Welcome back to the School year!

Summer has been a blast, and now i am back with more reading to do and more reviews to type.

Drop us a line and tell us what you did this summer!

Vancouver USA:  Didn’t sign your kids up for camp yet?  It’s not too late.  Check out the following websites for safe, fun activities where your kids will learn, be active and meet friends.  Vancouver Parks and Rec at www.vanclarkparks-rec.org, or the Firstenburg Community Center at www.cityofvancouver.us/fcc.

Deanna and I are meeting with Pastor Jim and Dyani Waldrop next week for our initial 2008 camp planning meeting. I can’t wait for this year’s event. Today, I put some time into finishing up the graphics for both camp and the ‘08 Elevation Talent Show. Check ‘em out and download them to your heart’s desire below…

First, the black camp graphic… (click for the large version)

…and here’s the Elevation Talent Show…

…and a white-background version of the camp poster… (don’t you love Barry’s mug-shot?!)

See you at both! You know you want to be there!

My roommates are getting high underneath the Bob Marley sarong in our living room. It’s already dark, and in 8 hours I have to get on a plane. Our internet was down for the day, and upon its heroic repair, I indulged in the obsessive kind of googling that only interests me in the first 10 minutes of the internet being a novelty. This urge only hits me after long internet-free periods, like cross-country roadtrips or sojourns to the amazon jungle. And this google adventure led me to the Pitchfork Media reviews of two different albums that I have listened to fairly obsessively, one for an entire summer and one for the week I’ve owned it, The Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible and Stars‘ In Our Bedroom After The War (Stars pre-released it on the interweb, but I am not savvy to these things. I would much rather just buy it and play it on my cd player. The internet makes me uncomfortable.) And it led me to thinking about both these albums, which I never would have contextualized together but which contain some shocking similarities. (To me, not to the universe. They are really only similar in their adherence to the concept of an unspecific but definite overall thematic idea, and their theatricality.) (Oh yeah, and they’re both Canadian.) I am only describing one, because I have to get on a plane early in the morning. On both cds, I consider Track 2 to be the best song, and I don’t think anybody else cares. Track 2 on Neon Bible is ‘Keep The Car Running.’ You would think it would be impossible to capture the intense emotional intricacies of driving across America in your first car, a week after getting your license, with 3 of your favourite people in the entire world. The sun is setting over Arizona and your tires are driving miles and miles to meet your roommates in Indio, California for your third Coachella Festival. You will spend weeks, stopping at towns that rise clapboard and neon out of the desert, eating at bizarre Mexican restaurants where people walk in between the tables selling beaded earrings, drinking beer staring at the setting sun over the Grand Canyon and throwing rocks off cliffs in the painted desert. You will sleep at dawn on a picnic table. You will arrive 5 minutes before Andrew Bird’s surprise set at Amoeba, and drink Mexican hot chocolate. You will drive for hours outside L.A. fueled on Rockstar until you find the only campsite still open, and when you wake up you are beside a beautiful mountain. You will smoke cigarettes and talk about love until four in the morning outside your friend Joanna’s house in the Oakland hills, and when you stand up to go to sleep the San Francisco city skyline will be over your shoulder. You will arrive home and it will be summer and you will drive a thousand more places, with a thousand more people, in a thousand more contexts, and it will all sound like this song. It is a very, very good song. Track 2 on In Our Bedroom After The War is ‘The Night Starts Here.’ This song is like life: it’s about a lot of things that have already happened to me, but it’s really about something that hasn’t happened yet at all. This is the most important song on this album, and I don’t care what anyone says.  AND NOW, The Playlist That Makes the Fact that I Have to Spend an Hour and a Half on the Bus and Skytrain to Get to School Enjoyable: 1. Suenos Dulces-Thunderheist (the bass in this song is so filthy I can’t get enough of it. it is extremely difficult, also, not to say “THUN. DER. HEIST.” out loud in daft punk voice whenever I listen to it.) 2.Take Me To The Riot- Stars (the video for this song is about my friends, if we met someone outside a bus station and took him dancing. we have never drunkenly frolicked in lake ontario, though. it is too far from downtown.) 3. The Way I Are- Timbaland f. Keri Hilson and DOE 4. Ms. Hill- Talib Kweli 5. Over and Over- Hot Chip (somewhere in rolling stone magazine, someone said something about how no one had ever heard this song sober, and at the time i read it, i had heard the song at least a hundred times, and it was totally true.) 6. Stronger- Kanye West f. Daft Punk (Kanye was all, ‘I’ma wear some stunna shades and talk over the coolest song ever written. and he does this awesome snarl thing in the video that makes everyone wish he was on them. he’s Kanye West, dude can do whatever the fuck he wants. i love robot helmets.)  7. Lovely Allen-Holy Fuck (this is the most beautiful song ever. i want to be buried in this song when i die.) 8. The Night Starts Here- Stars 9. 1 2 3 4-Feist (the first time I heard this song was at Olympic Island 2006, Feist was wearing a straw hat and talking about lighthouses while the sun was slowly making it’s way towards the skyline. Loveliness.) 10. The Beginning After The End- Stars 11. Paper Planes- M.I.A (mmm. she performed it in sequined shorts at Lollapalooza, it thumped out of an art car that drove by at 8 in the morning at Burning Man, and everytime I was like ‘i have to find that song and listen to it always.’) 12. We Are Your Friends- Justice vs. Simian (this is the funnest song to dance to drunk ever. i want to get drunk and dance to it right now.) 13. This Is The Way We Live- Baby Boy Da Prince (da prince!) 14. Young Folks- Peter, Bjorn, and John (this song has been stuck in my head for an entire year. by listening to it, i cut out the middle man. plus, if i listen to it on the bus, i am made out of paper.)

or, writing-assignments-doing-south-africa-research-waiting-in-line-for-my-passport for the weekend. work shifts have been few and far between and come next thursday i will be crying about it, especially since my new list of things i have to buy NOW has expanded to include a free city sweatshirt (i have taken the majority of my work hiatus to re-watch the entire series of the l word) and a pair of snakeskin crisscross slouchy leather flats. i DO, however, have a shift tomorrow, just in case they missed me too much. oh, how i miss the regularity of guaranteed shifts everyday. i do love being able to go out and get as drunk as i want though, especially in the instance of friend’s birthdays. and most especially when certain other friends in attendance are a little hard to look in the eyes right now. saturday was lovely, though, despite the social losing their liquor-license for over-capacity (wtf?) we danced it up at supermarket and spilled drunk and ridiculous out onto college to steal parmesan shakers from amatos and get in waterfights. and not having any work means instead of dragging my hungover, gingerale and coffee-clutching self to the store the next morning, i can rest my bo-day and indulge in a delicious, slow hangover-y cloudy day, the only commitments of which include going to see knocked up (hifuckinglarious) with a group of friends. i hope next weekend is as eventful, though right now i’m trying to pick a destination: kingston? muskoka? as much as i’d love to spend the weekend hammered out of my skull at a bmx camp-fest, i also don’t really want syphillis. hard to decide.

getting high with a friend i hadn’t seen in a long time on the stairs of my elementary school, it occured to me how many people i know that are still in love with the first person they ever fell in love with. it’s like, by virtue of those feelings occuring for the very first time, they gain a much more intense depth. like discovering them for the first time makes them more intense than anything else could ever be. but, i guess, the first cd you ever loved and the first place you ever went, the first movie that ever reached out to you, the first book that ever moved you, seems just as intense as that first love does, so why not have it stay with you like they all did? sometimes, late at night, you still revisit them. you go back to them when you really need them and nothing else will do, will fit, will feel as you as they did because they were more than what they were, they were also the essence and the personification of discovery.

THE COACHELLA BREAKDOWN!:(a bit late, but you have to let the dust settle. and i bought my LOLLA TICKET today!)DAY 1:after a long, hot drive to the festival in my friend’s white volvo with no air conditioning, the sight of the willcall ticket pickup line was possibly the most depressing thing i have ever seen. a neccessary hurdle, because my friend had been in nicaragua for the past 2 months and got a last minute ticket. the sun was high, the line was long, and we could hear brother ali from where we were standing outside the gates. WE WERE DOOMED! but a chance on a twenty-dollar one day pass sold by a fan desperate to unload his spare ticket and get inside saved the day, and we were finally inside the happiest place on earth: the empire polo field at coachella time. this years coachella was, unfortunately, dominated by double-ups, and desperate runs from one end of the field to the other to catch at least half of a band you’d been excited about since january.  lots was missed, but stephen marley waving in the sunset with his giant irie flag, bringing out k’naan for an acoustic ‘until the lion learns to speak’, was one of day 1’s highlights. Jesus and Mary Chain may not have been thrilled to be there, but the fans at their set were, especially when scarlett johanssen came out to sing the chorus of ‘just like honey’. i ended off the day napping under the stars and a bronze tree listening to bjork in one ear and dj shadow in the other. not a bad start. DAY 2:my favourite day of the festival. starting off with pharoahe monch ripping through ‘pushing’ in the scorching sun, catching a little bit of the frames, the day was dominated by regina spektor, whose soviet loveliness and new york grit blew me away. nobody else could make swearing so classy. S W E A T I N G it out in the dance tent through mstrkrft, and watching decemberists in the sun after hearing strains of hot chip and peter, bjorn and john. then, the mad dash into the crush of people waiting expectantly for arcade fire, the archetypal memory for me of the first coachella i ever went to, ‘rebellion’ crashing over the crowd as the sun tie-dyed the sky with oranges and yellows, i had no idea what to expect this year, squished among hipster canadians watching them set up neon bibles (literally) and a fake organ around the main stage. but the montreal band was absolutely fantastic the second time around, playing just enough old and new stuff to keep a crowd of thousands dancing, jumping, and enthralled. as some kid walking behind me in the am/pm after the festival said : “a religious experience.” then, after the oh-so-neccessary coachella nap, and some lcd soundsystem dance tent action, tiesto took over the field, with beats and lights and a masterful control of the crowd’s energy, he brought the festival to a pulsing, moonlight close.DAY 3:whiskey-drunk and dancing with fourteen year old hollywood girls to mika is the best way to start a sunday that i can think of. add in some iced lemonade and being thisclose for lupe’s chicago-shoutout rap cover show, then some beers and some explosions in the sky, the roots playing the sun in, cut chemist giving a slow start in the dome, leaving air’s beautiful (late) musings to dance to manu chao in the moonlight, lying on the ground in between shows, and walking on the edge of the crowd watching the mosh pit stretch as far as the eye can see, watching some lemonheads from the bleachers, and getting ready for the long, slow ride back to civilization past the windmills and into the sun-soaked concrete palm tree grind of l.a., and you have a pretty perfect day. i even ran into a girl from ubc, and the girl who worked at the buffalo exchange in tempe, arizona that we stopped at before coming to the festival, and sold me a zebra-print tote and grey joe shoulder bag. mmm coachella coincidences. mmm frozen lemonade and palm trees. mmm coachella.

so, i’ve decided to get the fuck over any wierdness associated with coming home, and everything that stands for. maybe it’s the sun or the insane amount of working accompanied by days off full of roadtrips to tiny ontario towns to drink beer and light off fireworks, smoke joints in the living rooms of people i’ve never met and barbecue portobello mushrooms with people i’ve known for a hundred years, but my opinion of a hometown summer is moving up in the world. Even though almost everyone i know has escaped to their various university haunts for the next 4 months, there’s nothing wrong with summer in the city. and it means i have my fair share of places to visit with couches waiting for me with open arms. but today, i’ve elected to stay where i am and read vogue in the sun, furthering my obsession with all things coco rocha, irina lazareanu, natalia vodianova and sienna miller, and creating a newfound desire to sleep over in the brand-new tom ford store in silk pajamas and his monogrammed slippers.  if i spend my entire summer drinking iced americanos and reading vogue, nylon and books from the sixties in a white dress and bare feet, i will have no complaints. also, getting to see awesome theatre productions like ‘goblin market‘ at the equity theatre  [  http://www.experienceto.com/theatre/printer_goblin-market.shtml ] makes a summer worth having. tonight: patio-ing somewhere in the city. mmmm summa!