CANUCKERY: #Canucks Overcome Wild In OT, Trade Samuelsson & Sturm To Panthers

October 22, 2011 

The Canucks’ hard fought victory today over the Minnesota Wild in OT (attaboy Salo!) must have felt great until the team got into the locker room. There, GM Mike Gillis was waiting with the news that popular Mikael Samuelsson and (meh) Marco Sturm had been dealt to the Florida Panthers for left winger David Booth – who will likely join Kesler’s 2nd line with Higgins (all American!) – and centreman Steve Reinprecht. Video of Gillis explaining himself after the jump… Read more

CANUCKERY: Vancouver Extends Winning Streak To 1 With 5-1 Drubbing Of Predators

October 21, 2011 

An entertaining game to watch. The takeaway: Keslord’s one-timer wristy awesomeness; Sedins combine for 5 points; Rinne chased from net after just one period; much better PP puck control (2 man advantages help); Weise scored his first in the NHL; Sturm looked less like a disinterested old man; Ballard is suddenly a dependable rock (deja vu a la Andrew Alberts, circa 2010); Luongo was a non-factor. Bonus: fights!

CANUCKERY: It’s Hockey (Pre)Season Again And Marco Sturm Has Yet To Injure Himself

September 22, 2011 

I know it’s only the preseason, but it’s been a long couple of months without any Canuckery and I’ve been especially keen to see if new off-season acquisition Marco Sturm has any gas left in his Teutonic tank. In one of the two opening tilts against Calgary on Tuesday, the 33 year old, injury-suffering German left-winger from Dingolfing very clearly showed that he did, scoring a nifty equalizer and adding an assist (he ended up being the first game’s 1st star in the win). Check out his ready, Kesler-esque rebound hands above and the full preseason and regular season schedules here.

Bonus: Tonight’s game against Edmonton is on TSN (6pm).

CANUCKERY: Vancouver’s “Green Men” Tire Of The Off-Season And Move To Wisconsin…

October 6th can’t come soon enough, if only because it turns out that there’s no penalty box in baseball…

CANUCKERY: It’s A Long Time To Wait Until The Next Season Starts In October, So…

…why not watch every single goal scored by the Canucks in the 2010-2011 campaign? It’s a gas, and not just because the tight edits make play-by-play announcer John Shorthouse sound like a lunatic (“Torres steals the puck…scores! Kesler scores! Henrik to Daniel…scores! Raymond dekes, scores! Rebound, scores! Burrows off the sideboards…scores! In all alone, scores!”). We led the league in scoring last year so the video is a whopping 43 minutes long. No complaints here. Would you rather have it shorter? I think not. Coconuts go.

CANUCKERY: A Boston Fan To Jump Ship For Vancouver On A Few Good Conditions

Let me be the first to say welcome to Vancouver. Can we have your mascot, too?

Foreign Intelligence Brief #371: A Closer Look At The Boston Bruins Victory Bar Tab

A copy of the bill assessed to the Boston Bruins after a night spent celebrating their win of the Stanley Cup last week has made it’s way onto Reddit. It takes a lot of Champagne (and some 136 Bud Lights) to fill that bowl. Add on a $25,000 gratuity to have it poured, and you have a good night for everyone. Naturally, the first comment underneath the photo nailed it:  “I’m betting the Vancouver bill was more.” Plus we got stiffed.

SOUNDTRACKING: On The Canucks Run Confusing Line Between Rockers And Jocks

by Daniel Colussi | Call me old fashioned, but I grew up with the clear understanding that you were one of two things: a rock ‘n roller of some stripe – a punk, a goth, a metalhead, a teddy boy, whatever – or you were a jock.  Sure, there were other clans in high school, but we won’t worry about them now.  What concerns me today is how this simple demarcation of identity has lately become obscured, perhaps even irrelevant.  As the Stanley Cup finals progress and Vancouver falls deeper into a drug-like trance of Canucks worship, a new atmosphere has opened up in which Vancouver’s musicians and music lovers have all revealed themselves to be die-hard, jersey-wearing sports fans.

I can’t convey my confusion and sense of betrayal.  I can’t give up the straightforward us vs. them mentality of rockers vs. jocks that once served me so well back.  In those days, there were basic visual clues with which to identify everyone’s allegiance: rockers had long hair and over-sized rock t shirts (usually Nirvana), while jocks wore baggy jeans, jerseys and short cropped hair that coalesced into bleach-tipped crests.

But nowadays, all previous lines of understanding have been obscured. Walk into any jamspace in this city and you’re as likely to see a poster of Roberto Luongo or a Sedin tacked to the wall as you are of Bowie or The Stones.  Last weekend outside The Cobalt, the talk wasn’t of the bands that had just played but of Malhotra’s miraculous return to the ice.

Sure, I could anticipate a few musicians succumbing to the paranoid grip that hockey holds over Vancouver – a city whose very pulse can be monitored by the Canucks’ scoring (car horns, vuvuzela’s and wild hollering in the streets indicates robustness while silent streets on game night are a flatline on the EKG), but I never thought I’d see the day when Vancouver’s rock scene wholeheartedly embraced The Game.

But maybe I’ve had it wrong all along.  Vancouver has long maintained an uneasy alliance between punk rock and hockey.  I’m thinking of D.O.A.’s blasphemous 1987 music video cover of BTO’s Takin’ Care Of Business in which hockey and punk rock were portrayed as two sides of the same rebellious coin.  And then there’s Nomeansno’s dark twin, the Hanson Brothers, who traded their guitars for hockey sticks and celebrated the brutal sport with their treatment of The Hockey Song?  More recently, local 90′s rockers The Odds have stepped onto the ice and upped their exposure to previously unheard of levels.

Perhaps I’ve had it wrong all along. Maybe it’s not so bad.  Maybe it just goes hand in hand with our being a world class city. Maybe it gives Vancouver a more European quality.  I mean, how many English rockers are also full blown footballers? Pretty much all of them, I think.  Pink Floyd loved their football, and of course there was the legendary match between Oasis and Blur, the two biggest UK bands of the 90′s.  If they’re OK with it, then why shouldn’t I be too?

It seems I may have succumbed to the same faulty, binary logic that still pits The Stones against The Beatles in my brain.  It wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve had to reassess my old hypotheses about the world…

——————————————–

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

CANUCKERY: “My Name Is Johnny Canuck, And This Is My Year.” Oh Yeah? Prove It…

Hat tip: Nucks Misconduct. Best of three with home ice advantage. We got this.

Seen In Vancouver #299: Canucks Bridal Gown At “Frocks Modern Bridesmaids”

Many thanks to watchful reader B.R. for sending this snap in of what appeared to us at first to be a Vancouver Canucks-themed wedding dress (with matching LW and RW bridesmaids) in the window at West Broadway’s Frocks Modern Bridesmaids. It’s actually a fitted t-shirt slipped over a dress and tied down with a sash, but so what? Twas seen, and we like.

MORE SEEN IN VANCOUVER

Next Page »