"Drink Up Vancouver!": Lily Allen 03/27/2007Anyone who's talked to me long and hard about my feelings re:live music know that something I hate is music that sounds just like a track I can hear on a computer or CD or anywhere convenient. I show much chagrin to a band who's so tight the song just drones on without any improv, fuck-up or subtle difference from the recorded track.

That said, all the tracks Lily Allen sang from her CD were pitch perfect but with a few subtle differences which made me turn into one giant loophole.

First, she used a live band to recreate the sampled tracks off the disc. Granted they fudged a klezmer here and there but overall it was the effort that counted. Also effort-wise the fact that nobody looked bored and/or "going through the motions" with the tracks made them move a bit smoother. There's something about a band obviously trying hard yet sounding effortless which makes a heart endear to them.

Couple the music with looks that make a man think "If I could talk to her I'm sure I could impress her", a profanity-laden stage presence, streety-sexy fashion sense (baggy jeans and braless baby doll top oh lala) , smoking a cigarette to cure her sore throat and a penchant for reggae-fied jamish covers of clear personal favorites and I know who I'll be secretly repeating on my ipod next time I'm stuck on the bus.

Best moment of the night: Upon chugging back a drink and throwing the cup into the audience sarcastically commenting "WOOOO a plastic cup!!!" at the person who caught it. Then turning the whole thing on it's head by apologizing for taking such a cheap shot while still somehow re-burning the cup-catcher.

Oh and audience participation on "Heart of glass" can't hurt either.

- Cam

Dear Queen, Please Don't Die:
Judging our future royals via their questionable choices in women

To really get excited about Prince William or (HA!) Prince Harry eventually ascending to the throne is to deny the colonies long-standing love affair with Queens.

I mean, who gives a crap about any but the most ancient of kings once you get away from the UK?

So thus I have taken it upon myself to judge these princes not on their class (point William) or their swagger (point Harry) or their coolness (point as yet to be determined based on any available coolness) but instead on the choices of women they choose do date and, thus, the possibilities we have for Queen.

With William we have only one choice...ugh...Kate Middleton. The girl who basically has a lock on being a Queen.

Poised? yes. Likes to wear lady's derby hats? you betcha. Attractive? sure, in an 80s kind of way. Palpably boring? Ding ding ding ding ding.

I don't even know what to say. She'd have to ride naked and bloody into a million wars she started herself screaming "THIS IS BRITAAAAAAAAAAIN!" before I'd wake up and get excited for her as a Queen.

Keep looking William old Chummmmmmmp.
Oh to Harry and ...good lord...Chelsy Davy. Not only is she a robot-sounding Afrikaans from the former capital of ridiculous, this is literally the best photo of her I can find. Because her hair covers her face and it shows off her gratuitous, albethey boxy, endowments.

So Oi getcha 'Harry you like a bird for a larf...but she has pretty unfortunate nostrils aaaaaaaaaand even though she gets credit for having sex with a prince...I'll have to pass. If you wanted to do the whole "Look out England here's Queen Paris Hilton" you could have tried a little hotter...I mean harder...or do I?
So then I saw this cover about his other girlfriend t.v. presenter Natalie Pinkham and was like...yes...yes...shake it up Harry, force us all to think a bit here. But then I saw a non-ridiculous paparazzi doctored photo:And i say "GET YOUR HANDS OFF THAT NICE BORING GIRL"!!! She doesn't need a thing like a prince groping her once when she was young to taint her for the rest of her life. How the hell can she live up to that? she' can't...and she'll cry herself to sleep in her flat with her millionaire barrister (or solicitor) husband because he isn't a prince...he JUST isn't a prince...

So there. Princes. Ruining girls lives...choosing brides who don't please me. Keep at it boys I'm sure there's someone good in like Monaco. I mean Princess Grace? woo woo She had to pop out a couple lookers. Or you could inbreed like in the olden days, I hear that keeps the blood clean.

Or, and I'm just throwing this out there, If you really wanted to shake up the royal family and be contemporary you could always take advantage of the U.K.'s same-sex marriage laws...I know a nice Canadian boy who's got a head for diplomacy and likes bejeweled riches...I'm looking at you Harry...

Cam

Lesson of the Day: Why $1.50 bag of marinated duck wings is not as good as a $1.50 bag of Chicken wings even if you think it probably is:
5. The sauce tastes like nothing and makes your house smell like Chinatown.
4. The bag isn't properly closed and leaks duck juice all over everything.
3. They look like the legs on the bad guys from "Starship Troopers".
2. Not easily matched with dippin' sauces.
1. Packaged liberally with large amounts of what I can only assume are duck hearts.

Cam

(1921-2006)The man above is dead and I care.

Why do I care about an actor who I barely remember from movies I barely liked and was most famous for episodes of David Letterman which aired long before I was aloud to stay up that late?

Some people call me "The Hoon".

It comes from a mistake that people thought my name was Cal...which changed to Calvert Deforest...then to Rory Calhoon...then eventually "The Hoon".

It was stupid and short lived but hilarious.

Sometimes my greatest fear is that I won't make a lasting impression on anyone or anything in the span of my life.

Knowing crazy stuff like this matters to crazy people like me makes me feel right about things.

Cam

Mo' Rest for the wickedToday I finally have started my campus installation. It involves photos of people having "sex" on campus. Warren took the photos while I played the best Steely haired Mr.Jay I could "art directing". Then I put them through a program and then I paste them on campus with some sexy words on them. What are some sexy words?

In class I also got pretty excited about Martin Creed
his videos featuring people vomiting are totally hypnotizing.

You should kill some time going to this website and learning scientific facts
As much as I like to think I bring the chuckles now and again, comedy blogs don't tend to do it for me...until now...maybe I'm making a turn for the worst...
take me out back and shoot me?


Some people would say family bands stopped existing due to the fact that they usually sucked.
I'd say it's because we are always creeped out by focusing on the sexual tension between brothers and sisters

Cam

St. Patrick's Day is...Waking up on a couch at 8am on March 18th when your sleeping partner and you decide it has become too painful to continue, realizing that the injury you sustained just falling over into the edge of a coffee table is probably worse than you first thought and then realizing as tempting as staying over for tacos in Richmond seemed the night before, it's probably not going to happen without some sort of bodily malfunction ruining the hour long bus ride there.

St.Patrick's day is about having all the injuries, memory loss and amusing stories from any other drunken night and not thinking "Oh man i have to cut down..." but "Oh man it's more than a week until an event which can justify that much ridiculousness"

I'm sure all the pictures will be on Facebook...

Cam

Mid-season Night's Dream

Am I the only one woefully disappointed by the mid-season replacements television has to offer? It's one thing to pull our favorite shows right when the get good, but quite another to replace them with things that are 'meh' inducingly bland (David E. Kelly I'm looking at you and "Wedding Bells") to jaw-droppingly awful ("The Winner" you know who you are)shows. Thank god my recent lull in classwork has allowed me to plunge a bit beyond what our cable actually picks up though, because I've found my first reccomendation:
"The Riches" is a good show because it's premise can only go two ways: artistically inspired or so bad it's hilarious.

Basic premise: Family of southern gypsy con artists headed by Eddie Izzard Dad and heroin addicted Mom Minnie Driver flee the gypsy lifestyle and assume the identity of a dead family in a fancy gated community. Brilliant.

Early reviews always seem to touch on the fact that the show is very "HBO" or "Six feet under" which really just means it's well acted and shot, or in this case, kind of exactly like "Big Love". I mean you've got the troubled marriage, insane kids (some wanting to stay gypsies some not) and the evil cult of their past undoubtedly eventually nipping at their heels. But I think the strengths of this show are the way it seems to subvert a lot of things which annoyed me about "Big Love".

It seems to be as much about how the regular world is horrible as it is about travelers and their class system. I've written enough damn papers on pikies and travelers in Ireland to know if there's one thing they hate its normal people so, yeah, good call. While it was amusing to have the antagonists in "Big Love" be, like, best friends and nice neighbors and squeaky clean LDS missionaries theres something a little better about kind of evil people screwing over other kind of evil people. This show isn't "Hustle" where the criminal stars somehow are always cool and nice and in some way do good, but still it'll be easy to root for them against the dumb normal people.

But enough of this. Good show. Also it finally showed me the badass Eddie Izzard and serious Minnie Driver ill fated casting directors have tried to show me for years.

Now here's hoping Andy Richter can keep this weeks good t.v. streak alive!

Cam

Workin' over time...WORK OUT!My only regret in my brief penpal correspondence with Callianne Bachman, Randy "BTO" Bachman's daughter, is that I never demanded she opine on how effectively I should "take care of business".

The business end of both my artistic pursuits and indeed life in general causes nothing but stress for me. Teleconferencing, setting up meetings...demanding things...all this does not come naturally to a man like myself.

When face with business in fact I can only go two ways. First, I can hide and pretend things don't need to be taken care of and hope eventually they take care of themselves (they never do). The other option is to go into it headfirst in some sort of put-on of a businessman who's excited about the business of negotiation and demand but that tends to end up with me threatening to "rip of someone's head and shit down their throat".

As much as my business-related disdain continues it seems like with graduation pending and filmmaking still on the go I'm forced to deal with it more than ever.Yesterday alone I had to book a meeting/discuss price and times, demand someone finally consider repairing my computer after numerous visits, go to a screenwriters conference talk and network with some musicians at a party.

It being my career path I was the most worried about the screenwriting talk. When I got there my worst fears were realized when it seemed to be full of either 20 something wannabes like myself though more comedic and talkative and 50 something shouldabeenbutdidnts who looked like housewives but talked even more. I wasn't a big talker business person so I sat alone, decidedly unethnic in comparison, palms literally sweating in the corner until some other lost soul, a 30 something mom smelling like...i'll say...Elizabeth Taylor's "White Diamonds"...sat next to me.

Luckily the talk went amazingly and it got me really excited about an incredibly regimented and structural way of producing a screenplay. All the creative types in the audience (those of the writers workshop no doubt) clearly showed distaste but I, the quiet fearful man in the corner saw the armor of 40 systematically organized and labeled index cards as my best defense against the mob of business showmanship and indeed the possible way I can take care of business...quietly and kind of afraid.

I can make meetings lying in bed in my pajamas and speaking apologetically, I can circle the block around the computer place until someone comes in and demands the repair person's attention then I can start a line behind them, I can hide in the back of conferences and enjoy the formulaic constraints of structure and I can wait until everyones very drunk at parties to get them to promise things to me.

I'm a fucking business avenger. When I buy my first business suit I think I'm also going to buy a mask.
In other news: Is everyone jumping for joy over Spielberg finally getting the rights to Tintin? Tintin is every mildly bilingual child's dream hero because he drinks and fails and isn't necessarily that good at adventure but somehow always saves the day. Plus he lives in a weird time period that probably doesn't exist and seriously has been to the moon multiple times.

I think I'm excited now but as soon as I realize I'm not actually PLAYING Tintin it'll seem a little less fun.

CAM

My Soulmate in Advertisement Form

Cause Celebre: Reasons why the last while, though chock full of crap, was still O.K.
Childhood Dreams:
I got to be involved in a film of an extremely graphic dissection of a hand. What's more I got to be the blood. THE BLOOD! It involved surgical tools and latex and lots of what, when I was a child, I had hoped filmmaking would be all about.
That's movie magic folks. It makes me excited.



Chaucer:
So you are a few hundred years dead, write in a language I barely grasp, are maybe a rapist and the subject of some excruciating essay writing...you can still weave a good yarn. Add to that the fact that half of the time you are finding creative ways to make farts more hilarious and you have my undivided attention, Sir. You truly are a stout carl for the nones.

Soft Sculpture:
1) I get to shop for supplies at Dressew and ogle the sexy fashion design students
2) I get to finally be hip enough to live out my project runway fantasies and demand certain lengths of fabric and haggle prices for the shoddy cutting by the cutting girls
3) It's more satisfying than a piece of crap cardboard thing
4) I get to talk about erotic shapes in front of my class (and they get to feel a fake boob!)
5) I can finally hug my art!

Professorial Colleagues :
Man, people who work together hate each other but if pressed from outside also pretend they like each other. This tends to work as a disadvantage as a student because you are constantly being lied to about the integrity of your program and they may, oh, lets say, in fight their way out of you getting properly credited wasting both your time and money.

But , sometimes when the moment is right you can call them out on it and they call their colleagues work bad and question their choices as a human being. Call out your professors on their friendships. They are petty petty people...just like us. Yardies:
I read/watch/listen to enough British things to love the concept of Yardies and Jamaican drug lords overall so, I was both surprised and overjoyed to be waiting on a corner of Hastings for a bus at 2:30 am and to hear a cajoling "Hey Crackaholics! Who wants some Crack?" come from the usual hoody wearing crack dealer but...BUT this time in a Jamaican accent.
I didn't want to jump the gun and assume my dream had come true but soon enough another one with a lit stem came around and then a girl too offering packages to the more together people.
I was not only pleased at my powers of looking in one direction and listening in another (hooray Vancouver!) but also from my hours of "The Wire" paying off so I could figure out their general roles at least in this street level stuff.
AND THEN...the icing on the cake: Two of them do their laundry at my laundromat. Organized crime still works folks. You can still sling crack on a downtown corner one night and be washing your undies in the suburbs by morn'.
Man. I get excited over horrible things.
And...maybe someday...god willing...I'll get shot for knowing too much.

hopefully this week is a little more exciting.

CAM