Click here to view the embedded video.

Yeasayer will bring their adorable brand of crazy (and their new-found dance-y sound) to the Commodore on April 21st as they wrap up a ginormous tour supporting their latest album, Odd Blood (Feb. 9th, Secretly Canadian). Tickets here.

The pieces can live for 8-12 months if you take care of them correctly.

Get ready for Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s VECTORIAL ELEVATION (lame name, groovy project):

Anyone, anywhere, can go here and coordinate twenty 10,000-watt spotlights in Kits and English Bay for 8 seconds; patterns will consecutively come to life all night, every night of the Olympics.

“The 10,000-watt lights will move and create patterns silently from locations in Vanier Park and Sunset Beach that cover an area of 100,000 square metres and be visible within 15 kilometres of the city’s downtown core, stretching to Richmond, the peaks of Cypress and Grouse mountains and freighters and boats on the water.”

Let’s do our best to use and abuse.

 Here are three reasons why alleys are awesome (but I they only apply in suburban neighborhoods, because downtown alleys are usually the opposite of these):

1)    They’re unpopulated.

2)    They’re full of interesting shit that you want to take home.

3)    Free off-the-vine blackberries.

I’ve had an alley addiction lately (sidewalks suck). Here’s photographic proof:

You know you have an alley problem when you come home with weird, unsexy stuff. Like an old TV or a pylon. Alcohol made it appear to be the perfect thing for your dog/ house/ project, but in the harsh light of day you realize it’s just a dirty piece of shit.

However, that’s part of the fun; alley walking is about discovery. For example:

Compost vision, making sustainability fun on West 13th Ave

Here are some other recent alley discoveries:

Giant blackberry bush! If it's in the alley, it's fair game right?

Juicy close-up

Pumpkin patch

A friendly challenge: I defy someone to post a weirder alley find than the fuzzy octopus chair.

Anvil Press; $45 List Price, $36 at Book Warehouse

I discovered this wonderful new book today, which maps Vancouver through nearly 100 poems centered in various locations across our grand and gritty city. Each poem is accompanied by a full-page colour photograph by Derek von Essen, and it’s surprisingly fun to read verse about places you know and love, like Gastown in “4:00 am”  by Wayne Stedingh, the VAG steps in “What Jack Shadbolt said” by Trevor Carolan, Wicked Cafe at 7th and Hemlock in “Purgatory” by Christine Schrum, or taking the good old B-line in “99 Express– 8 a.m.” by Bibiana Tomasic. And this is just naming a very, very few.

Yet my favorite, hands down, is a speculative poem about what it would be like to be on Wreck Beach when the dreaded “Big One” earthquake hits, excerpted after the jump:

from WRECK(ED) BEACH, 1997 by ZSUZSI GARTNER

“The ocean spits deadheads, sending logs rocketing through the city / like battering rams to crack open the Roman walls of the new library, / The Bay, GM Place, St. Paul’s Hospital, splitting heads as they whistle / by like heat-seeking missiles. All over the city film sets collapse as the / earth heaves.

The naked scramble madly up the cliff face from their beach, / clutching at branches and swollen arbutus roots, brambles tearing / at their pubic hair and genitals, as the ocean roars behind them, a / towering inferno of water swallowing pan pipes, arthritic dogs, / coolers of dope and sangrias.

They’re shocked, not because the end has come, but because it’s so / New Testament when they had thought it would be man-made– / a cold, clinical apocalypse, so they could say WE TOLD YOU SO.

There’s no longer a cliff and we’re clutching at air.”

The first-ever Vancouver performance of La Roux, the U.K’s latest electro-star, was wickedly fun and sold out to boot. Unfortunately my view of the stage was blocked by a Large Marge, but I still ended up with some sweet head shots of La Roux, which is for the best since you really just want to look at her hair anyway.

Love & Electrik are like breakfast: they always seem to start things off juuuuust right.

Would you ever guess that he’s singing “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins? 

Full house.

Finally, the lovely lady herself.

The teaser-trailer for Tim Burton’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND has hit the interweb. Enjoy the goosebumps it gives you now so that in six months’ time, when any excitement you had about the film’s opening has been faded by the unavoidable upcoming media-overdose of everything Alice related, you can look back on these introductory moments fondly.

Photo via Vanity Fair (Derek Berwin/Fox Photos/Getty Images)

 Don’t you hate falling in love with something, and then discovering that you’re just a little late in some way? Like finding out about a new band who makes your toes tingle, looking up their tour dates to see if they’ll grace our fair city, and realizing that they did play here two weeks ago but you had no idea who the fuck they were at the time? I hate that, and it’s happened again. 

Today I read that Toronto’s Julie Wilson is ending her three-year literary voyeurism project Seen Reading. This was the first time I had ever heard about the blog, so I checked it out and promptly fell head over heels. In a nutshell, Wilson spies on people reading in public places, notes the page that they are on, finds the same book in a store so that she can copy down a paragraph from that page, turns the anonymous reader into a character, and creates a fictional vignette about them using what they were reading as inspiration.

Here’s a neat video of Wilson at work.

Creeping and creativity combined! Golden.

You may have heard about WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, Spike Jonze’s upcoming filmic adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book. Since Sendak’s story is relatively sparse (48 pages, lots of grand illustrations but very few words), it makes sense that when Jonze and Dave Eggers were adapting the book into a screenplay, they had to beef it up a bit with new characters and scenarios. Well, it seems that Eggers (famous contemporary novelist that he is) had so much fun that he is adapting the film adaptation of the children’s book into a 300 page novel called THE WILD THINGS, complete with a weirdly awesome “Fur Edition” dust jacket. Strange eh?

According to McSweeney’s, THE WILD THINGS is about “the confusions of a boy, Max, making his way in a world he can’t control. His father is gone, his mother is spending time with a younger boyfriend, his sister is becoming a teenager and no longer has interest in him. At the same time, he finds himself capable of startling acts of wildness — he wears a wolf suit, bites his mom, can’t always control his outbursts. During a fight at home, Max flees and runs away into the woods. He finds a boat there, jumps in, and ends up on the open sea, destination unknown. He lands on the island of the Wild Things, and soon he becomes their king. But things get complicated when Max realizes that the Wild Things want as much from him as he wants from them”.

Sounds good to me!

AAH! Sweet Jesus. No joke, I was actually startled. Could those piercing hazel eyes be hiding the soul of an artist of literary majesty, whose debut novel might rip the veil off of humanity and make us face our deepest, darkest emotions?

Nope. The eyes on the back cover are false advertising; after all, the first sentence of L.A CANDY is “Jane Roberts leaned against her dresser, studying the way her white silk nightie looked against her sun-kissed skin”. I guess this means Conrad’s book is another vapid fart of “chick-lit”, the colon of contemporary fiction. Lauren, I expected more from you!!!!!!!!