. In all these cases the narrator is forced into passivity with the telephone being an instrument of domination. But how about when you try to be a little more pro-active?

On “Answering Machine,” Paul Westerberg is ready to dial the number except he’s stymied by the telephone’s wedged-in position between himself and the girl. She’s not picking up, so what’s he supposed to do – pour his heart out to an answering machine? The pain runs even deeper in Glen Campbell’s gloriously schmaltzy “Wichita Lineman” in which the brutal irony is that even though the guy’s out on the highway installing telephone lines, he still can’t get through to the girl! So close but so far, and all that’s left is the singing in the wire. An absolute classic is, of course, Blondie’s ”Hanging On The Telephone,” in which Debbie Harry repeatedly phones her lover in an attempt to extricate him from his mother’s overly dominant grip on his love life (the prominence of the Oedipal complex in pop songs is a whole other matter). On these tunes the telephone can connect – but just as easily block – the transmission of love.

Other times, its not so bad. In “Memphis Tennesse“, Chuck Berry doesn’t really have it so rough. The song is basically about a guy who needs a phone number. Yes, it’s a drag to have to call the operator, and its annoying to be put on hold, but there’s nothing to suggest that he won’t get through to his lady. In The Band’s “Long Distance Operator“, Robbie Roberston is in pretty much the same boat as Chuck Berry, although Robertson’s way more dramatic about the situation (he’s on fire, he’s tangled in telephone lines, etc), and we’re less sure that he will indeed reach his lady. That Berry’s song conveys less of a sense of total hopelessness could be the fact that it arrived in sunny 1959, before the dark spectre of telephones fully inserting themselves into our love lives could be adequately grasped.

Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” is maybe the best telephone song ever written in that it ties together so many disparate facets of telephonic presence in our lives: the desire to ignore calls, particularly ones from your mother; the irritating faux-pleasantries of pre-recorded answering machine greetings; and ultimately the inextricable link between household technology and the military-industrial complex. That the song is performed by Anderson in her classic spoken word style, i.e. in the voice of an actual telephone conversation, only increases its genius.

All the aforementioned tunes deal specifically with the landline experience. It’s only logical that cellphones would beget different songs because of the unparalleled access that they afford. If someone’s got your cellphone number then there’s nowhere to hide. Lady GaGa’s “Telephone” best represents the cell phone experience of always being within communicable reach. Here, GaGa’s miffed at some guy and just wants to revel in the Dionysian ecstasy of dance and drink, but she can’t get into the moment because this guy keeps calling and texting her. Its distracting. Unlike Anderson, GaGa doesn’t probe into the deeper implications of the telephone’s (and thus technology’s) increasing presence in our lives. I have no idea if her depiction as a human/machine motor-booty hybrid on the cover of Born This Way betrays any of her feelings on the subject. On “Telephone,” GaGa just seems kinda pissy, so I think the track carries much weight in the lineage of telephone pop songs. But I know that, for sure, whenever I hear those bittersweet Spinners harmonies, I’m instantly right there with them, waiting by the telephone.

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Zulu Records veteran and tunage aficionado Daniel Colussi is the Music Editor of Scout Magazine.

Smoke Break #948: ETT Technology Could Send Us Around The Globe In Just Six Hours

I’ve seen messages whip around an old-school newsroom before by evacuated tube (very steampunk), but I never imagined it as a form of transport:

Evacuated Tube Transport is an airless, frictionless, maglev-like form of transportation which is safer, cheaper and quieter than trains or airplanes. Six-person capsules travel in the tubes and can reach a maximum speed of 6,500 km/h, and provide 50 times more transportation per kwh.

That’s New York to Los Angeles in just 45 minutes! Imagine a future where you could wake up in Vancouver for a breakfast in Los Angeles, a lunch in New York, and a dinner in Paris. Theoretically, you could be back home in time for last call without any jet lag. Of course, the video also posits that an ETT could get you to Beijing from New York in just two hours, but I imagine the Atlantic Ocean would have something to say about that. Still, paging John Galt…

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