About James Brotheridge

Contributing Editor with Prairie Dog.

Author Archive | James Brotheridge

Leader-Post Erecting Paywall

By on May 14, 2013 in Media

From the Leader-Post‘s website:

Postmedia Inc. is extending a digital pay meter to its remaining properties on Tuesday, including The StarPhoenix.

The move means online readers of The StarPhoenix as well as the National Post, Financial Post, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Regina Leader-Post and Windsor Star will be asked to register for online accounts after reading 10 articles for free.

If you only read 10 articles from the Leader-Post, make this one of them. Actually, you’ve got the basics. I love how StarPhoenix gets a mention before the Leader-Post, like everyone just has to admit the Saskatoon daily deserves more attention.

It goes without saying that Prairie Dog sees the value of a daily in Regina, so best of luck to the Leader-Post in this. Personally, I might be saving my 10 articles for the letter pages.

Comments { 1 }

A Dog In A Cape

By on May 5, 2013 in Comics

Over at Slate, Glen Weldon, author of the recently released Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, has posted an “unedited transcript” of a phone conversation between him and his editor:

Editor: Glen, who are you writing this book for? Who exactly is this person in your head who’s prepared to wade through 13 pages about Superman’s dog? It’s you, isn’t it?

Weldon: OK, let me just stop you right there. I think I see the issue. You are talking about Krypto as if he’s just a dog. He’s not just a dog, Eric.

Editor: Here we go.

Weldon: He is a dog …

Editor: “ … in a cape.”

Weldon: Yes, he is a dog in a cape, Eric. And that … that is awesome. OK? Empirically so. That’s just science. I mean … did you read that section? Really read it?

Editor: Oh, I read it. All 13 pa …

Weldon: Because it doesn’t sound like you really read it.

What follows is a stirring argument for the importance of Superman’s super pet, as if the argument needed to be made.

I was hanging out with my sister’s three dogs yesterday — one still a pup who was so excited about playing that he peed on the couch — and would argue that most all dogs are empirically awesome, let alone one who built himself a Doghouse of Solitude in space.

Comments { 1 }

R.I.P. Paradise Cinemas

By on May 2, 2013 in Film

Paradise CinemasThat photo isn’t great. It has two things going against it: 1. I took it, and 2. it’s a rushed iPhone pic in a dark Paradise Cinemas.

To help you out, the poster is for Oz the Great and Powerful and it says “COMING SOON” below it. Not so, unfortunately: Paradise Cinemas is closed.

I was looking for something to do on Tuesday and, having failed to convince Girlfriend to go to Oblivion with me, decided to see what was on at the Paradise. Turns out, I had checked in on their very last day as a movie theatre in Regina.

So it was that we wound up going to The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, the last film to be screened at Paradise Cinemas.

The place had always been a bit of an oddity. Its selection of movies could best be described as 1.5 run — not quite first run like the Galaxy or second run like the Rainbow, but somewhere in between. Prices were in the middle ground, too, going at $7.50 a ticket.

We often wound up going for the charm of the place. It was nice to have another theatre in town that didn’t feel like a Cineplex clone, and the theatres were a step up from the Rainbow, a place I love to be clear.

It was also a theatre with quirks, beyond being housed in a building with a mini-golf course. (The mini-golf course and arcade are staying open.) For a while, they served buckets of popcorn. Perogies, too, if you wanted them. If you wanted a beer, you’d have to finish it before you got into the theatre, but it was always an option.

Paradise was also one of our last film theatres. The Galaxy, Rainbow and Southland Cineplex have all gone completely digital. When we got to Paradise, I asked why they were shutting down the theatre and sure enough, it was because they couldn’t afford (or don’t want to shell out) to convert to digital. Now, our only film theatre in town is the Regina Public Library, and even they have to show a movie or too on DVD on occasion.

To be honest, we also wound up going to Paradise because we knew it wouldn’t be packed. There was at least one occasion where my group took two separate cars and the first car there had to try and convince the person at the counter that more were coming, as Paradise always said they wouldn’t start the movie with less than four people in the theatre. The busiest I ever saw it there was when they were the first theatre to get Moonrise Kingdom in Regina. That was a good time.

Burt Wonderstone was no Moonrise Kingdom, in attendance or quality. My group of three was joined by one fellow who sat at the back of the theatre, laughing at odd moments in a movie that had few laughs to be found. The movie really felt like a wounded animal, like at one point there was a serviceable script or at least one that showed some promise but had one too many injuries dealt to it.

The best tribute to the odd beauty of the place were our tickets Tuesday night, which read “BERT WONDERTO”. Thanks for the movies, Paradise Cinemas.

Comments { 6 }

Tim Tebow, CFL Superstar?

By on April 30, 2013 in Sports

In the only important sports story of yesterday — what else was there? Really, there couldn’t possibly be a single other story this important, not one — quarterback Tim Tebow was released from the New York Jets. No surprise. The wildly popular player wasn’t wildly successful in the NFL.

From some corners of the internet, the situation’s conjured up the collective shrug of “I don’t know … CFL?”

Our own football league’s website has a poll up right now, asking “Would Tim Tebow excel in the CFL?” As I write this, over 3,500 people have voted and the split is 52 per cent, 48 per cent, with the majority saying “Yes”. The post also posts tweets quoting Montreal Alouettes GM Jim Popp showing some interest.

If it does happen, get ready for the most American interest there’s ever been in Canadian football.

(As long as we’re talking football and dropping Deadspin links all over the place, the prospective designs for a new Atlanta stadium are worth seeing. The sarlacc’s pit is rightfully coming up in the comments.)

Comments { 2 }

Two Hours Traffic And Rah Rah At JUNOfest

By on April 24, 2013 in Music

Once, I saw Two Hours Traffic with five pieces of plaid clothing between the four members. (One of them had on a plaid jacket over a plaid shirt.) We called it 125 per cent plaid, though it’s questionable why it isn’t still just 100 per cent plaid.

When they were playing Friday night at the It’s Gonna Get Loud Tent, they were a ways off from that. Singer Liam Corcoran was even wearing a suit jacket. Suit jacket Two Hours Traffic? What’s this?

I could try to pull something about their evolving sound out of this and yes, they have changed and polished their music a little over the years. Their live show is better for it. While I haven’t spent as much time with their latest, Foolish Blood, as I have their previous records, the songs translate better live from what I’ve seen.

Make no mistake, the first few THT records are great. Somehow, the Carillon got like four copies of their breakthrough, 2008’s Little Jabs, and each wound up in the hands of someone who loved it, me included.

Strangely, those songs aren’t buoyed by THT’s energetic performance. After a Foolish Blood track, they jumped into “Whenever We Finish” and “Weightless One”, a pair of earlier gems for the P.E.I. power-pop group that fell surprisingly flat live. Whereas the new material seems built for the stage.

They were followed in the tent by their tour mates, Regina’s own Rah Rah. The group — performing as a five piece tonight — are still touring behind The Poet’s Dead, their most focused, most well written and simply best album to date. That’s translated to their live show. They fucking rock.

If you wanted to find a criticism, it would have to be that their sets feel really rehearsed now. With all the switching they have to do — which might be cut down from their days touring Breaking Hearts, actually — and how seamless they make it, they’ve honed a set that you can’t see them deviating from. You don’t get the impression that they could play anything from their albums at anytime, but that’s mostly a fleeting thought.

Near the end of the show, band member Kristina Hedlund releases three inflatable letters — R-A-H — into the crowd. I’m standing beside Gregory “G-Beat” Beatty this whole time and when the letters reach him, he does nothing. He just stands there with his hands in his pockets, letting the letters bump up against him. I get the impression that if he were locked in a room and forced to battle these balloons, the balloons would win. Eventually, they do; he takes off before the set is over.

Comments { 1 }

Review: I, Claudia

By on April 23, 2013 in Uncategorized

I, ClaudiaLucy Hill wears four masks in I, Claudia, the current Globe Theatre Main Stage production. Literal masks, that is; as a seeming extension of the mask work she explored in her solo show Bertha, Hill is currently performing I, Claudia, a one-person play that requires her to play four characters, a feat achieved through — you guessed it — masks.

Most of the masks have a cartoonish quality, or at least aren’t hoping you’d be fooled if you bumped into them on the street. The closest thing to an exception is Leslie. Her mask feels closer to a human face than the others — something in the eyes, I think — but in an off-putting, “uncanny valley” kind of way, perfect for a woman as harsh as she is.

In many ways, I, Claudia reemphasizes where attention should be placed in a theatre setting, the most obvious being away from the face but the arc of the play as well, rife with possibility but inconclusive in many ways. One minute’s a party, and the next minute’s arty.

Read my review of I, Claudia after the jump. Continue Reading →

Comments { 0 }

Slow Down, Molasses And Emilie Mover At JUNOfest

By on April 22, 2013 in Music

To be clear, the It’s Gonna Get Loud Tent, down on the city plaza, was a very nice tent. I’ve seen a lot of tents, some real bunk ones among them. I can’t even extend my legs fully in the $20 tent I own at the moment. The It’s Gonna Get Loud Tent was warm and music didn’t sound terrible in there, which is better than I can say for music tents in the past.

That said, 8 p.m. on a Friday in a tent is a rough gig. Slow Down, Molasses played well but simply didn’t get all the way there, and a crowd that included a group next to the stage trying to see how high they could stack beer cans on the table didn’t help.

I’ve always hoped for good things from Slow Down, which features Planet S and Prairie Dog contributor Chris Morin. With each release — and each Regina gig, including shows at BreakOut West and Regina Folk Festival — they figure out their spot in the shoegaze niche a little better. That niche doesn’t coexist entirely with a space still filling up with people and that featured a video board as wide as the stage.

From there, I walked down to catch a bit of Emilie Mover at Artesian on 13th. She’s an artist I missed talking about when her record, Mighty Time, came out. Didn’t mean I wasn’t listening — Mighty Time held me for a few listens, a singer-songwriter record that sounded like a focused band album.

She was in town as a Juno nominee for Children’s Album of the Year, a fact I had missed before the night. Some of the songs from Mighty Time came from the same period when she was writing her kids album, she said at the concert.

“We’d think they were joke songs,” she said from the stage, “and then three of them ended up my record. That last one started as a joke song. It was a day-drunk song.”

Live, Mover was performing mostly solo, with a piano player joining her a little later in the set. Her songs adapted well, though they lost a little without the spot-on full-band pop treatment. Mover’s voice was great, working the edge between soulful and cool disaffection.

Comments { 0 }

JUNO Awards Broadcast Live

By on April 21, 2013 in Music

James Brotheridge, WriterPrairie Dog Dog Blog readers, say hi to Ghost James. For the past few days, he’s been roaming around Regina with credentials and everything. Real official. (For the record, they told me this was one of the better passes they’d done that day.)

You’ve already seen some of the great photography of Chris Graham. You’re going to see a lot more of that in the days to come, along with blog reports on the weekend from myself and other Dog Bloggers.

For now, we’re watching Michael Bublé do his opening monologue. He just dropped a “city that rhymes with fun joke”. I can’t remember where that lands on our bingo card, but hopefully someone made a line with that. I’ll be updating this post periodically from now with tidbits from the press room, as long as the internet holds out. Enjoy the show. Look for updates after the jump.

Continue Reading →

Comments { 2 }

The Doritos Locos 15,000

By on April 17, 2013 in Life

From the Houston Chronicle:

The wildly popular Doritos Locos Tacos are taking thousands of people off the unemployment line, according to Taco Bell’s chief executive officer.

CEO Greg Creed, 54, told ABC News that the taco has created 15,000 jobs because of the heavy demand for the product. Creed said roughly two to three employees have been added to 6,000 Taco Bell locations.

Creed also said “that the company used a spray gun to coat a regular taco shell with seasoning”, in case you were wondering.

“There are no downsides!” I told my girlfriend when I read this. “It’s all downsides!” she responded. I think more reasonable minds might come down somewhere in the middle?

Comments { 1 }

Review: O.C. Dean

By on April 12, 2013 in Uncategorized

Photo Credit: Globe TheatreI don’t get the impression Daniel Maslany is excessively fancy or anything, but his role in O.C. Dean is an unglamorous one on the face of it. He comes straight out of playing Charles Bingley in the Globe Theatre’s Main Stage production of Pride and Prejudice. To refresh you memory, Bingley is the open, gregarious friend of the initially off-putting Mr. Darcy, and Maslany played him often with a welcoming grin, wearing a handsome period costume to boot. (And boots, too. Nice boots.)

The Dean of the title of this play, a one-person piece written and performed by Maslany for the Globe’s Shumiatcher Sandbox Series, is a far cry from that. A ways off from the headshot you see to the left as well. When the lights go up, the protagonist and storyteller for the evening is sitting in an office chair in front of shelves of uniform white boxes. Maslany, as Dean, is wearing a white, sterile sweater and matching pants. His knuckles are scabbed over and his face is worn from worry and unrest. Life is a struggle for Dean, a young man suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Characters with the disorder seem more common in culture these days, or at least closer to what I understand the experience to actually be like. Movies and T.V. aren’t exclusively filled with portrayals like Bill Murray in What About Bob? or Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. As the stigma towards the disorder gradually lessens — or it’s at least better understood by a wider part of the population — there’s more room for believable characters who aren’t defined by OCD. (A recent plot on the HBO series Girls comes to mind.)

There’s a narrative appeal to the disorder as well, in that it presents something at least partially unknown to the audience while also externalizing personal fears and anxieties. Which is kind of perfect for a one-person show.

The risk run is that the piece turns into an information session on OCD, or worse a catalogue of quirks. Maslany obviously understands as much. While the show opens with background on the disorder and how it manifests itself in Dean’s life, Maslany roots it all in an individual place. Dean looks back on his parents’ first inklings of what was to come, his own slovenly younger sister and his difficult childhood years. If all that sounds like a downer, it’s not. Maslany, a gifted improviser with the Combat Improv and Middle Children improv troupes in Regina, can find the humour in a situation without breaking character or losing the reality of the situation.

While the play moves through the people in Dean’s life and towards the present it’s also working towards its ending. The subtly in this regard was impressive; without telegraphing the next plot development, Maslany keeps the audience aware of the progression of time and of the story. (There’s some clever business with some buttons that I really appreciated.)

All that’s especially important for a character who’s being performed sitting down for a good part of the show. You really have to buy into Maslany’s storytelling ability, and I did.

The ending puts a point on one of the many real dilemas of OCD. The preoccupations that take hold of its sufferers are a barrier between real interaction with other people. Dean is trapped and defined by his disorder and cut off from everything, so much so he can’t say “OCD” without adding his own name in place of the D. Finding a way to connect or to recognize the individuality of those around him means finding a way out.

O.C. Dean is running until Saturday, April 20. Go to the Globe Theatre website for more information.

Comments { 0 }

Tonight! The Escorts

By on March 30, 2013 in Music

The Escorts

You’re inviting a bit of trouble when you name your band the Escorts.

“The Facebook group keeps getting torn down because they think we’re an actual escort group. We’ve had to put it back up a few times,” says Strychnine Buzz, guitarist for the Calgary rock group. I’d encountered similar problems before our phone interview. Searching for “calgary escorts” online doesn’t net me much beyond a questionable Google history.

Strychnine, known in real life as Sebastian Buzzalino, recognizes all that.

“I was joking with my girlfriend the other day was going to be ‘Whatever’. Just un-Googleable.”

The band aren’t the types to let internet problems get in the way of the music. After leaving his old band, the Blackouts, Buzzalino started the Escorts in February 2012. They’ve just released a self-titled EP on the Winnipeg label Transistor 66.

The Escorts are playing tonight, Saturday, March 30 at the German Club, along with the Thrashers.

Look after the jump for more of our interview.

Continue Reading →

Comments { 1 }

2013 Gateway Festival Lineup Announcement

By on March 28, 2013 in Music

The Dog Blog’s told you about a few festivals recently, like Sled Island in Calgary and this year’s Regina Folk Festival. Well, add Bengough, Saskatchewan’s Gateway Festival to the list

Here’s the lineup for the 2013 edition:

Steve Earle and the Dukes
Corb Lund and the Hurtin’ Albertans
Yukon Blonde
The Wooden Sky
Blake Berglund
Rah Rah
Shotgun Jimmie
Zachary Lucky
Close Talker
Harlen Pepper
Riva
Def 3 and Factor
Fly Points
Indigo Joseph
The Lazy MKs
The Karpinka Brothers
The Coldest Night of the Year
The Lonesome Weekends
Jeans Boots
Prop Planes
Kieffer
Andino Suns

Unrelated to the festival, I was actually thinking of Corb Lund earlier today while listening to Loretta Lynn’s Entertainer of the Year. A great album title, by the way. Anyhow, I was listening to this classic record that features the great “Rated X” among others. Then, it occurred to me that Lund’s “Drink It Like You Mean It” could stand up along with a lot of that album. Not “Rated X”, which is amazing, but a lot of the record. There’s no denying it: Lund’s latest, 2012′s Cabin Fever, is a country classic.

I don’t know that I even need to tell you that, or if I’d need to tell you the wealth of Saskatchewan talent here is impressive. I know you already know Steve Earle will be great.

The Gateway Festival takes place from July 26 to 28. Go to their website for information on tickets and camping.

Comments { 2 }

Thee Oh Sees’ Rock ‘N’ Roll Minotaur

By on March 27, 2013 in Music

Thee Oh Sees have put out a fun video for “Minotaur” a track off their of forthcoming album. A fucking great track, to be specific. I’ll be looking forward to April 16 when Floating Coffin comes out. John Dwyer, the San Francisco madman behind the band, always pushes these records in weird and unexpected places, for garage-rock or any music.

Speaking of Dwyer, he’s one of the curators for this year’s Sled Island Festival. The Calgary music blowout has announced a few headliners already — Jesus and Mary Chain? Divine Fits? Joel Plaskett Emergency? Yes please — but, knowing Dwyer, he’ll have interesting choices further down the bill. Judging by his curation skills with his label, Castle Face Records, at least.

Comments { 0 }

Crap Kingdom’s Not-Crap Soundtrack

By on March 21, 2013 in Books, Music, Uncategorized

ref=sr_1_1D.C. Pierson’s new novel, Crap Kingdom, is out now, but I haven’t been able to track down a copy. I’ve got a moderate hopes, though. The comedian and Derrick Comedy member held my interest with his last book, The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Didn’t Have to. The premise for Crap Kingdom, his first teen novel, seems promising, too. Its description reads like a more lighthearted version of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. Instead of the crippling ennui of Grossman’s take on a Narnia-esque tale, Pierson seems to be aiming for a funnier version, which I’m down for.

Even if the book’s a bust, its existence alone is contributing to my life with a soundtrack of all original music. You can download it for free, and I’d recommend it. Ted Leo sans Pharmacists is in fine form. Arguably, the Rosebuds track is as good as, or maybe even better than anything off their last proper LP, 2011′s Loud Planes Fly Low. Owen Ashworth, as Advanced Base, is still one of the great sad sacks out there. And the rest of the acts — the Ettes, Free Energy, Jean Grae, Matt Bennett and Sean Nelson — put forward good songs, too.

Comments { 0 }

#RFF13

By on March 16, 2013 in Music, Regina, Uncategorized

FacebookLogoIf you want to put “social media expert” on your CV — a real necessity in today’s job market — you’ll need to tone those Twitter muscles. You don’t want to look like a social media dummy, do you?

Example: I was watching a Padres/Angels spring training game the other day where they “turned over the broadcast” to Padres bloggers, and one referred to his Twitter name as his “hashtag”. Rookie move. Don’t make the same mistake!

If you’re going to be tweeting about #RFF13, you may as well follow some of the artists. I’ve gone through the lineup for the 2013 Regina Folk Festival and seen who’s on the site and reasonably active. For your convenience, I’ve broken it down into four categories, based mostly on a quick glance at their feed and some guessing. Correct me in the comments.

PEOPLE WHO ARE INTERESTING AND FUNNY We’ve got at least one real Twitter star coming: Neko Case, a funny and prolific user.

There’s also Hayden, Rah Rah, Don Amero, Elisapie Isaac, Northcote, Don Brownrigg and Amelia Curran.

PEOPLE WHO MOSTLY PROMOTE SHOWS Nothing wrong with that; you don’t always need to see a Vine video about how they made their stir fry.

We’re looking at Feist, Rosanne Cash, Man Man, Bahamas, Niyaz, Carolina Chocolate Drops, H’Sao, Briga and Reuben and the Dark.

PEOPLE WHO’VE CLEARLY GOT SOMEONE ELSE RUNNING THEIR FEED FOR THEM C’mon, Charles Bradley shouldn’t have to learn how to use Twitter. Leave him be! Same for Loreena McKennitt.

AL SIMMONS AND BUBBA C THE MC These two get their own category. Just go ahead: follow the delightful Al Simmons and the equally delightful Bubba B the MC. Quick tip: make sure to not follow Al Simmons Guns. They Twitpic pictures of guns, which is scary.

And as long you’re in a following mood, follow the Regina Folk Festival themselves. (Heck, go for Prairie Dog, too, if you haven’t already.)

Comments { 0 }

RFF’s Edmonton Connection

By on March 16, 2013 in Music, Regina, Uncategorized

FacebookLogoFor a few years now, the Regina Folk Festival and the Edmonton Folk Festival have shared some artists, especially headlining acts. Right now, for example, if you look at the artists Edmonton has announced so far, you’ll notice they also have Neko Case.

This is no coincidence, of course. When it came to be that the EFF and the RFF would be on the same weekend, it opened up opportunities for our festival.

“The size of our city and our budget would not allow us to get the people we’re sharing with Edmonton,” says Sandra Butel, RFF artistic director. “For more of the artists that are really well known, and sometimes internationally too when we bring in a big group from overseas, it’s more convenient to share the costs between two festivals.

“Especially when the other one has a bigger budget and sells a lot more tickets than we do. They’re a really big festival. It really helps us out a lot.

“There’s still a lot of artists at our festival who aren’t there. We don’t start to look the same. We’re selling tickets to the same people.”

This means to some degree, Butel winds up working with Edmonton on bringing in artists. There’s no one way it works; Butel describes it as an “organic process” that could involve direct consultation between the two festivals or Butel hearing from agents who’s been booked for Edmonton that they might be able to get a deal on.

Her Edmonton counterpart, Terry Wickham, a “a good Irish dude”, Butel tells me.

“He’s pretty old school. He writes things on foolscap. He doesn’t have a spreadsheet of artists or anything he’s working from. For years, we’ll be trying to work on an artist with him and then it’ll finally happen. Neko’s been a long time coming.”

For all the benefits of being able to work with Edmonton on bringing in artists, it also means that there has to be some give as to when she puts them in her schedule.

“I have to be more flexible in the way we present. We have to do a weekend of music instead evenings of music. That’s hard for me.

“The one year, we had John Prine and he was only available for Friday night. And, well, that’s the kids night! But that’s the only time he could do it. So what do I do? Do I pass up the chance for John Prine because it’s not the right night in my head?”

The answer: go with John Prine, even on a Friday night.

Comments { 0 }

New Music From RFF 2013 Performers

By on March 15, 2013 in Music, Regina, Uncategorized

FacebookLogoMany of the artists performing at the Regina Folk Festival this year have their fair share of history behind them, including plenty of records to dive into before RFF weekend. A few, though, have records still to come before we get there.

A couple have dropped recently. H’Sao put out Oria earlier this year, and Hayden is just now touring across Canada in support of his new album, Us Alone.

Charles Bradley’s follow-up to 2011′s No Time for Dreaming is coming out April 2. That he’s releasing Victim of Love this quick after the last is a good sign; I really want Bradley to make up for lost time. He’d spent most of his life in odd jobs all around the U.S, only getting the opportunity to record now that he’s in his 60s thanks to Daptone Records. Im thankfully for that. His everything-on-the-line soul is amazing, and promises an even better live performance.

2013 also sees a new album from Matthew Goud, a former Saskatchewan boy gone further west. He’s releasing the second album under his folk monoquer Northcote, a self-titled effort due May 7. He recorded it with producer Colin Stewart, who’s done great work for Yukon Blonde, Ladyhawk and Dan Mangan of late, so that in itself is a really good sign for Goud’s new one.

Comments { 0 }

More On RFF 2013 Artists

By on March 15, 2013 in Music, Regina, Uncategorized

FacebookLogoWe’ve clued you in to all the artists who’ve been booked so far for the 2013 Regina Folk Festival, and I’ve told you all how jazzed I am about it. It may come as a surprise, though, that putting together this lineup was easy for Sandra Butel, artistic director for the RFF, at least relative to other years.

“This year, there may have been one offer that was turned down,” says Butel. “Everything else that I put out as an offer was a ‘Yes’, which never happens. More often, there’s a round of offers, and then most of them go away, then you start again.”

A lot of those offers happen to have gone to great female acts, who make up a large part of this edition of the festival, headliners included.

“It was really odd, because I was telling my graphic artist, ‘All I can tell you is there’s going to be lots of hot women, so play with that.’”

One near the top of the list that will interest many is Neko Case. The alt-country singer was last part of the festival when she played with the New Pornographers in the early 2000s. Since not long after that, Butel’s been trying to bring Case back on her own.

“I’ve put offers in the last five or six years, where it would just be like, ‘Hey! Is Neko available?’”

Butel thinks she got Case thanks to having a good relationship with Case’s agent, who also represents former RFF performers like the New Pornographers and Calexico.

“It’s really interesting to me how many bookings happen because I know the agent. You’d think it would be, if you have the money, you can book the artist. That’s not how it works. They have to trust you. They’re putting their artist in your hands.”

Comments { 0 }

Friday Afternoon Cute Food Critic

By on March 15, 2013 in Uncategorized

Originally, this was going to be a post about pug agility contests. They’re out there, and they’re amazing. I’d never considered it, but there are pugs out there who can jump, slalom and do anything your more traditionally agility-minded dog can do. And they look great doing it in slow-mo, as seen in the middle of this video.

But we have what amounts to a YouTube crisis. The video above is shy of 150,000 views, when it clearly deserves so many more. Really, this is unacceptable. “Food Critic Pug” is one of the few dog videos I can think of that justifies being over a minute long. I don’t know that I would give the pug a full-time reviewing job, but he could at least do another four or five instalments, all with at least 500,000 views.

Comments { 0 }

Regina Folk Festival 2013 Lineup Announcement

By on March 14, 2013 in Music, Uncategorized

FacebookLogoI got the Regina Folk Festival lineup for 2013 a few days ago over lunch. I looked at the list — which you can see below — and thought, “Wow. This is a good list.”

Later in the afternoon, after a nap and some work and whatnot, I tried mentally reconstructing the list. I rattled off a bunch of artists, really good ones too. When I checked back with the official lineup, I’d missed big ones, musicians whose records I own and love.

That’s the quality of this year’s RFF: there’s so much good, you can forget some of it.

Here’s the lineup itself. According to RFF artistic director Sandra Butel, there are still more locals to be booked. Check back at Dog Blog for more posts about this year’s festival, including more info from Butel.

Feist
Neko Case
Loreena McKennitt
Hayden
Rosanne Cash
Man Man
Charles Bradley
Bahamas
Niyaz
Calypso Rose
Carolina Chocolate Drops
H’Sao
Rah Rah
Don Amero
Elisapie Isaac
Northcote
Nomadic Massive
Briga
Reuben and the Dark
Don Brownrigg
Amelia Curran
Al Simmons
Bubba B the MC

The festival runs from August 9 to 11. Early bird tickets are available now.

Comments { 1 }
Older posts