1007: Full Frontal Diva

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2014-09-15 11:28 AM

ISSUE: 1007 FEB 12 – FEB 18, 2015 COVER PHOTO: MAT SIMPSON PHOTOGRAPHY

LISTINGS

ARTS / 17 MUSIC / 31 EVENTS / 33 CLASSIFIED / 34 ADULT / 36

FRONT

5

"I found myself reeling from the actions of my own party when they forced the Bill 44 Legislation through the house." // 6

DISH

8

"The tart was a gorgeous creation ribboned root vegetables, swirled on top of a tiny pie shell line with cashew cream." // 8

BIG AL’S

ARTS

10

"As much as I love blues and love playing it, how do you come to play music that is, in a sense, not yours?" // 11

HOUSE OF

BLUES

FILM

18

"But at some point you have to wonder if such sensitivity and respect need be accompanied by such milquetoast treatment." // 17

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MUSIC

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FRONT DYERSTRAIGHT

NEWS EDITOR: REBECCA MEDEL REBECCA@VUEWEEKLY.COM

GWYNNE DYER // GWYNNE@VUEWEEKLY.COM

Graffiti in Lugansk: "Putin is a cock."

Hey, we didn't write it. // Creative Commons

Ukraine ceasefi re?

VUEPOINT Putin doesn't have a clue if he thinks the West would allow Ukraine into NATO RYAN STEPHENS RYANS@VUEWEEKLY.COM

The stigma of dying The Supreme Court's ruling last week to lift the ban on assisted suicide marks the end of a long-fought battle for personal autonomy.

While it's a comforting win for patients left vulnerable due to debilitating and incurable conditions, we should be asking what function it serves in our sub-optimized palliative-care system.

According to the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association, we are unable to provide substantive palliative care to more than 70 percent of dying Canadians, while even fewer receive grief and bereavement services. What's more, such care typically unfolds in busy and uncomfortable hospital rooms—not the coziest environment to live one's last days. End-oflife care is psychological as much as it is physical, and it's important to consider what death represents amongst all other options.

Do patients truly want to end their lives because their pain or lack of self-sufficiency is unbearable? Or is it because of a perceived burden on their loved ones or a crunched medical system? We live in a society that stigmatizes death, the elderly and the disabled. While the Supreme Court decision may help, the stigma will persist if our health care continues to fall behind in the services it provides.

There are a number of issues holding the system back, not least of which is that the majority of Canadians die in hospitals where costs are highest. Our focus on acute, reactive health care pushes people towards hospital beds rather than promoting a more proactive, comfortable and financially efficient option such as home care, for example.

This Supreme Court ruling is surely a mark of progress, but it mustn't be seen as an end while it leapfrogs more pressing issues in palliative care. Let's not ignore how nicely it fits in a system that could do much more for those wishing to prolong their lives in comfort. V

Angela Merkel grew up under Communist rule in the old East Germany. She speaks fluent Russian. She has been the chancellor of Germany for the past 10 years.

And for all that time she has been negotiating with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on a wide variety of subjects—including, for the past year, Ukraine. They may not like each other much, but they certainly know each other.

So listen to what Merkel said about the debate in the US military, in the Congress and even in the White House about sending direct American military aid to the Ukrainian government.

"I cannot imagine any situation in which improved equipment for the Ukrainian army leads to President Putin being so impressed that he believes he will lose militarily," she said. "I have to put it that bluntly."

Does anybody think that Merkel is wrong about this? Does any sane person think Putin would flee in panic if he hears that the US is going to send Ukraine "defensive weapons" (anti-tank weapons, anti-artillery radar and the like)? If not, then this is crazy talk.

Nobody in the United States is talking about sending state-ofthe-art US tanks and planes to Ukraine, and they're certainly not offering to send American troops.

Secretary of State John Kerry is merely talking about giving some sophisticated "defensive weapons" to an army that doesn't even use the weapons it has very well. The Ukrainian army is poorly trained, badly led and controlled by a government in Kiev that is as incompetent as it is corrupt.

It sometimes wins when it is fighting the equally ragtag troops of the two breakaway "republics" of Donetsk and Lugansk. But if the Ukrainian government troops and the assorted volunteer battalions that fight alongside them start to win, then the Russians send in a few thousand welltrained soldiers and push the Ukrainians back.

That's what happened last Au-

far from Russia's border or close to it. Wherever they are, nuclear deterrence still works.

And Putin can't really be worried about the example that a democratic and prosperous Ukraine might set for his own people. Ukrainian incomes are far lower than Russian ones (thanks mainly to Russian oil and gas), and the West shows no inclination to pour money into Ukraine

I do believe that there is something fundamentally important in having a language, however imperfect, that recognizes someone for who they are. gust, and now it's happening again. Putting more advanced "defensive weapons" in Ukrainian hands is not going to change this pattern, and military professionals in Washington know it. This proposal is pure, strategy-free tokenism.

Of course, Putin's stated concerns about Western plots to draw Ukraine into NATO are not very rational either. He's exceptionally ill-informed if he thinks that Western European countries like France and Germany would let Ukraine join NATO, since that would mean they were taking on a treaty obligation to fight Russia on Ukraine's behalf.

He's completely deluded if he takes his own military's hoary arguments about Ukraine's military importance seriously. It is 2015, not 1945, and Russia has lots of nuclear weapons. It simply doesn't matter whether NATO's tanks are

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

in quantities large enough to change that. And though Ukraine is more democratic than Russia, its government is no less corrupt.

What drives Putin, therefore, is a grab bag of emotional motives.

His man in Kiev got overthrown and he doesn't like to lose face.

Even if Ukraine has little strategic or economic importance, it was part of Russia for 300 years, and he hates the idea that it might just slide into the West on his watch.

He shares the paranoia about the evil intentions of the West that every Russian inherits (for very good historical reasons).

None of this is worth a full-scale war in Ukraine, let alone a serious military confrontation with the West or a new Cold War. Maybe if the United States was prepared to go in boots and all, showering Ukraine with weapons, money and even US troops, Putin might back

away, although it would be a terrible risk to take.

But some token "defensive weapons," basically to make Americans feel better? That involves less risk of a huge Russian overreaction, admittedly, but it would still be a big step towards a new Cold War, and for no possible gain.

That is why Merkel and French President François Hollande flew to Moscow last Friday: to head Kerry off by patching up some new ceasefire (or reviving the old one) in eastern Ukraine.

They will be meeting with Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Minsk on Wednesday in the hope that they can make it happen.

At best, that would mean the effective loss of Ukrainian sovereignty over two more provinces (Crimea is already gone), and a semi-permanent "frozen conflict" on Ukraine's eastern border. Not great, but realistically Ukraine has no better options anyway.

We know that Putin is willing to settle for such "frozen conflicts" in order to cripple disobedient former Soviet republics, because he has already done it with Moldova and Georgia. We know that the victims of such tactics can thrive despite Moscow's games. Georgia certainly does and Ukraine could do even better with strong European Union and US support.

There is no satisfactory military solution for either side. Settle for a stalemate and move on. V Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

UP FRONT 5

FRONT NEWS // LIBERALS

The risk the Conservatives overlooked wasn't in making information readily available on the Internet; they ran into trouble when they tried to delete it.

A screenshot from Chris LaBossiere's disappearing blog

W

hen Ryan Jespersen had Chris LaBossiere on his radio talk show on Janurary 27 to discuss his bid for the Edmonton-Rutherford Progressive Conservative nomination, the host mentioned the candidate had buried his long-running blog. I went searching to find what the former PC member turned Alberta Party president turned PC member again wrote that he didn't want us to read.

I learned he had resigned his position on the Edmonton-Whitemud PC constituency association executive and membership in the party in 2009. "I found myself reeling from the actions of my own party when they forced the Bill 44 Legislation through the house," he wrote at the time, "and in my opinion set back the image of our province in the eyes of the world."

While reading, the posts began disappearing before my eyes. Using Google cache and archive.org, I took screenshots and cut and paste as many as I could. The posts were all inaccessible by early evening on January 27.

LaBossiere says he's done nothing wrong by deleting his past commentary.

"I've been critical of the government. That stuff's out there. It's well known," he says.

Despite being presented with a screenshot on January 29 showing his blog was blocked, LaBossiere maintains it's not true, but if it is, he

6 UP FRONT

had nothing to do with it.

"Anything that's ever been archived by the Wayback Machine is impossible to erase," he says.

That's what I thought, too, until I read about "Deletegate."

David Cameron, before becoming UK prime minister, often hyped the Internet's potential to transform politics.

A 2006 speech at a Google Europe conference had him applauding the company's contribution to the democratization of information, which, he said, enabled people "to hold to account those who in the past might have had a monopoly of power."

Cameron and his Conservative Party launched WebCameron—a website containing his video blog, as well as written blogs, podcasts and guest submissions from right-wing luminaries such as US Senator John McCain.

The risk the Conservatives overlooked wasn't in making information readily available on the Internet; they ran into trouble when they tried to delete it.

And so a bit of irony was injected into the British news cycle in November 2013 when the online tech magazine Computer Weekly revealed the Conservatives had tried to erase their entire history. Initial claims by the Conservatives that the deletions were just routine website redesign were quickly rebuked when Computer Weekly pointed out the substantial difference between managing

a web page's content and making a concerted effort to wipe the Internet clean of any trace it ever existed.

Archive.org (commonly referred to as the Wayback Machine) enables users to look at screenshots of a web page as it appeared on a previous given date. In the Conservatives' case, a robot blocker had been used to disable archives from keeping a record. Computer Weekly, which had been taking its own screen shots, described the party's attempt to erase the official record "as alarming as sending Men in Black to strip history books from a public library and burn them in the car park."

Fleet Street media, swiftly dubbing the affair "Deletegate," reported it was initiated by the Conservative party war-room chief's marching orders to erase potentially embarrassing information in anticipation of the year's general election. The attempt backfired miserably.

LaBossiere says all he did was change websites and platforms and that he has no knowledge of anybody making a concerted effort to erase them from the archives.

"I did not try to technically bury anything. I just took my site down," he insists and cautions me to "be careful" what I write.

Judith Garber, associate professor of political science at the University of Alberta, says politicians trying to erase their cyber history are different

than their document-shredding predecessors of the past because they can never be sure they've succeeded.

"People trying to get rid of their entire digital footprint need to know that's going to demand explanation," she says.

Tech-savvy citizens on social media are also at work. Remember the role the anonymous tweet pointing to Allan Hunsperger's "Lake of Fire" blog played in Alison Redford's victory (perhaps more accurately, the Wildrose Party's defeat) in the 2012 Alberta general election?

These social-media sentries aren't necessarily partisan war-room operatives. Take Peter Skinner, for example.

The Mill Woods resident is very engaged in politics and social media but says he belongs to no political party, having cancelled his PC membership over Bill 10. When he heard rumours of the mass floor-crossing of Wildrose MLAs in December, he painstakingly archived the Twitter history of all of the potential defectors before they had a chance to erase controversial content or delete their accounts. He's done the same for other local politicians, particularly those who have suddenly—and without explanation—switched parties.

"There are a whole lot of people trying to wipe the slate clean and I'm not going to let them," Skinner says.

Richard Feehan, the NDP candidate

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

in Edmonton-Rutherford, doesn't want to comment specifically about LaBossiere's blog but wonders why anyone would try to prevent people from seeing previous political positions, even if they've evolved.

"Erasing what you've said in the past makes me question what you're telling me today," Feehan says, adding he believes political figures "have an obligation to allow people to trace the steps that brought them to a change of mind."

While it's understandable that LaBossiere might want to protect himself from the embarrassment of having it known he recently called Jim Prentice "polished and old school," I suggest to him it deprives voters the opportunity to know that he quit the PC party because of Bill 44 but now wants to join the government even though the legislation remains on the books. Erasing the record erases the likelihood of voters asking why.

As LaBossiere stresses that he had nothing to do with blocking access to his posts, I ask him now that it has been brought to his attention will he see to it that they become unblocked? "No. I won't," he responds.

"Look, I'll stand by every word I've ever written," he adds.

He's just not prepared to let anyone read them.

MIMI WILLIAMS

MIMI@VUEWEEKLY.COM

remember me?

I’m Jenna. I grew up down the street from you, but a year ago I ran away from home. My dad abused my mom and me. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

ASHLEY DRYBURGH // ASHLEY@VUEWEEKLY.COM

Pronoun triumph in Vermont

70% of homeless youth have suffered some form of physical, sexual or emotional abuse.

YESS will help them heal.

University of Vermont paves the way for gender-inclusive identifiers It's time for some good news: the University of Vermont is breaking the gender binary—administratively, at least.

In 2009, UVM gave students the option to select the pronoun by which they would prefer to be addressed: she, he or ze. Alternatively, a student could leave the field blank and be referred to by name only.

Likewise, students also had the option of choosing their preferred name, even if different from their legal name. This information is captured on the campus-wide information system, so whether a student is in class or accessing health services, they (theoretically) don't have to be worried about awkward pronoun conversations or being inadvertently outed in front of their classmates.

Such small administrative changes have had a huge impact. To date, 1891 UVM students have specified a preferred pronoun, with 14 opting for "ze" and another 228 for name only. Across the United States, more than 100 schools now allow students to choose a preferred name other than their legal first name.

UVM has not stopped at pronouns: students now have the option of selecting a third gender identity. Since September, the university has added "they" as a pronoun option, and 10 students have taken advantage of it so far.

One of those is Rocko Gieselman, a UVM student recently profiled by the New York Times. Gieselman, who works on campus planning gender-related events, struggled for years to articulate their genderidentity and is thrilled by the UVM changes.

"It's like a constant coming-out process, educating those around you that there is a gender binary, and this is what it means to identify outside of it," Gieselman told the Times.

blue eyes amplifying a broad smile.

Black bra straps poked out from a faded black tank top emblazoned with the logo of the indie band Rubblebucket; a silver necklace with an anchor dangled over ample décolletage."

WTF, NYT? I'm going to be gener-

change comes slowly (the Times reports it took more than a decade of lobbying to get the university to include gender-neutral pronouns), but change does eventually happen. I don't want to wade into the complex conversation about identities, but I do believe there is something fundamentally important in having a language, however imperfect, that recognizes someone for who they are. It is a small thing, but being able to select a word (whether that's a pronoun, a gender or a sexuality) that reflects who we are acknowledges that we are important and real. Let's hope more large institutions, like UVM, will continue to create nuance and respect for gender fluidity so issues like gender-neutral pronouns are no longer seen as the providence of a fringe minority but a basic human right. V

.

that s e r u s tion enl always bes a n o d il ur id YESS Yo YESS wthere for k na. n .org like Je

We ne

I do believe that there is something fundamentally important in having a language, however imperfect, that recognizes someone for who they are. ous and assume that the author is burying the lead, rather than introducing a female-born person by their looks or, worse yet, trying to engage readers' attention with a "shocking" juxtaposition between a name like Rocko and a description of that person's beauty and low neckline. Either way, this is a really sour start to an important profile.

Back to UVM: institutions are large, cumbersome things and

help r u o y ed

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The Times did a really fantastic job honouring Gieselman's preferred pronoun use, and the article was refreshingly absent of any offensive mis-gendering or awkward pronoun side-stepping, something many other publications—even queer ones—still struggle with. So imagine my skepticism when the article opened like this: "Rocko Gieselman looked like any other undergraduate at the University of Vermont but perhaps a little prettier, with pale freckles dancing across porcelain skin and bright

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UP FRONT 7

REVUE // VEGAN

DISH

DISH EDITOR: MEL PRIESTLEY MEL@VUEWEEKLY.COM

10575 -114 Street 780.425.8939 mercuryroomyeg.com

H

The Mercury Room's local, seasonal fare is healthy and delicious comfort food

8 DISH

igh-end vegan dining. Does that sound pretentious? In some hands, it certainly could be— but at the Mercury Room, Edmonton's up-and-coming venue/restaurant, it's anything but.

The space, opened recently by three local partners, is a smallish room north of Oliver Square's bigbox eateries. When co-diner and I walked in a couple of weeks back, on the Mercury Room's very first night of dinner service, we thought we might've been in the wrong place: the whole venue, save for four tables, was filled with artists learning to paint a moonlit mountain scene.

But this was the right spot. We were seated by a wall underneath pictures and text of Faces of Edmonton, a series by local photographer and author Shayne Woodsmith. With Paint Nite in full swing beside us, plus the low lighting and exposed pillars and brick that adron the space, it felt like we were in a friend's cozy den.

The menu is small: three starters, three salads, three entrées and two desserts. We picked a borscht salad ($5 half, $8 full) and the charcuterie plate ($14) to start.

The quality was obvious from the beginning. The borscht salad was a master-class in simple, fresh ingredients cooked perfectly: grilled Brussels sprouts, carrots and beets topped with tangy sauerkraut. This was fine-dining good for only five dollars.

The charcuterie board—which must be one of very few vegan versions in town—was just as good: warm spiced nuts, housemade

// Josh Marcellin

cashew-truffle cheese, saskatoonberry preserve, garlic jam, olives and some grilled ciabatta to scoop it all up. Oh, yeah, and bourbonsmoked tofu: firm, flavourful protein that's not trying to be meat.

Whetted, we sipped on hoppy beers from the North Americafocused beer fridge. The painters drank cans of Pabst and snacked on other starters, like the pretzels with jalapeño cashew cream, their mountain scenes slowly taking shape from a blue-black fade of night sky.

The Mercury Room, like other great restaurants in Edmonton, is focused on seasonal and local food.

This was executed flawlessly in our entrées: barley risotto ($16) and a rainbow vegetable tart ($9).

The tart was a gorgeous creation of ribboned root vegetables, swirled on top of a tiny pie shell lined with cashew cream. On the side were cold, marinated mushrooms with a firm, almost meaty texture that was savoury and satisfying.

The risotto was the ultimate winter dish. With flavours of whiskypoached lobster (vegan, naturally) and truffle oil, topped with tart

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

saskatoon preserve, this lined my belly with homey, earthy comfort.

Complex and deep, this dish will shield your morale against the worst offences of cold weather.

We tried the crème brûlée ($6) for dessert, which substituted the traditional custard for silken coconut tofu. The cracking layer of caramelized sugar was there, as was a rich, smooth and cool texture from the tofu.

The owners are expecting to run dinner service Tuesday through Saturday, with the restaurant likely closing at 7 pm on Friday and Saturday to do sound checks for live music. There's Saturday brunch too, rumoured to feature perogies and housemade maple sausage with sour cream and sauerkraut. The restaurant seating could also expand into an attached L-shaped space soon, pending zoning and permits.

The Mercury Room is a strong addition to Edmonton's food scene: inventive, healthy, reasonably priced and delicious. The fact this place happens to be vegan is just (dairy-free) icing on the cake.

JOSH MARCELLIN

JOSH@VUEWEEKLY.COM

VENI, VIDI, VINO

MEL PRIESTLEY // MEL@VUEWEEKLY.COM

The Shiraz Effect

What will become the next ubiquitous grape?

Shiraz—and therefore it's only a matter of time before Malbec is dethroned.

What will be the next big grape? I haven't noticed any serious contenders just yet; people are still content to guzzle Argentina's star variety en masse. Personally, I've been enjoying the fruits of Spain and Portugal's wonderfully revitalized reds, which are often Tempranillo-based for the former and a blend of indigenous grapes for the latter. They have been the most interesting value-priced wines I've had lately, and I'm really hoping that restaurants clue into this and change their wine lists accordingly.

Some have put forward Chilean Carmenere or South African Cabernet blends as contenders to Malbec's throne. I don't see either of those succeeding: both of these wines have secondary earthy aromas that render them a little too distinctive (and sometimes downright funky) to give them the necessary mass appeal.

I'm bloody sick of Malbec.

Argentinean Malbec has become the new Australian Shiraz. It's on every single wine list; it's the wine everyone brings over and I inevitably wind up drinking more of it than I'd care to, for the simple fact that it's often the only reasonably priced wine on offer. Like Shiraz, it's super fruity (and therefore approachable) and it's got an easily pronounceable name, so it's a comforting, safe choice for new and veteran wine drinkers alike. So we've been buying it in bulk, driving up sales and reinforcing wineries' decisions to pump it out in ever-increasing quantities.

Malbec has been very popular for more than a decade. When I entered the wine world in the early 2000s it was just gaining ground; Australian Shiraz was the grape du jour and had been since the late '90s. Before that— though I was too young to experience it firsthand—Napa Cabernet Sauvignon was the big thing. Before that, Chianti.

Among white wines, a similar parade of popular singular varieties has occurred: Italian Pinot Gris and Prosecco, New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, Napa Chardonnay.

This is not a cry of wine hipsterism, mind you: there's nothing inherently wrong with drinking popular wines— they are popular for a reason, after all.

My complaints reside in the result of such mass and enduring popularity: mass and enduring homogenization.

Aside from a couple notable bottles, all of the Malbecs I've tasted recently were virtually indistinguishable from one another. The prices are starting to rise, too.

Call it the Shiraz Effect, for the same thing happened with Australian

Perhaps the industry will move beyond the need for a single-varietal wine to be championed above all others. It comes down to consumer adventurousness and advocacy; we have the power to make these changes, but only if we're willing to forego safety in favour of exploration and its risk of occasional disappointment. But with Malbec already becoming so disappointingly homogenized, what have we really got to lose?

Whether or not we've already reached peak Malbec is—just like peak oil— something that will only be proven after that fact. But rest assured, it will happen—sooner or later. V Mel Priestley is a certified sommelier and wine writer who also blogs about wine, food and the arts at melpriestley.ca

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DISH 9

COVER // THEATRE

ARTS

ARTS EDITOR : PAUL BLINOV PAUL@VUEWEEKLY.COM

'I

Until Sat, Feb 21 (7:30 pm; 1:30 pm matinees on Feb 14, 15 & 21) Full Frontal Diva Directed by Wayne Paquette La Cité Francophone, $12 – $15

// Mat Simpson Photography

10 ARTS

love theatre with consequence," Wayne Paquette states, grinning. "Where something is seriously going to change, and it's not always good. It's not always a happy ending or, 'We'll work it out.'"

The director can certainly back that statement up with his CV: during the years Paquette's been co-running Blarney Productions with John Sproule, the scripts he's selected have frequently skewed deep into the darkness, from Orange Flower Water's acidic look at relationships in wilt to, most recently, a Fringe production of Chris Craddock's 3…2…1 and its damaged young men.

Consequences-for-actions have always been paramount to the stories Blarney's brought to the stage, and the company's also been handily rewarded for its focus with acclaim: 15 Sterling nominations and eight wins since 2006.

It's also been a while since we heard from Blarney in the main season: the company coproduced a pair of shows in 2013, Murielle (with Promise Productions) and Age of Arousal (with the Maggie Tree), but 2014 was silent outside the Fringe. Then, out of the quiet, Blarney suddenly drops a three-show season into the next four months: May brings both the Psycho-inspired Mote and the bad-copsbad-situation dynamic of Steady Rain. But first up is Full Frontal Diva, a dark, psychological mystery that spreads itself across three minds in a trio of monologues. Each one is connected by the same grim death of a young man in a small town—the second part of the title reads the forgotten history of a dead queer— and each speaker feels its ripple effects from a different time and place, spanning 20 years.

"I don't think any of these characters walk away unscathed, or walk away without big wounds that sometimes will never heal," Paquette says, cheerily.

Seated across from him, Eric Wigston, one of the show's three actors, nods his agreement.

"There's no real sugar-coating in this show," Wigston says. "It's straight up—this is how these people are feeling. And we're gonna tell you about it whether you like it or not."

For his role, Wigston notes such a sustained monologue to be an actorly endurance run.

"Your brain doesn't stop working," Wigston says. "I found [that] after a couple of weeks when we just did a lot of table work, after sitting for even three hours, talking through it, reading through it once, I was exhausted. My brain was full."

Even though Wigston and his fellow castmates Aaron Talbot and Jesse Gervais are all alone on stage, Full Frontal isn't quite as minimist as it sounds: the monologues are adorned with theatrical convention—costumes, settings—and they're being directed specifically at the audience that's present night-of.

"We acknowledge that they're there watching us," Wigston continues. "That's a different dynamic than a regular one-man show where it's just get up and tell a story. It's get up and tell a story—but are you listening?"

This Blarney production marks the Canadian première of Full Frontal Diva, despite it being a Canadian script. It was written by Winnipeg-based Donn Short, who, for his part, had almost given up on seeing another staging

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

of Full Frontal Diva. He's in town for rehearsals, particularly stoked about tech day, of all things—"That's the fun part, that's where you can contribute, and where all the important decisions are made"—and explaining its history: back in the early 2000s, Short entered the script, which had originated as a sole monologue, into an international writing competition for plays with LGBTQ themes. It was one of two winners, which led to a reading, where it was picked up for a London, UK run.

Despite that buzz, getting Full Frontal produced back home proved more difficult than expected.

"A couple of theatres in New York contact me, and a couple of Canadian theatres read the show," he recalls, sitting in a cafe in the La Cité building. "It was very frustrating for me, because a number of them would say—this is a little hard to say about my own stuff, but— this is a beautiful play, it's nicely written, but we can't do it. It might offend our subscribers.

Too edgy."

The script's genesis, he notes, pulled from a few different places: a playwright friend told Short he didn't do monologues, which, for Short, seemed like a challenge; he'd been thinking of writing an atypical sort of revenge play; plus there were a few other, more constant, thematic concerns.

"Something that's in a lot of my work is how people deal with grief in particular, and how you move on with that, if you can," he adds.

"And just memories in general: how memories shape us. That's a theme that animates my work: that we drag our pasts with us. That we are what we remember."

In exploring all of that through monologues, as opposed to multi-character scenes, Short found the one-actor-on-stage format to be effective in delving deep into the mind.

"The monologue allows you to really find the character," Short says. "You have a real sense of who they are beyond what's said ... Even when you're dealing with characters who've done despicable things, because I'm putting myself in their position, I'm trying to think, well, how did they get here and what's happened to them? Thinking in terms of monologues, speaking as that person encourages that."

That all three characters find themselves at a particular crossroads was, Paquette notes, part of what drew him in.

"I'm just so fascinated with the moments and the choices we make where we start to go from a child or a young boy to becoming a man," he says. "The hard, rocky road from getting from that point to the next point is really fascinating to me. So that was a huge element for me: these characters, and their desire or reluctance to change."

That it shines a light into a deep, psychological darkness probably didn't hurt, either, given how those depths fit snug with the other shows Paquette was considering for the company.

"This is who we are, this is our voice," Paquette states of the season at hand. Then, a smile breaks across his face as he cracks wise.

"The next season will be all TYA shows."

PAUL BLINOV

PAUL@VUEWEEKLY.COM

PREVUE // THEATRE

Life, Death and the Blues R

aoul Bhaneja discovered the blues through a harmonica.

"Guitar players have a lot of genres to choose from, but harmonica players are pretty much drawn to the blues," he says with a chuckle.

Bhaneja is calling from Winnipeg, where his show Life, Death and the Blues is running at the Prairie Theatre Exchange before it arrives on the Citadel's Club stage.

Bhaneja, who's half Irish and half Indian, was born in England and grew up in Germany. His first experience of the blues came from listening to his older brother's Jimi Hendrix records; he got hooked on the genre after he was given a harmonica by a neighbour and taught himself to play while walking home from school.

By his own admittance, Bhaneja isn't a likely candidate for a blues musician.

"As much as I love blues and love playing it, how do you come to play music that is, in a sense, not yours?" he asks, the first in a barrage of questions he tosses out during our conversation.

Bhaneja describes the show as part theatre and part concert, performed with his backing band the Big Time along with R&B vocalist Divine

Brown. Each night, a different local musician will join the pair on stage for a final jam; a series of local youth blues bands is performing every night in the lobby.

Life, Death and the Blues originated from a short monologue Bhaneja presented 15 years ago at Tarragon Theatre's Spring Arts Fair in Toronto—the same festival that gave rise to another Canadian show about music, staged by the Citadel last season: Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt's 2 Pianos 4 Hands. Bhaneja is quick to point out that, of that original piece, maybe only "a couple lines from the first minute" have made it through to its current version, which he has been continually developing in a "rolling world première" since its debut last September at Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille.

"I don't think there's a blues artist worth their salt who can ignore where this music comes from," Bhaneja says.

"In many ways, the blues has become very international—there are incredible blues bands in Scandinavia and Asia; there's a big blues festival happening each year in India now. The specificity of our conversations around blues and cultural ownership and ap-

Until Sun, Mar 1 (8 pm)

propriation, that ripples Directed by Eda Holmes through people in differCitadel Theatre, $35 – $89 ent ways: here I am, doing a show about The Other and a show about stereotypes and a show about cultural appropriation, and I'm in the town that MacLean's said is the most racist in Canada."

As much as Life, Death and the Blues is about provoking conversations— sometimes quite difficult ones—it is also about capturing the essence of a musical genre on a live-theatre stage.

Bhaneja hopes as many people will see it out of interest in its deeper social implications as those who simply love music.

"How do you tell a story about music, when in some ways the answer is the music?" he asks. "It goes from being very much an idea-driven, one-person experience to a collective thing that's really shared with the audience; that hopefully by the end allows people to really receive the power that blues music has, beyond the clichés, beyond the stereotypes, and beyond some of the very real issues that surround our interest and our taste for black culture."

MEL PRIESTLEY

MEL@VUEWEEKLY.COM

Asking new questions of an old genre

FEATURING BFA ACTING CLASS OF 2015

BY BERTOLT BRECHT | MUSIC BY KURT WEILL LIBRETTO TRANSLATION BY MARC BLITZSTEIN Director Brian Deedrick Conductor & Musical Director Peter Dala

FEBRUARY 5 - 14, 7:30 PM | TIMMS CENTRE FOR THE ARTS PREVIEW FEBRUARY 4, 7:30 PM | MATINEE FEBRUARY 12, 12:30 PM UALBERTA.CA/ARTSHOWS

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

ARTS 11

ARTS REVUE // THEATRE

REVUE // THEATRE

The Laws of Thermodynamics

The end is nigh // Dave Degagné

'H

old your breath, junior," Della says, months along in her pregnancy, as she takes a drag on a cigarette. Bad parenting to an unborn child, but then again, the world's about to end. Why not?

Everything seems coated in dust at The End, at least in the tiny town of Crumb, where journalist Daniel's (Cody Porter) car breaks down. Try as he might to continue on down the highway, the creeping, sinister fog that rings (and starts to encroach upon) the town seems to direct him right back to its three remain-

proves increasingly problematic as the ambitious two-and-a-half-hour play wears on: maybe these Until Sun, Feb 15 (8 pm; 2 pm characters have almatinee on Sat, Feb 7) ready done their wonDirected by Heather Inglis dering about The End, Westbury Theatre, ATB Financial but we're never offered Arts Barns, $17 – $28 insights into what they gleaned, or even a sense of what it's like to realize that this is capital-I It. The context's omission feels unnaturally absent: to not have at least someone's thoughts on what is actually the end of the world makes it hard for the gravitas of everyones' end-days actions to really sink in. When we're left puzzling about the surface context instead of chasing its deeper resonances, it starts to wear ing denizens—waitress Della (Me- instead of intrigue. lissa Thingelstad) and prisoners Jerry (James Hamilton) and Curtis (Julien That said: there are some lively, exArnold)—between whom a vendetta citing performances here. Arnold, of sorts is slowly revealing. There are playing against type as a hulking, also visions of a girl in white (Paula orange-jumper-clad Curtis, is a sinHumby), hanging clothes, who spo- ister, incredibly effective presence, radically appears. especially once he starts talking.

Cat Walsh's script—a world première Hamilton's Jerry is surprisingly afdeveloped through Workshop West's fable, a bemused, blue-collar chuckle playwriting unit—picks up three days peppering his words, and has the from the end of the world, though most sympathetic pull to him. Thinhow or why the apocalypse cometh is gelstad, as Della, finds the nuances something never made clear to us. It's a choice to omit, sure, but one that CONTINUED ON PAGE 14 >>

Gaining one's bearings // Max Telzerow

Bears F

WHAT’S ON AT UALBERTA? Last Chance!

Runs until Feb 14

7:30 p.m.

The Threepenny Opera

By Bertolt Brecht

Music by Kurt Weill. Translation by Marc Blitzstein.

Director: Brian Deedrick Timms Centre for the Arts

Feb 27

8 p.m.

From China to Canada

Experience superb violinist Yue Deng, one of China’s most outstanding artists and artist in residence at the U of A’s Department of Music.

Holverson, Fung, Gershwin & more.

Convocation Hall

ualberta.ca/artshows 12 ARTS

rom Whitemud Creek to Mount Edith Cavell, then beyond into northern BC: Floyd has departed the usual stomping grounds of an oilpatch worker.

Broad-shouldered and hulking in a high-visibility blue jumpsuit, it's not much of a stretch for Sheldon Elter to resemble the grizzly bears his character loves so much. (And he's a dead ringer for a rig pig.) In Matthew Mackenzie's new script, Bears, oil-rig worker Floyd runs from the law after a potentially intentional workplace accident has left him a wanted man.

He flees his native Edmonton to the Rockies, through to the wilds of interior British Columbia along the same route as the perpetually contentious Northern Gateway pipeline.

Pyretic Productions, under the direction of choreographer Ainsley Hillyard, has created this rich world through movement and sound. Elter is joined on stage by five women, a contemporary Greek chorus who quite literally embody his environment through their nimble, inventive movements. They offer callbacks and comments, often crass and with a fair bit of cursing: a profane punchline to Floyd's heightened, poetic speech. Mackenzie's script also grounds that poetry with the most ludicrously banal comparisons, made even funnier by Elter's deadpan delivery: the night sky is better than an HD television screen.

These shifts in tone are matched by changes in the play's soundscape.

Pulsing electronic beats take hold when Floyd enters a new area and witnesses its animal denizens: fren-

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

Until Sun, Feb 15 (8 pm; 2 pm matinees on Feb 14, 15) ATB Financial Arts Barns, $16.50 – $21.50 zied twerking honeybees, peppy chickadees, jumping salmon. Jaunty piano and accordion numbers interject, written and performed by Bryce Kulak, who takes a brief, hilarious role as the ghost of a Canadian park ranger.

The familiar personification of nature as female, fertile and ready for plundering, plays out continually in Bears through Floyd's interactions with the chorus as he quite literally manhandles their bodies. It's a powerful visual metaphor, certainly, though it also feels a bit problematically clichéd. It works nonetheless, and certainly feels appropriate when we're talking about shoving pipelines through valleys. That's also probably a bit too intensive of a reading for most audience members, for Bears is firstly a physically beautiful and highly entertaining piece of theatre, and second a rallying cry against both complacency and extremism in our dealings with Alberta's wanton energy sector.

Bears is also—perhaps most importantly—a call against our collective lack of empathy for the environment and its inhabitants, large and small. It reminds that one doesn't need to be a left-wing pinko or a furious tunnelvision activist (as Lianna Makuch plays here, riotously) to recognize the value of our country's natural places and the necessity of becoming respectful stewards, not thoughtless conquerors.

MEL PRIESTLEY

MEL@VUEWEEKLY.COM

Artists: Sarah McLachlan & Alberta Ballet Artists; Photo: Phil Crozier

The Music of Sarah McLachlan Choreographed by Jean Grand-Maître - Artistic Director, Alberta Ballet

“Shimmers in beauty” –The Globe & Mail FEBRUARY 20-21, 2015 780.428.6839 | www.albertaballet.com

PRODUCTION SPONSOR

Join us before the show for a fun-filled party, themed around all things LOVE! Your ticket includes: • Delightful hors-d’oevres • Themed activities • And a ticket to see the show

February 20 | Tickets: $100 per person Tickets at albertaballet.com VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

ARTS 13

ARTS

ADVERTORIAL

Our Lady of Mount Carmel WHERE STARS ARE BORN The Threepenny Opera REVUE // THEATRE

Do you have a very creative son or daughter? Do they like to express themselves in the arts?

The Performing Arts Academy at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Elementary and Junior High would be perfectly suited for them!

The Performing Arts Academy is a program based around the Fine Arts; Drama, Music, Film Study, Visual Arts, “Students are able to share in and Dance. The aim of the their passion for the arts, inspire Academy is to further develop each other, and have fun our gifts from God, acquire skills and techniques in a exploring the various variety of specified disciplines, opportunities I create in our and participate in an overall Performing Arts Academy!” body, mind, and spiritual Anna Paquin, Academy Director experience through the Performing Arts.

The Arts allow us to celebrate life, become in tune with the world around us, explore our imaginative processes, and merge our dreams with the realities of our future. We challenge our students to take risks, support each other, and see the power of a dream. The Mount Carmel Performing Arts Academy is where stars are born.

Students will be introduced to the history of the performing arts and the influences that have shaped them. They will also develop an understanding of related subjects such as media and culture.

Performance skills and stagecraft are developed through real performances. Students will acquire new skills such as costuming, stage make-up, prop construction and set design. They will also acquire an understanding of the elements of lighting and sound, as well as how to stage a production.

At Our Lady of Mount Carmel we have an Elementary Performing Arts Academy from Grades 3-6 and a Junior High Performing Arts Academy Grades 7-9. We have a wonderful, warm, and welcoming Performing Arts Theatre room to explore performance on stage in school; as well as, opportunities to perform in front of audiences! Academy students are featured in school celebrations, Christmas concerts, year end Drama productions; we participate in the “Heart of Glee,” Kiwanis Music Festival and many more performances throughout the year!

Being located in the Theatre District of Old Strathcona, we will be able to draw from the rich resources already established and build new networks and contacts from the professionals in the field. We have attended several plays at the TransAlta Arts Barns and we bring in various artists for workshops with our Performing Arts Academy students. These artists include: clay, stained glass, ceramic, mural, visual artist, local directors/film makers, musicians, and singers.

If this sounds like it would be a perfect fit for your son or daughter try it for a day! Book a shadow day! Your child will be partnered with a Performing Arts Academy student and they will see first-hand what our community is like at Mount Carmel and find out what our academy is all about!

For further information to book a shadow day please contact: Our Lady of Mount Carmel Elementary/Junior High School Anna Paquin, Performing Arts Academy Director anna.paquin@ecsd.net 10524-76 Avenue • Phone: 780 433-1062 www.ourladyofmountcarmel.ecsd.net 14 ARTS

One a penny, two a penny ... // Ed Ellis

A

beggar's splendor, indeed: The Threepenny Opera revels in the lowbrow, the vulgar, the general uncouthness of a dystopic England.

The script is German playwright Bertolt Brecht's most popular, as much for its socialist criticism of capitalism as for Kurt Weill's music, particularly the jazz standard "Mack the Knife" that originates therein. The story follows one Macheath (Mack, played by Hunter Cardinal), a narcissistic criminal attempting to climb the social ladder on the backs of the beggars, thieves and whores who are his contemporaries.

It's an ambitious choice for the University of Alberta's BFA graduating class, both for the weight and breadth of the script's social critique as for its challenging musicality. The cast, uneven in their handling of the vocal demands, are aided by a live band on stage. Conducted by Peter Dala, the music adds a welcome streak of discordant, jazzy vitality that fills in for some of the vocal performances that fail to live up to the grandness we associate with opera.

Brecht's work is notorious for its pomposity and general stuffiness. Studio Theatre's production releases a lot of that hot air by embracing bawdiness—almost to the point of vaudevillian farce—and taking a cue from the opening subtitle's description of the show as "beggar splendor." This shines through most clearly in the play's sartorial elements, a set of

THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS << CONTINUED FROM PAGE 12

of both dark humour and southern sensibility.

Porter, a fine and capable actor, seems a bit stuck in wits-end cynicisms here, which makes it hard to connect with the character even though he's kind of our de facto protagonist as the stranger in this strange land. That's partly due to writing—a beleaguered "why?" is a most frequent line of dialogue, and the character proves to be more of a flesh-and-blood MacGuffin, actually, bringing us to Crumb as an accidental stop on a quest of reconciliation,

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

Until Sat, Feb 14 (7:30 pm; 12:30 pm matinee on Thu, Feb 12) Directed by Brian Deedrick Timms Centre for the Arts, $11 – $22 opulent costumes (by Robyn Ayles) skewing towards the garish and tawdry, which also put one in mind of a dystopic 1920s rather than the script's original Victorian setting.

The blocky, hulking set will be familiar to audience members who caught director Brian Deedrick's last production at the Timms, 2011's Nicholas Nickleby. Here it is used mostly for visual layering, fleshing out the background via backlit silhouettes. The majority of the action still occurs front and centre, however, lending a claustrophobic air to the production.

Brecht's condemnation for all societal strata is complete: everyone is vulgar and tarnished, selfish and generally unlikeable. It's a sort of carnival of the disagreeable, and to that end the proceedings become tedious as this long play wears on, despite the cast's best efforts towards titillation and crude humour. Opera is meant to stir up grand emotions in its audience; here, dreariness and bemusement rule.

And, as much as this discontent was Brecht's entire point, that knowledge doesn't make it any more welcome.

MEL PRIESTLEY

MEL@VUEWEEKLY.COM

we learn, but the emotional importance of it never quite gels.

Thermodynamics takes place on a gorgeous, epic-sized set, excellently designed and welllit by Nick Blais, comprised mostly of occasionally twitching telephone poles. They look like Roman columns; maybe it's a nod to one long-dead civilization at the final rites of another, but regardless, it offers an appropriate visual weightiness to match the situation at hand.

PAUL BLINOV

PAUL@VUEWEEKLY.COM

REVUE // THEATRE

REVUE // THEATRE

One Flea Spare

Famous Puppet Death Scenes But if you don't enjoy a particular segment you don't need to wait long for the show to move on to something completely different. (With such a vast and varied collection, one wonders how many vignettes have been left on the cutting room floor.)

Although Nathanial Tweak's philosophical monologues recur throughout Famous Puppet Death Scenes, the most compelling throughline is the reappearance of a giant fist intent on crushing a bunch of lumpy puppets. These little wooden people flee the fist's cold, implacable malice in the same way that we try to outrun death, and with the same unavoidable result each time.

Ultimately, though some of its episodes feel underdeveloped compared to the others, Famous Puppet Death Scenes succeeds in making us laugh, making us sit in sober silence, and making us either squeal with delight or squirm with dread as we wait for that inevitable moment when the fist will drop.

Until Sun, Feb 22 (8 pm; 2 pm Sunday matinees) Directed by Tim Sutherland Eastglen High School – Majestic Theatre, $15 – $35

I

n the opening moments of Famous Puppet Death Scenes, our melancholy, meditative and curiously naked narrator Nathanial Tweak squeaks out a depressing pronouncement: "We are all dying each moment! We are dying as I speak!"

These words inspire a sense of urgency which pervades this fast-paced show. Over an hour and a half, we see more than 20 quick episodes of death and disaster. We're treated to a salmagundi of scenes with silly names, including Das Bipsy und Mumu Puppenspiel (a terrifying children's TV show set to the beat of Berlin technotrance)

Until Sun, Feb 15 (7:30 pm, 2 pm matinees Feb 14 & 15) Directed by Amy DeFelice Varscona Theatre, $15 – $25

and The Ballad of Edward Grue (a cautionary tale about dressing like a deer and cavorting through the forest). On the more serious end we're presented with The Cruel Sea, where an old man slowly disintegrates as a clock ticks, and Lucille Arabesque, the quietest and most poignant scene in the show.

Although Death Scenes strikes a clever balance between comedy and tragedy, some scenes are too intent on being symbolic and come off as opaque. A whimsical waft of soap bubbles might represent the fragility of life, but what is it doing in the middle of this puppet show?

BRUCE CINNAMON

BRUCE@VUEWEEKLY.COM

Roped in

W

hat lies beneath us: beneath our fancy clothes, the society we've built or the stories we tell others about ourselves?

This is the major theme explored in One Flea Spare, a script by Naomi Wallace that pulses with the acid power of the English language. Produced by Trunk Theatre on a spartan set at the Varscona—a square wooden riser, a picture frame and plain chairs—this is a challenging work that is strongly performed.

It opens with a monologue by Morse (a standout Eva Foote), a 12-year-old we're told has lost both her parents to the bubonic plague in 1665 London. The imagery is vivid: she speaks of lying under her dead father for two days before crawling free, of a dead girl floating in the Thames, of people going to the pits of buried dead and their hearts breaking with a softly audible "cluck" of the tongue.

Then we're taken inside the home of the Snelgraves, an upper-class couple quarantined against the creeping death of the plague. Their bubble is burst when Morse and a mysterious sailor named Bunce (Cliff Kelly) break into their home, seeking refuge from the urban misery. First contact is the lady Snelgrave (Linda Grass) catching Bunce relieving himself in their fanciest vase.

their floors with vinegar. Morse, supposedly the surviving daughter of the Snelgrave's wealthy peers, is taken in as an equal: "a good Christian."

Forced into a 28-day quarantine by their lecherous, profiteering house guard Kabe (a deliciously menacing Douglas Tokaryk) the four personalities clash inside the cramped confines. Dark, buried secrets scratch free. The threat of violence fairly seethes under the surface as paranoia, frustration and embarrassment push them to the edge.

Wallace's powerful, poetic prose rings off the back walls of the Varscona, drilling the audience to their seats. But in a cast of very strong actors, Kelly seems just a little outclassed, his lines lacking slightly in force and gut-punch.

Although bleak, One Flea Spare is often darkly comic. It's worth braving the darkness for the quality of the challenging writing and performances.

JOSH MARCELLIN

ARTIFACTS

PAUL BLINOV // PAUL@VUEWEEKLY.COM

formers for a one-night-only showcase of scintillating moves. (Bonnie Doon Community Hall [9240 - 93 St], $25 – $50)

That's agent Gunn to you // Virginia Harold Photography

Ray Gunn and Bazuka Joe / Fri, Feb 13 (8 pm) Love burlesque but wish there were more men bustin' moves and losing layers onstage? Take heed: Edmonton Burlesque Events is bringing Ray Gunn and Bazuka Joe, two-thirds of the Stage Door Johnnies—"the world's premier all-male burlesque troupe"—to town, to partner with a scatter of local per-

The Clock 24-hour screening / Fri, Feb 13 (7 pm) Sometimes art takes some time to sink in. Sometimes a full, night-andday stretch of your time, as in the case of The Clock, a 24-hour video installation created by Christian Marclay, which is arriving at the AGA after taking the top prize of the 2011 Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art. with its massive edited montage of clips of movies and TV, strung together into an unbroken stream of visuals. Of course, you could go nab snippets of the film during the gallery's regular hours, but The Clock will screen three times in its 24-hour entirety

during its February to April run, the gallery remaining open so the most ardent of visual-arts fans can take it all in in one go. That's happening February 13, March 13 and April 11.

Sleep is for the weak! (Art Gallery of Alberta) Valentine's Train Radio Show / Fri, Feb 13 and Sat, Feb 14 (8 pm); Sun, Feb 15 (2 pm) It's the '30s, and down-on-his-luck James finds himself launched into escapades and romance—taking him from Strathcona to the edges of the Mexican border—when he starts working for the enigmatic Mr Valentine. The Valentine's Train Radio Show was written by the indelible Andrea House, so you can bet on a rich weave of music stringing all the mishaps together, too. (Capitol Theatre, Fort Edmonton Park, $24)

JOSH@VUEWEEKLY.COM

A class system is established quickly: William Snelgrave (Glenn Nelson), in his sumptuous coat and "gentleman leather" shoes makes the barefoot, ragged Bunce his servant, swabbing VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

ARTS 15

Where to next?

ARTS PREVUE // SNOW FEST

Fri, Feb 13 – Sun, Feb 22 Hawrelak Park, free Full schedule at silverskatefestival.org

They’ve been to P.E.I., NYC, LAX and YYZ. They’re right at home in Hobart town and hike the equator round and round.

That tough leather? Well, we oil it.

Step right up to a Third World “toilet!”

Good in mud, good in snow.

No darn laces!

(They make you slow.)

Where to next?

Why ask?

Just go!

The Chisel Toe available in Crazy Horse Brown, Black, Stout Brown, or Rustic Brown

blundstone.ca Nighttime is the right time for winter fun

NORTHERN LIGHT THEATRE PRESENTS

“HOW ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH CAN YOU BE BOTH A BOY AND A GIRL?”

the pink unicorn by elise forier edie STARRING LOUISE LAMBERT

“NOTHING IN MY LIFE HAD PREPARED ME FOR GENDER QUEER”

Silver Skate Festival W

hat started out as a handful of people celebrating Dutch outdoorsiness with deep fryers and speed skates has evolved into Edmonton's longest-running winter festival. Silver Skate Festival, the annual thumbing of the nose to Old Man Winter, turns 25 this year—and it's been growing like a snowball rolling down a hill.

Festival producer Erin Di Loreto has been involved in Silver Skate for the past eight years. She says last year the event had 70 000 visitors, attracted by the bloodpumping activities held day and night: for families there's skating, snowshoeing, ice sculptures, winter sports or frisbee; for athletes there's a zombie run, a traditional Dutch speed-skating sprint called Kortebaan and the Edmonton Win-

ter Triathlon; and culture lovers can take in live music, fire sculpture and the nighttime storytelling magic of folk trails.

Volunteers descended on Hawrelak Park on January 12 to start setting up the forms and manipulating the snow that makes the frosty infrastructure. Weather, always the biggest variable, is accounted for: organizers borrowed a snow gun from Snow Valley to make sure that warm weather wouldn't make a puddle of their plans.

Like every year, Silver Skate is totally free—except for the romantic sleigh ride for two on Valentine's Day, which is $50. Di Loreto says she's especially excited by this year's addition of a Cree winter camp.

"It's a true Cree lodgepole winter

camp," Di Loreto says. "It's how the Cree people actually camped back in the day to hunt and to forage for food."

For a quarter-century now, Silver Skate has done its best to convince Edmonton that winter is the time to be outdoors. It's no easy task, especially with the instinct to nest underneath piles of blankets with Netflix.

The secret to enjoying the season?

Move it or lose it, Di Loreto says.

"You can't expect to just stand around in the cold and stay warm," she adds. "You have to be constantly moving and be doing activities. If you're dressed properly and you're out there moving and having fun, you're guaranteed to have a good time."

JOSH MARCELLIN

JOSH@VUEWEEKLY.COM

Edmonton Region proudly presents

STAGE STRUCK! 2015 REGIONAL ONE-ACT PLAY FESTIVAL

Friday, Feb. 27 – 7 to 10 pm The Ugly Princess by Heather Morrow *NEW WORK*

La Cite Francophone 8627 91 St, Edmonton

The Runner by Phil Kreisel *NEW WORK* Saturday, Feb. 28 – 1 to 3 pm Loris and Beaver Play Bingo by Nicole Grainger & Maria Colonescu *NEW WORK* Never Let the Crew See You Cry by Linda WoodEdwards

FEBRUARY 20 - 28, 2015 PREVIEW FEBRUARY 19 PCL STUDIO, ATB FINANCIAL ARTS BARNS, 10330 84 AVENUE FOR TICKETS CALL 780-409-1910 OR VISIT WWW.FRINGETHEATREADVENTURES.CA

Tickets through TIX ON THE SQUARE or at the door Weekend pass: $35 adult; Single ticket: $14 adult; $12 senior/student $28 senior/student

Saturday, Feb. 28 – 1 to 3 pm Cartoon in a Cartoon Graveyard by Gerald Osborn Public Adjudication, Awards Presentation and Reception

W W W. N O RT H E R N L I G H T T H E AT R E . CO M

16 ARTS

Adjudicated by Award Winning Playwright Vern Thiessen

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

*All plays are one hour long or less

ARTS WEEKLY EMAIL YOUR FREE LISTINGS TO: lIStINGS@VueWeeKly.COM FAX: 780.426.2889 DEADLINE: FrIDay at 3PM

DANCE GYMOPÉDIES AND HENRI MICHAUX: MOUVEMENTS • Timms Centre for the Performing Arts, northeast corner of 112 St and 87 Ave • Feb 20-21, 8pm • $35 (adult), $20 (students/seniors)

SUGAR FOOT SWING DANCE • Sugar Swing, 10545-81 Ave • 587.786.6554 • sugarswing. com • Swing Dance Social every Sat; beginner lesson starts at 8pm. All ages and levels welcome.

Occasional live music • $10, $2 lesson with entry SWEET NOTHINGS BY VIVA DANCE • Art Gallery of Alberta's Ledcor Theatre, 2 Sir Winston Churchill Square • lilley.stephanie@gmail.com • A collection of love themed dances accompanied by live music. An all ages production • Feb 14, 6:30-9:30pm

Rd 564 • Education-rich entertainment facility for all ages

GALLERIES + MUSEUMS ALBERTA CRAFT COUNCIL GALLERY • 10186-106 St • 780.488.6611 • albertacraft. ab.ca • Feature Gallery: 15 ON 35: artwork and written insights by a selection of 15 long-term, mid-career, emerging and new members; Jan 17Mar 28 • The Recipients: Recipients of the 2014 Alberta Craft Awards, Anna Rasmussen, Shona Rae and Andrea Blais, three talented and passionate artists; Jan 10-Feb 14 ART GALLERY OF ALBERTA (AGA) • 2 Sir Winston Churchill Sq • 780.422.6223 • youraga. ca • BMO World of Creativity: World of Boo: Jason Carter and Bridget Ryan; until Apr 16 • VIEW FROM A WINDOW: Photos by Edward Burtynsky, Robin Collyer, Eamon MacMahon, Laura St Pierre; Dec 6-Mar 1 • FUTURE STATION: 2015 ALBERTA BIENNIAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART: Jan 24-May 3 • art For lunch: With Ali Nickerson; Feb 19 • Open Studio adult Drop-In; Wed, 7-9pm; $18/$16 (AGA member) • SUBURBIA: A MODEL LIFE (Photographs 1970s-80s); Dec 6-Mar 1 • rBC New Works Gallery: OBSCURE INVERSIONS: Colin Smith; Dec 6-Mar 1 • all Day Sundays: Art activities for all ages; Activities, 12-4pm; Tour; 2pm • late Night Wednesdays: Every Wed, 6-9pm

780.424.1573 • milezerodance.com • A unique assemblage of interdisciplinary artists performing beyond borders and expectations of performance • Feb 20-21; 8-10pm • $15 (students & Mile Zero Dance members), $20 (adults)

ART GALLERY OF ST ALBERT (AGSA) • 19 Perron St, St Albert • 780.460.4310 • artgalleryofstalbert.ca • PROXIMITIES: video installation works

by Alysha Creighton; Feb 5-28 • art Ventures: What is and what isn’t? (Feb 21), 1-4pm; drop-in art program for children ages 6-12; $6/$5.40 (Arts & Heritage member) • ageless art: Terrific Photo Transfers (Feb 19), 1-3pm; for mature adults; $15/$13.50 (Arts & Heritage member) • Preschool Picasso: Shapes and Silhouettes (Feb 14), 10:3011:30am; for 3-5 yrs; pre-register; $10/$9 (Arts & Heritage member)

FILM

BUGERA MATHESON GALLERY • 10345-124

WITHOUT BORDERS ~ A SALON SPECTACLE • DC3 Art Projects, 10567-111 St •

CINEMA AT THE CENTRE • Stanley Milner Library Theatre, bsmt, 7 Sir Winston Churchill Sq • 780.496.7070 • Film screening every Wed, 6:30pm • Safe (not rated); Feb 11 • Free

DARK MATTERS SHORT-FILM FESTIVAL • TELUS World of Science, 11211-142 St • 780.451.3344 • Celebrate local and international talent, as the Telus World of Science showcases their films in the IMAX Theatre • Feb 19, 7-10pm • $14

DEATH AND DYING FILM SERIES • GB Building, 9562-82 Ave • lorainej@shaw.ca • 780.642.8703 • Watch three films exploring the mysteries of life, death and dying • 2nd Sun, FebApr, 1-4pm • Free (donations accepted)

EDMONTON FILM SOCIETY • Royal

St • bugeramathesongallery.com • Red Hot Reds; Feb 14-21

CARROT COMMUNITY ARTS COFFEEHOUSE • 9315-118 Ave • artsontheave.org • 780.471.1580 • Rhythms of the Earth African Textile Workshop: Learn how to make African textiles in a workshop facilitated by Jean Walrond • Feb 21, 1-5pm • Free (pre-registration required)

CENTRE D’ARTS VISUELS DE L’ALBERTA (CAVA) • 9103-95 Ave • 780.461.3427 • savacava.com • Exhibition of a selection of member's artwork; Jan 7-Feb

COMMON GROUND CAFE • 50 Brentwood Blvd, Sherwood Park • artgallery@strathcona.ca • 780.410.8585 • Coffee & Critique: coffee and art; Feb 20; 6-8pm; $10

FROM BOOKS TO FILM • Stanley A. Milner, 7

DAFFODIL GALLERY • 10412-124 St •

Sir Winston Churchill Sq • 780.496.7000 • epl.ca • Films adapted from books every Fri afternoon at 2pm • The Fault in Our Stars (PG); Feb 13 • Never Let Me Go (14A); Feb 20 • One Day (PG); Feb 27

780.760.1278 • Not Your Parents' Watercolour; Jan 14-Feb 14 • All The Flowers; Feb 25-Mar 18

METRO • Metro at the Garneau Theatre, 8712109 St • 780.425.9212 • REEL FAMILY CINEMA: The Princess Bride (Feb 14), The Lego Movie (Feb 21), Fantastic Mr. Fox (Feb 28) • CULT CINEMA: Love Streams (Feb 24) • SCIENCE IN THE CINEMA: Wall-E (Feb 16) • Crime WatCh: Shawshank Redemption (Feb 17) • metro Bizarro: Black Mama, White Mama (Feb 18) OSCAR NOMINATED SHORTS – LIVE ACTION AND ANIMATION • Landmark Theatres City Centre 9 • edmontonfilmfest.com • Presented by the Edmonton International Film Festival (EIFF) • Feb 18: Animation (6:30pm), Live action (8:30pm) • Feb 19: Animation (6:30pm), Live action (9pm) • Feb. 19th: 6:30pm • Exclusive Lunchbox Shorts: The Oscar Nominees; Feb 19-20, 12pm • $13 (adv)

SCOTTSBORO: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY • Edmonton Public Library (Whitemud Crossing Branch), 4211-106 St NW • hrfilms@jhcentre.org • jhcentre.org/news-blog/do-rights-thing-filmseries-black-history-month-sun-feb-15 • Part of Black History Month. Scottsboro: An American Tragedy recounts the story of nine black teens, falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a train in Alabama in 1931 • Feb 15, 2-4pm • Free (donations welcome)

WHITEMUD LIBRARY • 4211-106 St • Monthly film series presented by the John Humphrey Centre for Human Rights and Whitemud Library • This month: Scottsboro: An American Tragedy (Feb 15), A Class Apart (Mar 15)

DOUGLAS UDELL GALLERY (DUG) • 10332124 St • douglasudellgallery.com • Matthew Pillsbury: Tokyo; Feb 7-Feb 21 FAB GALLERY • 1-1 Fine Arts Bldg, 89 Ave, 112 St • 780.492.2081 • Jesse Thomas: Alcuin Awards for Book Design; Jan 20-Feb 14 • Book Design in Canada; Jan 20-Feb 14 GALLERY@501 • 501 Festival Ave, Sherwood Park • 780.410.8585 • strathcona.ca/artgallery • HE ART OF NUI-DO, TRADITIONAL JAPANESE SILK EMBROIDERY: Bev Bunker: Japanese emroidery; Jan 30-Feb 21 GALLERY 7 • Bookstore on Perron, 7 Perron St, St Albert • 780.459.2525 • Bev Bunker (embroidery); Jan 27-Feb 23

GALLERY AT MILNER • Stanley A. Milner Library Main Fl, Sir Winston Churchill Sq • 780.944.5383 • epl.ca/art-gallery • Connecting to the Emotion; Feb 1-28

GALLERIE PAVA • 9524-87 St, 780.461.3427 • As the Flowers Unfold: featuring Cheryl Feragen; Jan 17-Mar 3

HAPPY HARBOR COMICS • 10729-104 Ave • happyharborcomics.com • Artist-in-Residence: DANIEL HACKBORN; until Apr 25, 2015 • OPEN DOOR: Collective of independent comic creators meet the 2nd & 4th Thu each month; 7pm HARCOURT HOUSE GALLERY • 3 Fl, 10215112 St • 780.426.4180 • Main Space: Navigating Boundaries: Jes McCoy and Kelsey Stevenson; Jan 29-Mar 5

JEFF ALLEN ART GALLERY (JAAG) • Strathcona Place Senior Centre, 10831 University Ave, 109 St, 78 Ave • 780.433.5807 • seniorcentre. org • SERENDIPITY BY ARTIST ELEANOR LOHNER: Jan 29-Feb 25

JURASSIC FOREST/LEARNING CENTRE • 15 mins N of Edmonton off Hwy 28A, Township

• Main Space: WE: Jan 10-Feb 15 • Stephen G.A. Mueller: Feb 13-Mar 28; Opening reception: Feb 13, 7-9:30pm • Holly de Moissac: farsighted; Feb 13-Mar 23 • Parka Patio: Feb 22, 8pm; $15 (adv)

LOUIE PHOTOGRAPHY GALLERY ON 124 • 10634-124 St • louiephotogallery.com • The Manila Project by Larry Louie/The Mae Sot Project

by Gerry Yaum; Feb 7-28

MCMULLEN GALLERY • U of A Hospital, 8440112 St • 780.407.7152 • LARISSA BLOKHUIS AND SYLVIA GRIST: Glassworks from artist Larissa Blokhuis and collaged landscapes from Sylvia Grist; Feb 7-Apr 5; Opening reception: Feb 12, 7-9pm

MULTICULTURAL CENTRE PUBLIC ART GALLERY (MCPAG)–Stony Plain • 5411-51 St, Stony Plain • multicentre.org • Maria Madacky - Exhibition of New Works: Feb 12-Mar 18; Reception: Feb 17

MUSÉE HÉRITAGE MUSEUM–St Albert • 5 St Anne St, St Albert • 780.459.1528 • Wus’kwiy / Waskway: From Berry Baskets to Souvenirs; Jan 27-Apr 12

NAESS GALLERY • Paint Spot, 10032-81 Ave • 780.432.0240 • paintspot.ca • Growing Up, a series of oil paintings by Daphne Cote; Jan 5-Feb 17 • ARTISAN NOOK: What Can’t You Do with A Sketchbook!?!, a group exhibition of personal sketchbooks; Jan 5-Feb 17 • VERTICAL SPACE: Maximum Energy, a solo exhibition of Stephen Ferris’s visually complex paintings; Jan 6-Feb 16 • Opening reception: Feb 12, 6-9pm (all three exhibits) per Ave • 780.455.7479 • probertsongallery.com • WINTER SHOW: recent work and older favourites from gallery artists; Feb 7-Feb 24

PRINCE OF WALES ARMOURIES HERITAGE CENTRE • 10440-108 Ave • info@projectheroes. ca • projectheroes.ca • Project Heroes: The Faces and Stories of Sacrifice: Get to know the Canadian soldiers who died in the Afghanistan war through their eyes, in photographs, videos and letters • Nov 3-Mar 4

CREATIVE PRACTICES INSTITUTE • 10149122 ST, 780.863.4040 • creativepracticesinstitute. com • Andrew Buszchak, Emilienne Gervais, and Ali Nickerson; Jan 27-Mar 7

Theatre, 8882-170 St • cineplex.com/Events/ DigitalFilmFest • Your favourite sci-fi, fantasy and cult films back to the big screen, like X-Men, Kill Bill and Blade Runner • Jan 30-Feb 5

LATITUDE 53 • 10242-106 St • 780.423.5353

PETER ROBERTSON GALLERY • 12304 Jas-

Alberta Museum Auditorium, 12845-102 Ave • 780.453.9100 • royalalbertamuseum.ca • royalalbertamuseum.ca/events/movies/movies.cfm • Winter 2015 Make Us Laugh; Feb 9-Apr 13

GREAT DIGITAL FILM FESTIVAL • Scotiabank

LANDO GALLERY • 103, 10310-124 St • 780.990.1161 • landogallery.com • February Exhibition and Sale; until Feb 19 • Fine Art Auction; Feb 22

ROYAL ALBERTA MUSEUM • 12845-102 Ave • 780.453.9100 • royalalbertamuseum.ca • WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR: Nov

28-Apr 12 • NOWHERE PEOPLE: Photos, giving a human face to the global issue of statelessness,

by Greg Constantine; Dec 6-Mar 22 • QUESTIONS AND COLLECTIONS V: RESEARCH AT THE MUSEUM; Jan 28-Apr 8

SCOTT GALLERY • 10411-124 St • WHEN LOVE COMES TO TOWN: SHANE GOLBY; Feb 7-24; Opening reception: Feb 7, 2-5pm SNAP GALLERY • Society of Northern Alberta Print-Artists, 10123-121 St • 780.423.1492 • snapartists.com • Eunkang Koh: The Human Shop; Jan 8-Feb 14 • Karen Cassidy: Daughter of a Dead Father; Jan 8-Feb 14

SPRUCE GROVE ART GALLERY • 35-5 Ave, Spruce Grove • 780.962.0664 • alliedartscouncil. com • Raw Humanity: Ashleigh Spence; Jan 27-Feb 21 • Feature Artist Sima Khorrami; through Feb STRATHCONA COUNTY MUSEUM & ARCHIVES • 913 Ash St, Sherwood Park • 780.467.8189 • strathconacountymuseum.ca • Celebrating Pioneer Women; Jan 20-Mar 21 • 3rd Annual Family Day Pancake Breakfast; Feb 16, 8:30-11am$5/adult (15+); $2/youth (ages 5-14); ages 4 and under free. Pay at the door (cash only); no advance tickets

TELUS WORLD OF SCIENCE • 11211-142 St • telusworldofscienceedmonton.com • GPS ADVENTURES CANADA EXHIBITION: Combining technology, nature, and hidden treasure; until Jun 1 • INDIANA JONES™ AND THE ADVENTURE OF ARCHAEOLOGY: until Apr 6; $26.50 (adult)/$19.50 (child 3-12)/$23.50 (youth 13-17), student, senior) • Dinosaurs Unearthed: May 15-Oct 11; $26.50 (adult), $19.50 (child), $23.50 (youth/student/ senior)

U OF A MUSEUMS • Human Ecology Bldg Gallery, Main Fl, 116 St, 89 Ave • LOIS HOLE: THE QUEEN OF HUGS; until Mar 22 • Charles Stankievech: The Soniferous Æther of The Land Beyond The Land Beyond; Jan 22-Mar 21

LITERARY AUDREYS BOOKS • 10702 Jasper Ave • GALentine's Day; Feb 13, 7pm BIG SPEAKEASY II • Strathcona County Library, 401 Festival Lane, Sherwood Park • 780.410.8600

• sclibrary.ab.ca • Writer in Residence Gail Sidonie Sobat will host an after-hours evening of fireside readings and performances from censored books and songs. Adults ony • Feb 28, 7-9pm • Free (register at sclibrary.ab.ca, or call 780.410.8600)

BOOKS2BUY • Stanley A. Milner Library, 7 Sir Winston Churchill Square • epl.ca/programs-andevents/events/books2buy • Feb 20-22, 9am-3pm • Free

Theatre Network tickets sold prior to the fire at the Roxy will be valid for the new venue

hollyWood osC-travaganza 2015 • Garneau Theatre, 8712-109 St • 780.434.5564 • Mark the awarding of the 87th Academy Awards in a one of a kind celebration. Fabulous Hollywood formal wear is encouraged, but not essentials • Feb 22; 5pm (doors), 6pm (show) • $30 (door)

vzenari@gmail.com • Prose Creative Writing Group • Every Tue, 7-9pm

HONK! JR. • Festival Place, 100 Festival Way, Sherwood Park • festivalplace.ab.ca • A contemporary retelling of the Hans Christian Anderson fable of "The Ugly Duckling" • Feb 13-16

EDMONTON STORY SLAM • Mercury

JEFFREY • Walterdale Theatre, 10322-83 Ave

CARROT COFFEEHOUSE • 9351-118 Ave •

Room,10575-114 St • edmontonstoryslam.com • facebook.com/mercuryroomyeg • Great stories, interesting company, fabulous atmosphere • 3rd Wed each month • 7pm (sign-up); 7:30pm • $5 Donation to winner

THE KOFFEE CAFÉ • 6120-28 Ave • Glass

Door Coffeehouse Reading Series: Lineup for the February Glass Door Coffeehouse Reading Series includes Kessler Douglas, Singer/Songwriter; Mark Kozub, Author, "Weird Edmonton"; Nancy Mackenzie, author, "Nerve Line"; Donita Wiebe-Neufeld, author, "Thirty Bucks". Host: Jannie Edwards.

Two-minute open mic. Books and CDs for sale • Feb 26, 7-9pm • Donations accepted

ROUGE LOUNGE • 10111-117 St • 780.902.5900 • Spoken Word Tuesdays: Weekly spoken word night presented by the Breath In Poetry Collective (BIP); info: E: breathinpoetry@ gmail.com SCALES AND TALES • Cha Island, 10332-81 Ave • 780.222.7243 • An evening of prose and music. Featuring writer Astrid Blodgett and musicians Steven Sware, Kayla Patrick and Dan Tansy. Host Tony Flemming-Blake • Feb 18, 7-9:30pm • No cover, door prizes SCRAMBLED YEG • Brittany's Lounge, 1022597 St • 780.497.0011 • Open Genre Variety Stage: artists from all mediums are encouraged to occupy the stage and share their creations • Every Tue-Fri, 5-8pm TALES–Monthly Storytelling Circle • Parkallen Community Hall, 6510-111 St • Monthly TELLAROUND: 2nd Wed each month • Sep-Jun, 7-9pm • Free • Info: 780.437.7736; talesedmonton@hotmail.com

UPPER CRUST CAFÉ • 10909-86 Ave • 780.422.8174 • strollofpoets.com • The Poets’ Haven Reading Series: Every Mon, 7pm; presented by the Stroll of Poets Society • $5 (door)

THEATRE THE 11 O'CLOCK NUMBER • Varscona Theatre, 10329-83 Ave • 90 minutes of improvised entertainment that unveils scenes, songs and choreographed numbers completely off the cuff based on audience suggestions • Every Fri, until Jun 26, 11pm • $15 (online, at the door) • grindstonetheatre.ca BEARS • PCL Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330-84 Ave • A multi-media, comedic cabaret about the people and animals along the route of the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline • Feb 5-15

BIG FISH • John L. Haar Theatre, Grant MacEwan Centre for the Arts and Communications, 10045156 St • Edward Bloom is a traveling salesman who lives life to its fullest. His larger-than-life stories thrill everyone around him, especially his wife. But their son, about to have a child of his own, is determined to find the truth behind his father’s tales • Feb 5-14, 7:30pm (matinee performance on Feb 8, 2pm). No show Feb 9 • $21.75, $16.75 (students/seniors)

CHIMPROV • Citadel's Zeidler Hall, 9828-101A Ave • rapidfiretheatre.com • Rapid Fire Theatre’s longform comedy show: improv formats, intricate narratives, and one-act plays • Every Sat, 10pm • $12 (door or buy in adv at TIX on the Square) • Until Jun 13 DIE-NASTY • Varscona Theatre, 10329-83 Ave • varsconatheatre.com • Live improvised soap opera • Runs Every Mon, 7:30pm • Until Jun 1 • $13 or $9 with a $30 membership; at the door (cash) or at tixonthesquare.com

DISNEY’S BEAUTY AND THE BEAST • Jubilee Auditorium, 11455-87 Ave • beautyandthebeastontour.com • The classic story of Belle, a young woman in a provincial town, and the Beast, who is really a young prince trapped in a spell placed by an enchantress. If the Beast can learn to love and be loved, the curse will end and he will be transformed to his former self. But time is running out. If the Beast does not learn his lesson soon, he and his household will be doomed for all eternity • Feb 10-15 FAMOUS PUPPET DEATH SCENES • Eastglen High School - Majestic Theatre, 11430-68 St • Presented by Theatre Network • Feb 4-22 • All

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

• Deciding to be a gay celibate in the New York City is an impossible challenge, but Jeffrey needs to navigate into a possible lifelong relationship, under the cloud of HIV, to discover the difference between the pursuit of love and physical gratification • Feb 5-14

THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS • Westbury Theatre, 10330-84 Ave • A gas-station gothic that examines loss, obsession and what it means to really say “The End” • Feb 6-15 LIFE DEATH AND THE BLUES • Club Cabaret, 9828-101 A Ave • citadeltheatre.com • Feb 11-Mar 1 MAESTRO • Citadel Theatre, 9828-101A Ave • Rapid Fire Theatre • Improv, a high-stakes game of elimination that will see 11 improvisers compete for audience approval until there is only one left standing • 1st Sat each month, 7:30-9:30pm • $12 (adv at rapidfiretheatre.com)/$15 (door)

THE MOTHERS • Alberta Avenue Community League, 9210-118 Ave • skirtsafire.wordpress. com • A play about a mother, her estranged teenage boy and the episode that binds them and isolates them • Feb 26-Mar 8 • $15-$25 OH BOY, BUDDY HOLLY! • Jubilations Dinner Theatre, #2690, 8882-170 St • It's Shallow Water's last graduation before it closes and to save it, the grade 12 kids, have written letters to their favorite rock and roll stars, begging them to play at their graduation dance. The kids have tried everything, and now the whole town is being swept away by the campaign! In response, Buddy Holly, The Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry arrive to save the day • Feb 7-Apr 12

ONE FLEA SPARE • Varscona Theatre, 1032983 Ave • In 1665 the plague has brought chaos to London. A wealthy couple, the Snelgraves, have nearly served out their quarantine when two strangers break into their home, seeking refuge • Feb 5-15 THE PINK UNICORN • PCL Studio in the ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330-84 Ave • northernlighttheatre.com • Trisha Lee, a Christian widow living in a small Texas town, finds herself grappling with fear, confusion and ostracism when her teenage daughter announces she is "gender queer" and is starting a chapter of the Gay and Straight Alliance at the local high school. When the school principal rejects the GSA's application for inclusion as a school club, Trisha must choose sides in her rapidly dividing town • Feb 20-28 PLAYING WITH FIRE: THE THEO FLEURY STORY • Maclab Stage, Citadel Theatre, 9828101A Ave • Based on the true story of NHL player Theo Fleury and the personal issues that haunted him, ultimately derailing his career • Jan 28-Feb 15

SPIRIT CONTROL • Maclab Centre for the Performing Arts, 4308-50 St, Leduc • leducdramasociety.ca • leducdramasociety@gmail.com • Presented by the Leduc Drama Society. Written by Beau Willimon, the writer who developed the hit Netflix series, House of Cards. When the pilot of a small plane suffers a heart attack, Adam must talk a terrified passenger through an emergency landing and his life is sent adrift • Feb 6-14, 7:30-10pm • $18 STELLA, QUEEN OF THE SNOW • Arden Theatre, 5 St. Anne St • 780.459.1542 • ardentheatre. com • Snowballs, snow angels, and mysterious white stuff fuel Sam and Stella’s wondrous and delightful adventure into the wide world of winter • Feb 15, 2pm

THAT'S TERRIFIC • Varscona Theatre • last Sat ea month • Nov 29-Jul 25 THEATRESPORTS • Citadel's Zeidler Hall, 9828-101A Ave • rapidfiretheatre.com • Improv • Every Fri, 7:30pm and 10pm • Jan 16-Jun 12 • $12/$10 (member) at TIX on the Square

THE THREEPENNY OPERA • Timms Centre for the Arts, 112 Street Northwest, University of Alberta • U of A Studio Theatre has invited U of A alumnus and former Edmonton Opera artistic director Brian Deedrick to direct • Feb 5-Feb 14

ARTS 17

FILM

FILM EDITOR : PAUL BLINOV PAUL@VUEWEEKLY.COM

REVUE // DRAMA

B

ased on neuroscientist Lisa Genova's eponymous bestselling novel, Still Alice charts the experiences of an otherwise healthy, active, middle-aged woman afflicted with early onset Alzheimer's.

It's flush with dramatic irony: Alice is a linguistics professor, an innovator in the study of infant babble, someone whose entire career has profited from the potency of her intellect. Its premise is, in a sense, material for a horror movie of the most deeply chilling

need be accompanied by such milquetoast treatment. Still Alice is a noble, stodgy picture, reliant on movie-of-the-week emotional cues—the music, the sudden close-ups—and hackneyed effects, such as shallow focus, to evoke its protagonist's growing confusion. Raw and affecting as Moore's performance is, there seems to be a reluctance Opens Friday to depict the Directed by Richard Glatzer and more unnervWash Westmoreland ing, unflattering  physical manifestations of e Alic from Julianne Alzheimer's, while the family's haute s a re Moo Moore, whose inher- bourgeois lifestyle—the ManhatJulianne ent grace, not to mention tan brownstone, the beach house, actorly intelligence, imbues the role the apparently generous medical sort: particularly in the protracted of Alice with special poignancy. And insurance—seems little more than period in which mental confusion it needs to be said that this film, writ- a crudely drawn sea wall able to deand lucidity compete for dominance, ten and directed by Richard Glatzer fend those behind it against whatever the protagonist is essentially forced and Wash Westmoreland, is in every catastrophe biology brings. Its supto observe her own deterioration way sensitive and respectful to the porting characters, most notably the as it progresses. (Think of Jeff Gold- harrowing experience—which will be protagonist's loving research-physiblum in The Fly, observing his body's painfully familiar to many viewers— cian husband (Alec Baldwin, making terrifying transformation.) The film that it represents. the most of an underwritten role), features a characteristically emotionBut at some point you have to won- are scarcely fleshed out, yet full-on ally precise, lived-in performance der if such sensitivity and respect subjectivity is never really embraced:

there could be some very bold, superscary, formally challenging version of this story in which sound and image adhere completely to the perceptual conditions of Alice's mental decline.

The one really effective relationship in Still Alice is between Alice and her youngest daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart), an aspiring actress and the closest thing this family has to a black sheep. Lydia tries to gently interrogate her mother about her experience of the disease, a tactic that her older sister, who seems more compelled to live in denial, finds reprehensible, but which actually turns out to be more truly compassionate. I just wish Stewart could stop twitching long enough to convey a sense of really being present in these scenes. Stewart is probably quite a capable actor, and her post-Twilight career is slated with some very strong choices—she stars in Olivier Assayas' sublime Clouds of Sils Maria, which comes out later this year—but she remains afflicted with an adolescent, quasi-Methody affect that can be annoyingly distracting.

JOSEF BRAUN

JOSEF@VUEWEEKLY.COM

REVUE // ANIMATED

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water

A dangerous game

S

ea sponges have three means of asexual reproduction: gemmules (not as tasty as they sound), budding and fragmentation. The SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon, in its 16 years of

18 FILM

life and counting, has spawned dolls, a $75 000 diamond pendant, toys, albums, comics, roller coasters, video games and, yep, soap-filled sponges.

If only the series' second feature, The

SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Wa- tom going Mad Max-apocalypto over ter, propagated no more burgers, or more laughs.

SpongeBob zipping The frame Now playing around in a makes t o r y — p i r a t e Directed by Paul Tibbitt and shift time-machine B u r g e r - B e a r d Mike Mitchell with Plankton, or (Antonio Ban-  Plankton entering deras) discovers his cranium to disa book that tells of the horrible time cover it consists of candy floss, or when Bikini Bottom ran out of Krabby our gap-toothed, sunny yellow, porePatties—actually becomes rather bearing friend singing about the imabsorbing. That's because the sur- portance of teamwork. The true takeest form of time-travel, we learn, is away: fast-food-obsessed sea animals to tell a story: Burger-Beard rewrites don't fry-cook up a sizzling comedy. the tale so he gains the secret formula to Krabby Patties; SpongeBob Hit-and-miss scenarios—a pro(voiced by Tom Kenny) and his gang longed condiment fight splats flat; rewrite it back so they gain super the superhero showdown is better— powers and can recover the formula. and groaners don't help. Even the But these script-smarts sandwich the appearance of rimshot-making band stupid meat of the movie—Bikini Bot- Bad Punz can't excuse the many weak

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

ones here. The movie's best when it goes all out in its visuals (as when SpongeBob has a freak-out or Plankton's eye goes bloodshot) or goes for broke in its absurdity—popsicles resembling the twins from The Shining; a caped Dolphin deity (voiced by the inimitable Matt Berry) watching over the universe and shooting a laser from its blowhole; tortillas and bratwurst at "Taco Haüs;" cannonballs floaaaaating serenely, trapped in bubbles. When the film goes that oddball, you don't have to be tripping on pot-added junk-food to enjoy the zaniness. But too much of the film lacks zip, invention and anarchic fun, offering instead forced and strained silliness.

BRIAN GIBSON

BRIAN@VUEWEEKLY.COM

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

FILM 19

FILM ASPECTRATIO

JOSEF BRAUN // JOSEF@VUEWEEKLY.COM

Godard's second first film Every Man for Himself a romanticist's look at bitter romance

Some utterly disillusioned folks just hangin'

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Jean-Luc Godard called Every Man for Himself (1980) his "second first film," and I don't hesitate to say that while the impact of Godard's first first film, Breathless (1960) is immeasurable, this second means much more to me.

In the 20 years separating these debuts we might say Godard went from being a genius adolescent to a genius adult. He did so without losing exuberance, invention or fascination with film's possibilities. In fact, his manipulation of form, thanks in part to the influence of his spouse and collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville and their decade of experiments with video, became more rigorous, his politics less on-the-nose and more salient. Every Man for Himself also displays an emotional maturity and sensitivity to the waywardness of long-term love and familial obligation. Which is all to say that even as Godard approached 50, the romance was still fiercely alive in his filmmaking—it's just that the actual romantic ties depicted onscreen have grown bitter with repeated failures, and perilously perverse.

Every Man for Himself is one of my

two or three favourite Godards, and I'm thrilled that Criterion has released it on DVD and Blu-ray.

"Dreams are always terrible. Even in dreams you keep looking for solutions." So says Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc), an utterly disillusioned Swiss TV director, one of three protagonists in Every Man for Himself, and a fairly awful human being, shorttempered and abusive, not to mention prone to distressing half-jokes about incest—he shares custody of his 11-year-old daughter with his exwife. Not unlike J G Ballard's tactic of giving the protagonist of Crash (1973) his own name, Godard's naming of this character seems designed to sabotaging our attempts to read the film as autobiography. Godard claims to have more affinity to the film's female characters, but he's freighted "Godard" with numerous, if superficial, shared traits, such as the ever-present cigar.

Of course, Godard pretty much renders all the film's men as loathsome— and as directors. One memorable scene finds an affluent john directing a colleague and pair of sex workers— one played by a Isabelle Huppert, brilliant, and refusing to play her character as victim—to synchronize a set of mechanical sex acts, the result being a sort of Dadaist pornographic performance for a non-existent audience (save the one watching this movie).

The film's title implies a state of emergency that justifies ruthless selfpreservation, and such scenes, blackly comic as they may be, evoke an appropriate sense of desperate isolation, with people—especially women—doing what they must to get by.

But all is not grotesque. In fact, one

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of the reasons I adore this film is for its beauty and lyricism. The opening credits declare this "A FILM COMPOSED BY JEAN-LUC GODARD," and Every Man for Himself is indeed imbued with a sense of musical structure and a sophisticated engagement with rhythm. Godard has always been invested in the disruption of sound and image as a means of shaking us out of passive viewing, but with this film these disruptions can feel enchanting, drawing our attention to smaller, lovelier movements that compose the everyday. Denise Rimbaud (Nathalie Baye)—her name itself invoking poetry—is a TV producer in the midst of an ugly breakup with Paul. She wants to move to the country and embrace a new sense of freedom. In the first of several scenes involving the use of slowmotion at varying velocities, we see Denise biking on a country road, the staggered, shifting rhythms of the image-movement providing a transfixing counterpoint to the musical score. But music also plays a more overt, diegetic role in the film's ongoing disruptions: someone is singing opera in the opening scenes, a string ensemble plays in an alley in the closing scene. Again, these are reminders that Godard is, above all, a rigorous romanticist, equally engaged with the allure of cinema and the urgency to dismantle its clichés.

Criterion's release looks gorgeous and features some excellent supplements, including not one but two episodes of The Dick Cavett Show featuring Godard—reason enough for any self-respecting cinephile to want to own the disc. V

REVUE // SCI-FI

METRO

CINEMA

Now playing Directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski  Not enough gravity to this Jupiter

GUIDE

Jupiter Ascending I

n 2012, the Wachowskis took a story-jumping plunge at David Mitchell's nesting-doll novel Cloud Atlas (two stars was its silver lining). Now, though, Jupiter Ascending is the Wachowskis' own script, and it's all space-opera spectacles of nonsense—F/X and fury signifying nothing much.

The background opening, like what follows, remains faintly bizarre—not quite camp but a bit broad, a smidgen unexplained and altogether too flitting and frenetic to be all-out, entertainingly immersive. Two Russians fall in love; she's expecting; the astronomy-loving father's suddenly killed in a break-in; the mother gives birth to Jupiter in a freighter's cargo-hold while crossing the Atlantic; Jupiter (Mila Kunis) grows up to be a cleaning lady in Chicago. And that's when she, as "her majesty" and lucky inheritor of

our planet (actually "seeded" long ago by aliens), is targeted by the Abrasax siblings, Balem (Eddie Redmayne), Titus, and Kalique, squabbling over their inheritance and Earth's bounty. The "harvesting" horror here's an echo of not only a Cloud Atlas sequence but The Matrix (and Soylent Green, etc), where humans are meat or lab animals to be consumed or used.

Much of the movie splices DNA from better sci-fi: the rejuvenation-elixir-as-resource, castles and dynasty smack of Dune, a bureaucracy sequence pays homage to Brazil and stars its director, Terry Gilliam; Star Trek is hologrammed in a starship where we hear "shields down" and the crew's multi-alien. (It all makes Guardians of the Galaxy seem like 2001: A Space Odyssey.) Worst of all's

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the romance—Jupiter isn't just saved from death by but held in the arms of "lycantant" Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), not once but thrice. Their relationship never rises above Hollywood hunk staring at Hollywood hottie. Kunis tries to assert Jupiter's earthy gravity, but mostly she has to moon over a wolf-man, shotgun-wed a scheming sibling, dress up in couture costumes, run around and generally act the hapless heroine. So much for feminism beyond this world.

By the time Caine's gone back for the girl for the nth time, plummeting and smashing through megabuildings much like the story keeps exploding and razing any depth or profundity, you'll feel like telling one of the writer-directors, "Hey, your movie's Descended Into Uranus."

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PREVUE // ROOTS

MUSIC

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'W

ork and love will make a man out of you," sang the Constantines on "Soon Enough," a line Elliott Brood felt was a fitting capstone for its latest album, aptly titled Work and Love.

"We were like, 'Do we really do this?'" recalls vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Mark Sasso, in the midst of a hectic day that's involved much trial and error to get the battery of his car changed. "It's more an homage to them, anyways. We weren't going to deny that's where we got it from, that's for sure."

Work and Love sums up a disc that is perhaps Elliott Brood's most personal, with the trio reflecting on the innocence and regrets of youth contrasted with the trials of adulthood over quietly powerful roots-rock melodies. Sasso says the group hadn't set out to write something so introspective—a very different direction than the historical and fictional figures that tend to populate Elliott Brood tracks— but he and fellow lyricist Casey Laforet found themselves writing very similar songs.

"It must be that we travel so much together," Sasso acknowledges. "It's one of those things— it's almost like with twins, where they're feeling or thinking the same thing."

Sasso may have injected more personal anecdotes and sentiments into his songs, but he was careful to leave something to the imagination. He likens it to painting with colour versus black and white, leaving listeners with the ability to add their own detail to the piece, rather than having it all laid out for them from the get-go.

"I kind of write how I'd like to hear … other people paint or write differently, [in ways] that are more direct and they don't allow there to be any other meaning," he adds. "For myself, maybe 10 years down the road I see something else in it or view it a different way, and I like that ability with the song as opposed to painting myself into a corner."

Wed, Feb 18 (8 pm) Elliott Brood With the Wilderness of Manitoba Starlite Room, $24

Work and Love has been dubbed "a lament to youth," and when asked what he's like now in comparison to his younger days, Sasso replies that he hopes he's almost the same person, though there will always be second-guessing the further you get in life.

"I think that's the lament is that you maybe didn't take the opportunities and run with them at that time, but that's life in general: there's nothing that can be done. I'm happy in life, and I think the guys are as well," he adds. "And maybe life doesn't turn out the way you expected it to anyways. I'm happy where I'm at."

Sasso is a father now, and he says parenthood really is the classic cliché of being able to experience youth again—and it's one of the best things he's ever done. Though he says the main piece of advice he wishes he could have imparted on his younger self is to just slow down.

"Maybe pay attention to other people's heart's as well," he offers, referencing "Taken," a song on the album about young love. "When I was younger you're kind of thinking for yourself, as opposed to helping the other person through the situation as well. You might not marry this person, but you can kind of grow and learn a lot with them for that moment that you're with them. I think too many people in life, and in general, try to find out what's better for them, and they don't look out for other people's hearts."

MEAGHAN BAXTER

MEAGHAN@VUEWEEKLY.COM

22 MUSIC

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

THE WILDERNESS OF MANITOBA The pop-rock-folk three-piece is touring in support of its latest album Between Colours, a testament to its ever-evolving sonic palette. Vocalist/keyboardist/guitarist Will Whitwham answered a few quesions about the album for Vue prior to the band's opening gig for Elliott Brood.

VUE WEEKLY: The Wilderness of Manitoba is continuously evolving its sound. What did you want to capture on Between Colours? Were there any factors that played into that?

WILL WHITWHAM: We wanted to capture a more atmospheric presence in instrumentation than any of our previous records. The focus was less on writing songs with a folk esthetic and more on the arrangement. We were listening a lot to bands that have their roots in songwriting but are far reaching in their arrangements. Bands like the Cocteau Twins, the Sundays, 10,000 Maniacs and the Red House Painters come to mind.

VW: Where did these songs

begin for you?

WW: Some of them began

two years ago as more ambient demos like "Shift" and "Big Skies." Whereas others developed over time from a cottage writing weekend up to the preproduction and recording at Revolution.

VW: You worked with Joe Dun-

phy at Revolution Recording in Toronto. Why did you want to work with him and what did he bring to the process?

WW: Joe brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in the audio world along with passion for the project. He put in a lot of extra time and after hours and took on more of a producer role in making Between Colours than our last album, Island Of Echoes that we recorded and mixed with him.

VW: What have you been lis-

tening to lately?

Clientele, Mazzy Star, Slowdive and as always, Red House Painters. I also need to mention the song "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand" by the Primitve Radio Gods because that song just gets me. I'm not sure what it is about bands that either no longer exist or on some kind of hiatus. Maybe it makes me yearn for them more.

WW: The

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Royal Wood .com

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Fri Feb 13 and Sat Feb 14 (7:30 pm) Arden Theatre, $32 Sun-dappled Royal Wood

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oyal Wood is at his parent's farm in Peterborough, ON, jetlagged but sounding relaxed. He just returned from a working trip to Los Angeles, where he snuck in time to record new material between writing and collaborating with other musicians.

"I just thought, just for fun let's go record three songs," Wood says. "I don't know if I'm going to make a full recordâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the new songs are in the learning to crawl stage right nowâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; but I've been on overload: even as The Burning Bright came out I've been writing and writing. I could easily make a record for this fall."

The Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter has been a bright light on the Canadian

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music scene since 2002, known for his blend of folk, jazz and pop sensibilities. Having released his fifth full-length album, The Burning Bright, and a companion record called I Wish You Well last year, Wood says his creative taps are wide open.

He says The Burning Bright was a "middle finger" to the idea that he had to recreate the success of We Were Born to Glory, his Juno-nominated 2012 album that debuted in the top 25 on the Canadian Albums Chart. Of all his releases, Wood says Glory was the time he felt he wasn't being totally true to himself.

"If something is nagging at you then you're not doing the right thing," he says. "I felt that for the first time of my life when we made We Were Born in Glory. Half of that record I felt so connected and the music came through me, and I was excited by it; the other half was me using my head and feeling a lot of pressure to have a followup success to [2010's] The Waiting. I haven't gone back to that again."

By trusting his intuition, and not aping past triumphs, The Burning Bright is Wood's biggest album yet.

The record's lead single "Forever and Ever"â&#x20AC;&#x201D;a stomper of a love song

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; FEB 18 , 2015

with a rousing hand-clap chorusâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;is his most successful track to date.

The song, and much of the album, was penned in a small cottage in a farmer's field outside of Slane, Ireland. Wood, who has Irish blood, says he needed to retreat from the pressures of life to "let the music come through me again." While there, Wood got involved in a local tradition called "the round," where he jammed with local musicians.

"You're literally in the middle of the pub," he says. "Pints just keep coming and whisky just keeps coming and they do the 'lock up:' they lock the door and no one else gets to come in anymore. You're there until the sun comes up. And you're just trading off songs and playing on each other's songs and singing and getting drunk, really. But that's what we did every week."

Big songs were born from those humble beginnings. For his upcoming tour of Western Canada, Wood is travelling with a maximalist setup: his whole band, a full lighting rig and backup singers.

"It's the big show," he says. "Everything is coming. I really wanted Edmonton to see the show, because it hasn't come out there this way."

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MUSIC PREVUE // ROOTS

PREVUE // PUNK

Lynne Hanson

Worst Days Down

L

ynne Hanson's mantra right now is simple: step carefully.

The Ottawa roots-Americana singer-songwriter is nursing a torn knee, a souvenir from chasing the quarterback in a game of touch football.

She's limped through a tour of Europe and is now navigating the icy Canadian prairies.

But overcoming personal struggles is part of Hanson's life these days. In 2011 she conquered a destructive relationship with the bottle, a constant companion in her life as a hard-living folk musician.

Her latest album, River of Sand, is an unapologetically honest and intimate look at her relationship with alcohol—and the beauty and challenge that sober life holds.

"This is the capital-T truth," Hanson says, borrowing a landline in the tiny village of Pierceland, SK as she tours west. "Some of the songs are pretty harsh, pretty gritty. I'm not hiding behind anything. I'm not afraid to be a little dark. It can be very hard to be honest, but as an artist I'm not going to pretend to be anything else."

River of Sand is her first record since 2010's Once the Sun Goes Down, and she says it was years before she felt ready to write again.

"I just didn't have anything to say," Hanson explains. "It was a long time before I had a song and thought, 'Hey, this is a keeper.'"

But she's found her real voice, maybe for the first time. Along with her unflinching look at drinking, Hanson has also been vocal about her struggles with mental illness.

She says it was uncomfortable to talk about depression at first, but her honesty resonated with fans.

"Just from talking to people, I found out it was a big deal for me to be sharing my story," Hanson says.

"People would thank me for being honest, for showing them they're not alone. And it's something that people should talk about. That's why I share my story, and I share it in my music. It's harder to live it than to talk about it."

After her tour of western Canada, Hanson plans to tour Europe again, where she has a solid fan base and label support. And she hinted at a secret project, set to be released in the fall.

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Fri, Feb 13 (8 pm) Wild Earth Bakery (Millcreek), $5 recommended donation

It's a big change from the years she spent kicking the bottle, and she owes it to her honesty: by sharing her moments of darkness, Hanson has found hope.

"Sometimes the lower you go the higher you bounce," she says. "I had a rough time for awhile coming up to the other side. But I consider myself to be very lucky."

JOSH MARCELLIN

JOSH@VUEWEEKLY.COM

Darkness and light

usic can be a beautiful force for bringing people together. Ben Sir, singer and guitarist for local punk band Worst Days Down, had just lost a good friend, musician Joey D—and Sir and friends gathered to play his music to remember him.

"Most of us knew him through his music," Sir says, the sounds of the memorial show for Joey D in the background. "And to be surrounded by all these people who are very close friends of mine now and realize it's all unified by his music. Punk, in a lot of ways, is pretty juvenile—or at least relegated to be juvenile. But it's really cool to see how it can shape your life and your experiences."

Sir, who also plays guitar for local hardcore band Etown Beatdown, wrangled some of his close friends to transform Worst Days Down from an acoustic solo project to a full band.

It's a who's who of local punk talent: Jerome Tovillo from Desiderata on drums, Fire Next time's Kevin Klemp on guitar and Matt Murphy from Audio/Rocketry on bass.

The band started in a way that should make for a doomed a relationship: a lie.

"There was a show that Telus TV was doing called Secret Setlist. I met a couple of the producers and managed to fool them into thinking I had a band," Sir says, who, at the time, had only jammed with the current members once. "So, after writing a proposal, they told me we had an episode. We had a month to get a band together and learn the songs—our first show was on TV."

Fri, Feb 13 (8 pm) With Napalmpom and Wares Brixx, $10 Though a little massaging of the truth got them together, it's friendship that's keeping them there. Sir is a manager at the Buckingham on Whyte Avenue, and he managed to book his bass player's favourite singer-songwriter of all time: Brendan Kelly from Chicago punk-rock band the Lawrence Arms—not only that, he got to play on the same bill.

"Matt, our bassist, is the sweetest, cutest dude: when he gets excited his eyes get really wide and he's just got this massive beard, and his head just vigorously starts shaking from side to side," Sir says. "So I can do this thing strictly for Matt that he gets to play with his favourite singer. And doing that just really strengthened our relationship.

That connected us. And when you have a really positive experience, you think, 'Hey, why would we not play in a band together if these are the things we're capable of?'"

It's a good thing the guys all get along, because Worst Days Down is heading out on the road. Sir says the group is planning to release a seven-inch in a couple of months, followed by a crossCanada tour, then shows across Europe before coming back to Canada to play some festivals and then going back to Europe again in the summer.

"Whenever this whole hilarious thing called life ends, however near or far that is, to be able to have had this band and travel Europe alongside my friends— holy shit, I'm the luckiest dude in the world," Sir says.

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PREVUE // BLUES-ROCK

Ash Grunwald T

he past can be difficult to leave behind, and the inability to know what the future holds is equal parts daunting and exciting. We often get too caught up in the "should haves" and "what ifs," not realizing that we're missing the present unfold before our eyes, which is something Ash Grunwald is attempting to rectify.

"I'm really into the concept, at the moment, of living the now, absolutely now and not freaking out about the past or the future and just really allowing myself to—when you have to use your mind for a specific purpose—be really focused," the Australian singer-songwriter explains over the phone from Bali, tranquil strains of music audible in the background. "I've found it really amazing, and I hope I can stick with it and it's not just a New Year's resolution or a diet or a fad. I hope it's something that sticks with me my whole life and it's something I can build on, because it's really useful at the moment."

That could be a practical notion for most of us, considering how much we as a society ostensibly struggle to focus on one task at a time. Grunwald's determined to keep at it, while discovering how to live the happiest life possible, which he says comes into play in his songwriting. A career's worth of those musings can be found on his current album, a 17-track self-titled compilation of infectious hip-hop-meets-rock-meetsblues tunes. There's plenty of crunchy, down-and-dirty guitar, hard-hitting drums and soulful sing-along-ready vocals spouting philosophical topics inflected with a little comedic flair on the likes of "Dolphin Song"—a tale about Grunwald's much-too-close encounter with a shark during a surfing escapade, in which a pod of dolphins came to his rescue and escorted him in to shore.

Grunwald will be making his way through his songwriting oeuvre on this

Tue, Feb 17 (7 pm) With Darryl Matthews Artery, $10 in advance, $12 at the door

tour, but he's in the midst of finishing up a new album. He can't make any promises those songs will make it into his current set, though the new material does play into the aforementioned idea of being present in each moment and digs into some prevalent social and environmental issues.

"It sort of grapples with that issue that we all seem to be dealing with, that governments are increasingly seeming much more like corporations, or seeming like they're set up to do the biddings of corporations, and less about repre-

2014-2015 SeaSON

OUr STaGE. YOUr EXPeRIENCe.

senting the people than ever," he says, the dedication to these issues evident in his voice. "The challenge was trying to write some protest music that doesn't sound like protest music in a lot of ways—that anyone who doesn't care about an issue can just love and get into, and I laboured over that."

Grunwald admits it's challenging to write a song that's poetic, catchy and meaningful all at the same time. But he acknowledges that people are less receptive to protest than they used

to be, which he thinks could be attributed to the inundation of information they are bombarded with—even though he believes there's more to protest than ever before.

"We're flooded with so much bad news that it seems like it doesn't hit home as much and we're sort of used to being lied to by politicians. There was probably a time when we would have jumped up and tipped over cars in the street if we thought our politicians were lying to us ... but we're just kind of used to that now and we don't

bat an eyelid, and then we go back to looking at photos of our friends' holidays and different meals that people are eating on Facebook," he says, adding he feels overwhelmed by it all at times, too. "It's hard to get people's attention, and I think they get their backs up pretty quickly if they think that they're being preached to or anything like that. But I think it's really important to strike a balance there without selling out the message."

MEAGHAN BAXTER

MEAGHAN@VUEWEEKLY.COM

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MUSIC 26

MUSIC PREVUE // ECLECTIC

Manraygun

Fri, Feb 13 (8:30 pm) Blue Chair Cafe, $15

Black and white at the Blue Chair // Trent Winchester

M

anraygun has always been more of a studio band than a touring band, but this pushes it to the extreme.

The local five-piece released itsfourth album, Outside Thoughts, last February. Not quite country, not quite rock and not quite a concept album, Outside Thoughts was a nuanced collection of musical ideas and, according to guitarist Everett

28 MUSIC

LaRoi, the band's strongest release of its seven-year career. But, after putting the record out, Manraygun only played one or two shows before going its separate ways to play in other musical projects or chase adventure.

Drummer Scott Lingley travelled to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago. Guitar player and singer Dennis Lenaduzzi and bassist Tom Mur-

ray worked on other music in their industrial outfit Free Judges. And LaRoi started a new company, bought a house and worked on scoring films.

"Tom Murray is in maybe 20 bands—I'm only in, like, three," LaRoi laughs. "So when the dust settles between projects, then we'll start something new with Manraygun.

I'm sure that will happen. I'm always writing and so is Dennis."

So where exactly does Manraygun fit into all these busy men's lives?

"It's like refuelling, reloading," LaRoi says. "The good thing about the contemporary musician approach to working on lots of different projects is you learn lots of new skills and genres. So when you go back you've got new stuff to bring to the music."

There's no shortage

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

of

genre-

bending creativity. Manraygun has been collaborating with Ira Lee, an experimental hip-hop artist and former Edmontonian now based in Europe. None of the band members have met Lee—they connected over MySpace—but they've been sending instrumental tracks for to him to rap over. And there's a remix album in the works, where Manraygun's music is reworked by an eclectic range of artists ranging from groundbreaking frequency painter Gary James Joynes to German ambient composer Phonatic.

The band used to release a record almost annually when it first started back in 2007—Manraygun's got 47 songs to its name. It was "hyper" productivity that couldn't be maintained, LaRoi says. For now, they group's happy to play its gig at the Blue Chair Cafe, a now-annual event.

And LaRoi says that whatever new music from Manraygun will happen when the time is right.

"When we all feel really good about it and we have the time, then we direct energies towards it," he adds. "I guess we don't feel pressed to produce every year. It's more organic than that."

JOSH MARCELLIN

JOSH@VUEWEEKLY.COM

MUSIC PREVUE // ALT-FOLK

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S

teve Schneider and Cole Switzer met through a mutual penchant for tearing up the pavement on skateboards, but their focus has turned to music.

"Cole and I actually met through the skate community in Edmonton, which is, I feel, really healthy," says Schneider, while on an extended lunch break from his day job as a carpenter. "I think we realized there's not too much longevity as far as being able to do that into your older years, so we transitioned to music."

That was nearly four years ago, and Schneider (vocals/guitar) and Switzer (bass) have since added drummer Allyson MacIvor and guitarist Kyla Rankine to the roster.

Nature Of is the first band for everyone but MacIvor, and Schneider says he's predominantly self-taught when it comes to guitar.

"I did piano when I was younger— my parents kind of forced me into it," he says with a laugh. "I wasn't too stoked on it, but now I kind of wish I would have taken it a little further.

I don't really play much piano anymore, but it's definitely helped as far as arrangement and melodies go.

I haven't really had any formal singing training, but my mom's a singer."

A lack of band experience certainly doesn't appear to have been a hindrance for the alt-folk group, with the lush, polished melodies of its debut self-titled album delivering a strong sense of sophistication and cohesiveness. Schneider notes the group's inexperience has allowed it to learn what works and what doesn't together.

"I think we all communicate and we know we have to treat eachother well because you spend a lot of time with anybody and it's easy to find the little things wrong with someone, right?" he adds. "You really have to be conscious of taking care of each other and trying to give everybody the benefit of the doubt, for sure."

Nature Of has managed to complete three cross-Canada tours, including an appearance at Cana-

Fri, Feb 13 (8 pm) With Close Talker, I Am Machi Mercury Room, $12 dian Music Week, as well as land itself on Earshots National Top 50 Chart (#17) and numerous college radio Top 30s—not bad at all for a first album. Schneider explains the group started out on acoustic instruments in order to flesh out the disc's 10 tracks, learning to play and balance electric instruments as the writing process progressed.

"It's just really nice to have it out and be able to move forward, as far as creating goes," Schneider says, noting some of the songs are several years old at this point and the group is steadily working on new material. "The live counterpart of the songs, when we played them, they stayed quite true to the record. But we have a really great violin player that's been playing with us and we occasionally have a horn player with us as well, so that helps to spruce things up a little bit."

W/ THE WILDERNESS OF MANITOBA

W/ TWO BEARS NORTH, JESSE & THE DANDELIONS, THE ASHLEY HUNDRED

TUES, FEB 24, THE WINSPEAR JCL AND LIVE AT THE WINSPEAR PRESENT

JAMES VINCENT MCMORROW W/ KEVIN GARRETT

FRI, FEB 27, MERCURY ROOM MERCURY ROOM AND CUYA PRESENT

SINGLE MOTHERS W/ THE DIRTY NIL, COLD LUNGS, AND LESSER MAN

SAT, FEB 28, MERCURY ROOM

JESSE ROPER RAH RAH

COLLEEN RENNISON (NO SINNER), & KIRBY SEWELL BAND

TUES, MAR 3, MERCURY ROOM

MEAGHAN BAXTER

MEAGHAN@VUEWEEKLY.COM

W/ WE WERE FRIENDS, AND GUESTS

WED, MAR 11, THE WINSPEAR JCL AND LIVE AT THE WINSPEAR PRESENT

DAN MANGAN + BLACKSMITH W/ HAYDEN, AND ASTRAL SWANS

WED, MAR 25, MERCURY ROOM, EARLY SHOW, DOORS AT 6 PM

AMELIA CURRAN W/ RYAN BOLDT (THE DEEP DARK WOODS)

NEW TIX ON SALE

FRI, MAR 27, STARLITE ROOM

THE WHITE BUFFALO W/ SPENCER BURTON

THUR, APR 2, ROYAL ALBERTA MUSEUM THEATRE

SHANE KOYCZAN CHRIS TRAPPER

AN EVENING WITH

FRI, APR 3, MERCURY ROOM

W/ GUESTS

SUN, APR 5, THE WINSPEAR JCL AND LIVE AT THE WINSPEAR PRESENT

THE CAT EMPIRE W/ CURRENT SWELL

FRI, MAY 29, ROYAL ALBERTA MUSEUM THEATRE

GREAT LAKE SWIMMERS W/ GUESTS

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

MUSIC 29

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LAYTEN KRAMER / FRI, FEB 13 (8 PM) This experimental folk singersongwriter's spent the past few years in groups opening for the likes of Zeus, Michael Bernard Fitzgerald, Samantha Savage Smith and Dan Mangan, but now he's heading out on his own.

(Artery, $8 in advance, $10 at the door)

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// Eden Munro

The venerable Jr Gone Wild frontman is continuing to show off his solo material. He won't be taking the stage until a little later in the evening, but there's a plated dinner at 7:30 as well as tunes from Colin Close and Fat Dave Johnston to tide you over. (Yellowhead Brewery, $20 for show only; $50 for dinner and show)

JIMMY GNECCO / SAT, FEB 14 (9 PM) Not many people can say there's a Lana Del Rey song named after them, but this guy can.

If you're unfamiliar, he opened for her on her latest tour and is the lead vocalist for a rock band called Ours. Local singer-songwriter Lyra Brown will kick things off. (El Cortez, free)

COMEDY AT THE CENTURY CASINO

FUQUORED / FRI, FEB 13 (8 PM) Friday the 13th seems like the perfect day for a metal show, doesn't it? (Pawnshop, $10)

WINTERFEST 2015 / FRI, FEB 13 –SUN, FEB 15

The Uptown Folk Club is hosting its seventhannual Winterfest. This year's headliners are Valdy and Barry Allen and the New Rebels, plus a roster that includes G W Meyers, the Command Sisters, Calvin Vollrath, Beth Portman & the Good Find and Clint Pelletier. Check out uptownfolkclub.ca for more information.

(Fiddler's Roost)

THE BASEMENT PAINTINGS / SAT, FEB 14 (8 PM) An instrumental mash-up of progressive and psychedelic metal from good ol' Saskatoon.

(Wunderbar, $10)

Call 780.481.YUKS FOR TICKETS & INFO .....................................................................

SEAN PROUDLOVE AND

FRI FEB 20

Honeymoon

THE

FRI FEB 13

FEB 13 & 14

NAPALM DEATH / SUN, FEB 15 (5 PM) The English grindcore shredders have been at it since 1981 and are out in support of the group's 15th album, Easy Meat. (Starlite Room, $31)

MATT BYRNE / TUE, FEB 17 (7 PM) Alan Doyle of Great Big Sea allegedly said this East Coast singersongwriter's voice is "friggin' perfect." Go see if you agree. (Mercury Room, $15)

THE IRISH DESCENDANTS

COMING SOON: PRISM, BIG RIVER BAND - JOHNNY CASH TRIBUTE AND MORE! TICKETS AVAILABLE AT CENTURY CASINO AND TICKETMASTER

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+íæ Pōĥį±ĉàįÂįāřĉà

KIMBERLEY MACGREGOR / WED, FEB 18 (10 PM) She released her debut solo album, True, in 2014, and she's already back at work crafting another one. (Black Dog, no cover charge)

Ļďêêį ğ PÕ PĤIJ

ʼn ğŎįG æ Ĥ PŎįêPàįÂįāāPà

Ĭďêêį7ğÃß į9Ãd ʼn ğŎį>ĽğĤ PŎį±ĉàįÂįêĉà

13103 FORT RD • 643-4000 30 MUSIC

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

MUSIC

WEEKLY

Johnny Infamous

(show); $22 (members), $26 (guests)

Boyz

FRI FEB 13

YEG DANCE CLUB Rich Homie Quan

Valentine's Day Dance; 7:30pm (door), 9pm (show); $28 (available through 780.257.6057

APEX CASINO–VEE LOUNGE Colleen

EMAIL YOUR FREE LISTINGS TO: LISTINGS@VUEWEEKLY.COM FAX: 780.426.2889 DEADLINE: FRIDAY AT 3PM

Rae & Cornerstone; 9pm

THU FEB 12

ARTERY Yung Smith’s Birthday Bash

ARDEN THEATRE Royal Wood;

7:30pm

BLUES ON WHYTE The Steadies

Featuring Layten Kramer with OJ Pimpson & Big Ben & Woodhouse and Power-Buddies; 8pm; $8 (adv), $10 (door)

BRITTANY'S LOUNGE Scrambled YEG:

ATLANTIC TRAP AND GILL Stan

ACCENT EUROPEAN LOUNGE Live

Music every Thu; 9pm

Open Genre Variety Stage: artist from all mediums are encouraged to occupy the stage and share their creations • Every Tue- Fri, 5-8pm CAFE BLACKBIRD Abra King;

7:30pm; $5

Gallant BLUE CHAIR CAFÉ Manraygun;

8:30pm; $15 BLUES ON WHYTE The Steadies BOURBON ROOM Dueling pianos

GA; 9pm; $40 YELLOWHEAD BREWERY Mike

Mcdonald with Fat Dave Johnston and Colin Close; 7pm; $20 (adv)

CENTURY CASINO Darrell Barr

DUGGAN'S BOUNDARY The Rural

Routes DV8 The Reckless Rebels, Rhubarbs,

Classical JUBILEE AUDITORIUM Beauty And

The Beast

Johnson From Accounting, D.I.Y.; 8pm

DJs

ENCORE–WEM Rupaul’s Drag Race: Battle Of The Seasons; 9pm (doors); $40

BLACK DOG FREEHOUSE Every Friday

FIDDLER'S ROOST Winterfest at the

DJs on all three levels THE BOWER Strictly Goods: Old

Uptown Folk Club FILTHY MCNASTY'S Free Afternoon

school and new school hip hop & R&B with DJ Twist, Sonny Grimez, and Marlon English; every Fri

Concerts: The Nervous Wrecks with guests Dumb Angel; 4pm; No cover

THE COMMON Good Fridays: nu

Fuzz Kings; 8pm

CAFÉ HAVEN Music every Thu: this

week with Karl Andriuk; 7pm

BRITTANY'S LOUNGE Scrambled YEG:

CARROT COFFEEHOUSE Thu Open

Mic: All adult performers are welcome (music, song, spoken word); every Thu, 1:30-3pm

Open Genre Variety Stage: artist from all mediums are encouraged to occupy the stage and share their creations • Every Tue- Fri, 5-8pm

CHA ISLAND TEA CO Bring Your

BRIXX BAR Napalmpom With

every Fri

Own Vinyl Night: Every Thu; 8pm-late; Edmonton Couchsurfing Meetup: Every Thu; 8pm

Guests Worst Days Down And Wares; 8pm; $10

FLUID LOUNGE R&B, hip hop and dancehall with DJ Aiden Jamali; every Fri

LEGENDS Sat 3pm Jam and Open Mic with Nick Samoil and guests

THE PROVINCIAL PUB Friday Nights:

MKT FRESH FOOD AND BEER MARKET Live Local Bands every

EARLY STAGE SALOON–Stony Plain

Open Jam Nights; no cover FIONN MACCOOL'S–DOWNTOWN

Penny and Jim; 7pm FION MACOOL'S–SOUTH

disco, hip hop, indie, electro, dance with weekly local and visiting DJs on rotation plus residents Echo and Justin Foosh

GAS PUMP Saturday Homemade Jam: Mike Chenoweth

DRUID IRISH PUB DJ every Fri; 9pm

Sat; 3:30-7pm

ELECTRIC RODEO–Spruce Grove DJ

LEAF BAR AND GRILL Open Stage

Sat–It's the Sat Jam hosted by Darren Bartlett, 5pm

Indie rock and dance with DJ Brodeep

Sat

CAFFREY'S IN THE PARK Heather

RED STAR Movin’ on Up: indie, rock,

NEW WEST HOTEL Trick Ryder O’BYRNE’S Live band every Sat,

Acoustiholics; 8:30pm

3-7pm; DJ every Sat, 9:30pm

J R BAR AND GRILL Live Jam

OLD TIMER'S CABIN Edmonton

Thu; 9pm

Blues Society: featuring Great North Blues Band; 7:30pm (door), $10 (members), $15 (guests)

KELLY'S PUB Jameoke Night with

the Nervous Flirts (sing-along with a live band); every Thu, 9pm-1am; no cover

ON THE ROCKS Chronic Rock

L.B.'S PUB South Bound Freight

week; $10

ORLANDO'S 1 Bands perform every

open jam with hosts: Rob Kaup, Leah Durelle

PAWN SHOP Future Roots and Funk Bunker present Love & Bass Featuring Technimatic with Future Roots and Funk Bunker; 8pm

MKT FRESH FOOD AND BEER MARKET Thu and Fri DJ and dance

floor; 9:30pm

RED PIANO BAR Hottest dueling

MORINVILLE COMMUNITY CULTURAL CENTRE Jimmy Rankin; 7:30pm

piano show featuring the Red Piano Players every Sat; 9pm-2am

northlands.com

NAKED CYBERCAFÉ Thu open stage; 8pm; all ages (15+)

RICHARD'S PUB The Mad Dog

Blues and Roots Jam hosted by Jimmy Guiboche; 3-7pm

NEW WEST HOTEL Trick Ryder NORTH GLENORA HALL Jam by Wild Rose Old Time Fiddlers every Thu; contact John Malka 780.447.5111 O'MAILLE'S Dylan Farrell; 9pm

CARROT COFFEEHOUSE Live music every Fri: this week with Jessica Holtby; all ages; 7pm; $5 (door)

RED PIANO Every Thu: Dueling

CASINO EDMONTON Mojave Iguanas

pianos at 8pm

CASINO YELLOWHEAD The Whiskey

REXALL PLACE Tragically Hip Fully

Boyz

and Completely Tour; 8-11pm; $32.76-$114.26

CENTURY CASINO Honeymoon Suite;

RIC’S GRILL Peter Belec (jazz);

most Thursdays; 7-10pm SMOKEHOUSE BBQ Live Blues every

Thur: rotating guests; 7-11pm STARLITE ROOM August Burns Red:

The Frozen Flame Tour Miss May I, Northlane, Fit For A King, Erra; 5pm (doors); Sold out TAVERN ON WHYTE Open stage

with Michael Gress (fr Self Evolution); every Thu; 9pm-2am WUNDERBAR Dead Fibres and ROy

funk, soul, hip hop with DJ Gatto, DJ Mega Wattson; every Fri SOU KAWAII ZEN LOUNGE Amplified

Fridays: Dubstep, house, trance, electro, hip hop breaks with DJ Aeiou, DJ Loose Beats, DJ Poindexter; 9:30pm (door) UNION HALL Ladies Night every Fri

DUGGAN'S BOUNDARY The Rural

Y AFTERHOURS Foundation Fridays

Vice & Vision; 9pm; $10-$15

Routes DV8 Unbalanced, Fiction Of Fate,

Reckless Rebels, Betty Sues A Tramp, New Age Veterans; 8pm FIDDLER'S ROOST Winterfest at the

Uptown Folk Club MKT FRESH FOOD AND BEER MARKET Thu and Fri DJ and dance

floor; 9:30pm MERCURY ROOM Close Talker

SAT FEB 14 ARDEN THEATRE Royal Wood;

7:30pm ARTERY Mercy Funk Love Fest

with guests; 8pm; $10 (adv), $12 (door) ATLANTIC TRAP AND GILL Stan

HOLY TRINITY ANGLICAN CHURCH

ON THE ROCKS Chronic Rock

The Beast

BLACK DOG FREEHOUSE Hair of the

PALACE CASINO–WEM Dahlia

DJs

Wakefield; 9:30pm

Dog: The Tubsteppers (live acoustic music every Sat); 4-6pm; no cover

RED PIANO BAR Hottest dueling

piano show featuring the Red Piano Players every Fri; 9pm-2am RIVER CREE Foghat with The

BLUE CHAIR CAFÉ Valentine's dinner

with live music by Jamie Philp, Farley Scott and Christine Hanson; 7-10:30pm BLUES ON WHYTE Every Sat afternoon: Jam with Back Door Dan; The Steadies

CENTURY ROOM Lucky 7: Retro '80s

Fabulous Thunderbirds featuring Kim Wilson; 18+ only; 7pm (door), 9pm (show); $29.50

with house DJ every Thu; 7pm-close

SHERLOCK HOLMES–DOWNTOWN

THE COMMON The Common

Doug Stroud

Uncommon Thursday: Rotating Guests each week!

Industrial - Goth - Dark Electro with DJs the Gothfather and Zeio; 9pm; $5 (door); (every Sat except the 1st Sat of the month)

SHERLOCK HOLMES–U OF A Rob

BOURBON ROOM Live Music every

ELECTRIC RODEO–Spruce Grove DJ

SHERLOCK HOLMES–WEM Mike

Sat Night with Jared Sowan and Brittany Graling; 8pm

"The Party Hog"

CAFE BLACKBIRD Billie Zizi -

TIRAMISU BISTRO Live music

every Fri

Valentine's Day Show; 8pm; $65 (dinner and show), $15 (show)

WILD EARTH BAKERY Lynne

CAFFREY'S IN THE PARK Heather

FILTHY MCNASTY’S Taking Back KRUSH ULTRA LOUNGE Open stage;

Taylor

BOHEMIA DARQ Saturdays:

7pm; no cover

Hanson; 8-10pm

McKenzie Band

ON THE ROCKS Salsa Rocks: every Thu; dance lessons at 8pm; Cuban Salsa DJ to follow

WUNDERBAR McGowan Family Band "Sweet 16 Birthday Party"; 9pm

mic; 7pm; $2

UNION HALL 3 Four All Thursdays:

YARDBIRD SUITE The Rockin' Highliners; 7pm (doors), 8pm

CASINO YELLOWHEAD The Whiskey

rock, dance, retro, top 40 with DJ

CARROT COFFEEHOUSE Sat Open CASINO EDMONTON Mojave Iguanas

FEB/18

KANT FLAVOURS, VICE & VISION NAPALM DEATH & VOIVOD ELLIOTT BROOD THE WILDERNESS OF MANITOBA JCL PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS

W/

FEB/21

UBK PRESENT THE BASS WEIGHT PROJECT 1.0 FT.

CRAZE, G JONES, DIMOND SAINTS FEB/ 22–23 BLACK VEIL BRIDES ALL AGES 1 SHOW THE BLACK MASS 2015 MEMPHIS MAY FIRE, GHOST TOWN UNION EVENTS PRESENTS

ST

SOLD OUT W/

FEB/26 FEB/27

NIGHT VISION PRESENTS

J PHLIP

FACE FIRST CD RELEASE SHOW

W/

HEAVISIDE

FEB/28

UNION EVENTS & STARLITE ROOM PRESENT

FEB/13

FROM CALGARY

YARDBIRD SUITE The Rockin' Highliners; 7pm (doors), 8pm (show); $22 (members), $26 (guests)

Classical

NEW WEST HOTEL Trick Ryder

PAWN SHOP Fuquored with Bogue Brigade and MSA; 8pm

WUNDERBAR The Basement Paintings with Day Dreaming and MoonMuseum; 8pm; $7 (adv), $15 (door)

Gallant

JUBILEE AUDITORIUM Beauty And

FEB/15

AND

W/

STARLITE ROOM Kant Flavours,

"B" STREET BAR Rockin Big Blues

Classical

Thursdays

SHERLOCK HOLMES–WEM Mike

W/

CONCERTWORKS.CA PRESENTS

SHERLOCK HOLMES–U OF A Rob

Taylor

AUGUST BURNS RED: THEMISSFROZEN FLAME TOUR MAY I, NORTHLANE ERRA

FEB/14

Doug Stroud

"The Party Hog"

and Roots Open Jam: Every Sat afternoon hosted by the Jimmy Guiboche Band; 2-6pm

every Thu

SHERLOCK HOLMES–DOWNTOWN

• Cannibal Corpse, Behemoth With Special Guests; 7pm (doors)

Davidson Orchestra; 8pm

Throwback Thu: Rock&Roll, Funk, Soul, R&B and 80s with DJ Thomas Culture; jamz that will make your backbone slide; Wooftop: Dig It! Thursdays. Electronic, roots and rare groove with DJ's Rootbeard, Raebot, Wijit and guests

Frequency - 16 Years Of Dance Floor Memories

7pm (door); $39.95

with Nature Of and with Guests; 8pm; $12 (adv)

BLACK DOG FREEHOUSE Thu Main Fl:

SHAW CONFERENCE CENTRE

UNION EVENTS PRESENTS

NIGHT VISION PRESENTS

HILLTOP PUB Open Stage, Jam every

Trio - Pre Valentine's Day Show; 8pm; $65 (dinner and show), $15 (show only) McKenzie Band

ALL AGES

FIONN MACCOOL'S–DOWNTOWN The

every Fri Night with Jared Sowan and Brittany Graling; 8pm

CAFE BLACKBIRD Dino Dominelli

FEB/12

ONE BAD SON

Vaughan String Quartet and Mathew Walton; 7:30pm JUBILEE AUDITORIUM Beauty And

The Beast WINSPEAR CENTRE Cirque de la

Symphonie; 2:30pm & 7pm

DJs

W/

BLACK DOG FREEHOUSE Main Floor:

The Menace Sessions: alt rock/ Electro/Trash with Miss Mannered; Wooftop: Sound It Up!: classic Hip-Hop, R&B and Reggae with DJ Sonny Grimez & instigate; Underdog: Alternating DJs

FEB/15

THE COMMON Get Down It's Saturday Night: House and disco and everything in between with resident Dane DRUID IRISH PUB DJ every Sat; 9pm ENCORE–WEM Every Sat: Sound and Light show; We are Saturdays: Kindergarten

CONCEALER BOMBCHAN W GUESTS/

SONS OF BEARS

THE BOWER For Those Who Know...:

Deep House and disco with Junior Brown, David Stone, Austin, and guests; every Sat

NAPALMPOM WARES

FEB/19

&

FNDTN

THE STARLITE ROOM IS A PRIVATE VENUE FOR OUR MEMBERS AND THEIR GUESTS. IF YOU REQUIRE A MEMBERSHIP YOU CAN PURCHASE ONE AT THE VENUE PRIOR TO / OR AFTER THE DOOR TIMES FOR EACH SHOW.

FLUID LOUNGE R&B, hip hop and dancehall with DJ Aiden Jamali; every Sat

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

MUSIC 31

MERCER TAVERN DJ Mikey Wong

SHAW CONFERENCE CENTRE

BLUES ON WHYTE Russell Jackson

every Sat

Frequency - 16 Years Of Dance Floor Memories

BRITTANY'S LOUNGE Scrambled YEG:

PAWN SHOP Transmission Saturdays: Indie rock, new wave, classic punk with DJ Blue Jay and Eddie Lunchpail; 9pm (door); free (before 10pm)/$5 (after 10pm); 1st Sat each month THE PROVINCIAL PUB Saturday Nights: Indie rock and dance with DJ Maurice

STARLITE ROOM Napalm Death &

Voivod; 5pm (doors); $31 WUNDERBAR Latcho Drom Tape

Release with Mobina Galore, the Strugglefucks, Feminal Fluids; 9pm YARDBIRD SUITE Lee Konitz/Dan

Open Genre Variety Stage: artist from all mediums are encouraged to occupy the stage and share their creations • Every Tue- Fri, 5-8pm DRUID IRISH PUB Open Stage Tue;

9pm

Open Genre Variety Stage: artist from all mediums are encouraged to occupy the stage and share their creations • Every Tue- Fri, 5-8pm

Classical

LEAF BAR AND GRILL Tue Open

ROUGE LOUNGE Rouge Saturdays:

Jam: Trevor Mullen

global sound and Cosmopolitan Style Lounging with DJ Mkhai

JUBILEE AUDITORIUM Beauty And

The Beast

MERCER TAVERN Alt Tuesday with

Kris Harvey and guests

SOU KAWAII ZEN LOUNGE

ROYAL ALBERTA MUSEUM–THEATRE

Peter and the Wolf; 3pm

MERCURY ROOM Matthew Byrne

WINSPEAR CENTRE Cirque de la

with Lindsey Walker and Jeff Morris; 7pm; $15 (adv)

Dance Party: Sugar Swing Dance Club every Sat, 8-12; no experience or partner needed, beginner lesson followed by social dance; sugarswing.com TAVERN ON WHYTE Soul, Motown,

BLACK DOG FREEHOUSE Main Floor:

Soul Sundays: A fantastic voyage through '60s and '70s funk, soul and R&B with DJ Zyppy

DUGGAN'S BOUNDARY Monday

BLUES ON WHYTE The Steadies

Monday Nights: Capital City Jammers, host Blueberry Norm; seasoned musicians; 7-10pm; $4

BRIXX BAR Concealer With Guests

NEW WEST HOTEL Trick Ryder

Bombchan And Sons Of Bears; 8pm; $10

PLEASANTVIEW COMMUNITY HALL

DIVERSION LOUNGE Sun Night Live

on the South Side: live bands; all ages; 7-10:30pm DUGGAN'S BOUNDARY Celtic Music with Duggan's House Band 5-8pm FIDDLER'S ROOST Winterfest at the

Uptown Folk Club HOG'S DEN PUB Rockin' the Hog

Jam: Hosted by Tony Ruffo; every Sun, 3:30-7pm NEWCASTLE PUB The Sunday Soul Service: acoustic open stage every Sun O’BYRNE’S Open mic every Sun;

9:30pm-1am RICHARD'S PUB Sunday Jam hosted

by Jim Dyck, Randy Forsberg and Mark Ammar; 4-8pm

OVERTIME–Sherwood Park Jason

RICHARD'S PUB Tue Live Music

BLUE CHAIR CAFÉ Jim Findlay Trio;

live swing, jazz and big band music in the City Room. If you enjoy the outdoors, the music will be broadcast directly outside or the enjoyment of ice skaters on City Hall Plaza. This week featuring: Don Berner's Little Big Band ; Every Sun until Feb 22, 1-4pm; Free

mic Wed: Hosted by Jordan Strand; every Wed, 9-12 jordanfstrand@gmail.com / 780655-8520

PLEASANTVIEW COMMUNITY HALL

open mic

CITY HALL Swing 'n Skate: Features

ORIGINAL JOE'S VARSITY ROW Open

RED PIANO Every Tue: the Nervous

Open mic every Sun hosted by Tim Lovett 9am-3pm; Donations

NEW WEST HOTEL Trick Ryder

Blue Jay’s Messy Nest: Mod, Brit Pop, New Wave & British Rock with DJ Blue Jay; Wooftop: Metal Mon: with Metal Phil (fr CJSR’s Heavy Metal Lunch Box)

OVERTIME–Sherwood Park Open mic

BLUES ON WHYTE Russell Jackson

BLACKJACK'S ROADHOUSE–Nisku

FESTIVAL PLACE The Irish Rovers: Farewell to Rovin'; Sold out

BLACK DOG FREEHOUSE Main Floor:

UNION HALL Celebrity Saturdays:

SUN FEB 15

O’BYRNE’S Celtic jam every Tue; with Shannon Johnson and friends; 9:30pm

DUGGAN'S BOUNDARY Wed open mic with host Duff Robison

Greeley (acoustic rock, country, Top 40); 9pm-2am every Wed; no cover

MON FEB 16

Y AFTERHOURS Release Saturdays

Dance Lessons: 7-9pm • Trick Ryder

BRITTANY'S LOUNGE Scrambled YEG:

every Tue

Funk, R&B and more with DJs Ben and Mitch; every Sat; 9pm-2am every Sat hosted by DJ Johnny Infamous

NEW WEST HOTEL Tue Country

DJs

Alt '80s and '90s, Post Punk, New Wave, Garage, Brit, Mod, Rock and Roll witih LL Cool Joe and DJ Downtrodden on alternate Weds

L.B.'S PUB Tue Variety Night Open stage with Darrell Barr; 7-11pm

electro every Sat with DJ Hot Philly and guests

Symphonie; 10am

BLACK DOG FREEHOUSE Main Floor:

BLUES ON WHYTE Russell Jackson

RED STAR Indie rock, hip hop, and

SUGAR FOOT BALLROOM Swing

ALBERTA BEACH HOTEL Open stage Wed with Trace Jordan; 8pm-12

FESTIVAL PLACE The Irish Rovers: Farewell to Rovin'; Sold out

Tepfer Duo; 7pm (doors), 8pm (show); $24 (members), $28 (guests)

Your Famous Saturday with Crewshtopher, Tyler M

WED FEB 18

MERCURY ROOM Music Magic

Acoustic instrumental old time fiddle jam every Mon; hosted by the Wild Rose Old Tyme Fiddlers Society; 7pm; contact Vi Kallio 780.456.8510

Flirts Jameoke Experience (sing-along with a live band); 7:30pm-12am; no cover; relaxed dress code Showcase and Open Jam (blues) hosted by Mark Ammar; 7:30pm RIVER CREE John Anderson; 18+

only; 6pm (door), 8pm (show); $24.50 ROCKY MOUNTAIN ICEHOUSE Live

Acoustic Bluegrass jam presented by the Northern Bluegrass Circle Music Society; every Wed, 6:30-11pm; $2 (member)/$4 (nonmember) RED PIANO BAR Wed Night Live:

hosted by dueling piano players; 8pm-1am; $5 ROSSDALE HALL Little Flower Open

Stage with Brian Gregg; 7:30pm (door); no cover

music with the Icehouse Band and weekly guests; Every Tue, 9pm

STARLITE ROOM Elliott Brood, The Wilderness Of Manitoba; 8pm; $24

SANDS HOTEL Country music

WUNDERBAR Party Like a Teenager: the Punk Years; 9pm

dancing every Tue, featuring Country Music Legend Bev Munro every Tue, 8-11pm

ZEN LOUNGE Jazz Wednesdays: Kori

YARDBIRD SUITE Tuesday Session:

Wray and Jeff Hendrick; every Wed; 7:30-10pm; no cover

Marty Majorowicz Quartet; 7:30pm (door)/8pm (show); $5

Classical

Night with Darrek Anderson from the Guaranteed; every Mon; 9pm

Classical

Access

Classical

JUBILEE AUDITORIUM Backstage

Access

MCDOUGALL UNITED CHURCH Music

JUBILEE AUDITORIUM Beauty And

DJs

ROUGE RESTO-LOUNGE Open Mic

The Beast

JUBILEE AUDITORIUM Backstage

at Noon; 12pm WINSPEAR CENTRE An Age of

BLACK DOG FREEHOUSE Main Floor:

DJs BLACK DOG FREEHOUSE Main Floor:

Blue Jay’s Messy Nest: mod, brit pop, new wave, British rock with DJ Blue Jay DV8 T.F.W.O. Mondays: Roots

industrial,Classic Punk, Rock, Electronic with Hair of the Dave TAVERN ON WHYTE Classic Hip

hop with DJ Creeazn every Mon; 9pm-2am

TUE FEB 17

Innocence: A 60s Jukebox; 7:30pm

Brit Pop, Synthpop, Alternative 90’s, Glam Rock with DJ Chris Bruce; Wooftop: Substance: alt retro and not-so-retro electronic and dance with Eddie LunchPail

DJs

BRIXX Metal night every Tue

BLACK DOG FREEHOUSE Main Floor:

DV8 Creepy Tombsday: Psychobilly,

Hallowe'en horrorpunk, deathrock with Abigail Asphixia and Mr Cadaver; every Tue RED STAR Swing, Funk, Soul, R&B,

Rock&Roll and Electro/Disco sounds of the last 70 years with DJ Thomas Culture

ARTERY Ash Grunwald; 7pm; $10

BILLIARD CLUB Why wait

Wednesdays: Wed night party with DJ Alize every Wed; no cover Alt '80s and '90s, Post Punk, New Wave, Garage, Brit, Mod, Rock and Roll witih LL Cool Joe and DJ Downtrodden on alternate Weds BRIXX BAR Eats and Beats THE COMMON The Wed Experience: Classics on Vinyl with Dane RED STAR Guest DJs every Wed

(adv), $12 (door)

VENUEGUIDE ACCENT EUROPEAN LOUNGE 8223-104 St, 780.431.0179 ALE YARD TAP 13310-137 Ave ALL SAINTS' CATHEDRAL 10035-103 St APEX CASINO 24 Boudreau Road, St. Albert, 780.460.8092 ARDEN THEATRE 5 Anne St St, St. Albert, 780.459.1542 ARTERY 9535 Jasper Ave ATLANTIC TRAP & GILL 7704 Calgary Trail South, 780.432.4611 "B" STREET BAR 11818-111 St BLACK DOG FREEHOUSE 1042582 Ave, 780.439.1082 BLACKJACK'S ROADHOUSE– Nisku 2110 Sparrow Dr, Nisku, 780.986.8522 BLUE CHAIR CAFÉ 9624-76 Ave, 780.989.2861 BLUES ON WHYTE 10329-82 Ave, 780.439.3981 BOHEMIA 10217-97 St BOURBON ROOM 205 Carnegie Dr, St Albert THE BOWER 10538 Jasper Ave, 780.423.425; info@thebower.ca BRITTANY'S LOUNGE 10225-97 St, 780.497.0011 BRIXX BAR 10030-102 St (downstairs), 780.428.1099 THE BUCKINGHAM 10439 82 Ave, 780.761.1002 BUDDY’S 11725B Jasper Ave, 780.488.6636 CAFE BLACKBIRD 9640-124 St, 780.451.8890

32 MUSIC

CAFÉ HAVEN 9 Sioux Rd, Sherwood Park, 780.417.5523, cafehaven.ca CAFFREY'S IN THE PARK 99, 23349 Wye Rd, Sherwood Park CARROT COFFEEHOUSE 9351118 Ave, 780.471.1580 CASINO EDMONTON 7055 Argylll Rd, 780.463.9467 CASINO YELLOWHEAD 12464153 St, 780.424 9467 CENTRAL SENIOR LIONS CENTRE 11113-113 St CENTURY CASINO 13103 Fort Rd, 780.643.4000 CHA ISLAND TEA CO 10332-81 Ave, 780.757.2482 CLUB AT THE CITADEL 9828101A Ave COMMON 9910-109 St CONVOCATION HALL 116 St and 85 Ave CROWN AND ACHOR PUB 15277 Castle Downs Road DARAVARA 10713 124 St, 587.520.4980 DIVERSION LOUNGE 3414 Gateway Blvd, 780.435.1922 DUGGAN'S BOUNDARY 9013-88 Ave, 780.465.4834 DRUID 11606 Jasper Ave, 780.454.9928 DV8 8130 Gateway Blvd EARLY STAGE SALOON– Stony Plain 4911-52 Ave, Stony Plain, 780.963.5998 ELECTRIC RODEO–Spruce Grove 121-1 Ave, Spruce Grove,

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

780.962.1411 ENCORE–WEM 2687, 8882-170 St FESTIVAL PLACE 100 Festival Way, Sherwood Park, 780.449.3378 FILTHY MCNASTY’S 10511-82 Ave, 780.916.1557 FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 10025-105 St FLUID LOUNGE 10888 Jasper Ave, 780.429.0700 GRANT MACEWAN UNIVERSITY 10045-156 St HILLTOP PUB 8220 106 Ave HOGS DEN PUB Yellow Head Tr, 142 St IRISH SPORTS CLUB 12546-126 St, 780.453.2249 J AND R 4003-106 St, 780.436.4403 JUBILEE AUDITORIUM 11455-87 Ave, 780.427.2760 KELLY'S PUB 10156-104 St L.B.’S PUB 23 Akins Dr, St Albert, 780.460.9100 LEAF BAR AND GRILL 9016-132 Ave, 780.757.2121 MCDOUGALL UNITED CHURCH 10025-101 St MKT FRESH FOOD AND BEER MARKET 8101 Gateway Blvd, 780.439.2337 MERCER TAVERN 10363 104 St, 587.521.1911 MERCURY ROOM 10575-114 St NAKED CYBERCAFÉ 10303-108 St, 780.425.9730 NEWCASTLE PUB 8170-50 St,

780.490.1999 NEW WEST HOTEL 15025-111 Ave NOORISH CAFÉ 8440-109 St NORTH GLENORA HALL 13535109A Ave O2'S–West 11066-156 St, 780.448.2255 O’BYRNE’S 10616-82 Ave, 780.414.6766 ORIGINAL JOE'S VARSITY ROW 8404-109 St O'MAILLES IRISH PUB 104, 398 St Albert Rd, St Albert ON THE ROCKS 11730 Jasper Ave, 780.482.4767 ORLANDO'S 1 15163-121 St OVERTIME–Sherwood Park 100 Granada Blvd, Sherwood Park, 790.570.5588 PALACE CASINO–WEM West Edmonton Mall, 8882-170 St, 780.

444.2112 PAWN SHOP 10551-82 Ave, Upstairs, 780.432.0814 PLEASANTVIEW COMMUNITY HALL 10860-57 Ave THE PROVINCIAL PUB 160, 4211-106 St RANCH ROADHOUSE 6107-104 St, 780.438.2582 RED PIANO BAR 1638 Bourbon St, WEM, 8882-170 St, 780.486.7722 RED STAR 10538 Jasper Ave, 780.428.0825 RENDEZVOUS 10108-149 St RICHARD'S PUB 12150-161 Ave, 780.457.3118

RIC’S GRILL 24 Perron Street, St Albert, 780.460.6602 RIVER CREE 300 East Lapotac Blvd, Enoch ROCKY MOUNTAIN ICEHOUSE 10516 Jasper Ave, 780.424.3836 ROSEBOWL/ROUGE LOUNGE 10111-117 St, 780.482.5253 ROSE AND CROWN 10235-101 St SANDS HOTEL 12340 Fort Rd, 780.474.5476 SIDELINERS PUB 11018-127 St SMOKEHOUSE BBQ 10810-124 St, 587.521.6328 SOU KAWAII ZEN LOUNGE 1292397 St, 780.758.5924 ST. BASIL'S CULTURAL CENTRE 10819-71 Ave STARLITE ROOM 10030-102 St, 780.428.1099 SUGAR FOOT BALLROOM 10545-81 Ave TAVERN ON WHYTE 10507-82 Ave, 780.521.4404 TIRAMISU 10750-124 St WINSPEAR CENTRE 4 Sir Winston Churchill Square; 780.28.1414 WUNDERBAR 8120-101 St, 780.436.2286 Y AFTERHOURS 10028-102 St, 780.994.3256, yafterhours.com YARDBIRD SUITE 11 Tommy Banks Way, 780.432.0428 YESTERDAYS PUB 112, 205 Carnegie Dr, St Albert, 780.459.0295 ZEN LOUNGE 12923-97 St

EVENTS WEEKLY EMAIL YOUR FREE LISTINGS TO: LISTINGS@VUEWEEKLY.COM FAX: 780.426.2889 DEADLINE: FRIDAY AT 3PM

COMEDY Black Dog Freehouse • Underdog Comedy show: Alternating hosts • Every Thu, 8-11pm • No cover

BRENT BUTT • Arden Theatre, 5 St. Anne St • Feb 18, 7:30pm

CENTURY CASINO • 13103 Fort Rd • 780.481.9857 • Open Mic Night: Every Thu; 7:30-9pm

COMEDY FACTORY • Gateway Entertainment Centre, 34 Ave, Calgary Tr • Fri-Sat: 8:30pm • Tom Liske; Feb 12-14 • Justin Berkman; Feb 19-21, Feb 26-28

COMIC STRIP • Bourbon St, WEM • 780.483.5999 • Wed-Fri, Sun 8pm; Fri-Sat 10:30pm • Hit or Miss Mondays: Amateurs and Professionals every Mon, 7:30pm • Battle to the Funny Bone; last Tue each month, 7:30pm • Steve Simone; Feb 11-15 • Jay Pharoah Special Presentation; Feb 19-24 CONNIE'S COMEDY • Draft Bar & Grill, 1291250 St • With Mike Dambra as headliner, Marvin Krawczyk and Dar Germin • Feb 11, 7:30pm

Wed, 6:30pm

ORGANIZATION FOR BIPOLAR AFFECTIVE DISORDER (OBAD) • Grey Nuns Hospital, Rm 0651, 780.451.1755; Group meets every Thu, 7-9pm • Free

POOR VOTE TURNOUT • Rossdale Hall, 1013596 Ave • poorvoteturnout.ca • Public meetings: promoting voting by the poor • Every Wed, 7-8pm •

SAWA 12-STEP SUPPORT GROUP • Braeside Presbyterian Church bsmt, N. door, 6 Bernard Dr, St Albert • For adult children of alcoholic and dysfunctional families • Every Mon, 7:30pm

SCHIZOPHRENIA SOCIETY FAMILY SUPPORT DROP-IN GROUP • Schizophrenia

SEVENTIES FOREVER MUSIC SOCIETY • Call 587.520.3833 for location • deepsoul.ca • Combining music, garage sales, nature, common sense, and kindred karma to revitalize the inward persona • Every Wed, 7-8:30pm

SHERWOOD PARK WALKING GROUP + 50 • Meet inside Millennium Place, Sherwood Place • Weekly outdoor walking group; starts with a 10min discussion, followed by a 30 to 40-min walk through Centennial Park, a cool down and stretch • Every Tue, 8:30am • $2/session (goes to the Alzheimer’s Society of Alberta)

SUGAR FOOT BALLROOM • 10545-81 Ave •

ROUGE LOUNGE • 10111-117 St • Comedy Groove every Wed; 9pm

TAKE OFF POUNDS SENSIBLY (TOPS) • Grace United Church annex, 6215-104 Ave • Low-

GROUPS/CLUBS/MEETINGS

cost, fun and friendly weight loss group • Every Mon, 6:30pm • Info: call Bob 780.479.5519

EMPRESS ALE HOUSE • 9912-82 Ave •

AIKIKAI AIKIDO CLUB • 10139-87 Ave, Old Strathcona Community League • Japanese Martial Art of Aikido • Every Tue 7:30-9:30pm; Thu 6-8pm

ARGENTINE TANGO DANCE AT FOOT NOTES STUDIO • Foot Notes Dance Studio (South side), 9708-45 Ave • 780.438.3207 • virenzi@shaw.ca • Argentine Tango with Tango Divino: beginners: 7-8pm; intermediate: 8-9pm; Tango Social Dance (Milonga): 9pm-12 • Every Fri, 7pm-midnight • $15

BRAIN TUMOUR PEER SUPPORT GROUP •

Mount Zion Lutheran Church, 11533-135 St NW • braintumour.ca • 1.800.265.5106 ext. 234 • Support group for brain tumour survivors and their families and caregivers. Must be 18 or over • 3rd Mon every month; 7-8:45pm • Free

CANADIAN INJURED WORKERS ASSOCIATION OF ALBERTA (CIWAA) • Augustana Lutheran Church, 107 St, 99 Ave • canadianinjuredworkers.com • Meeting every 3rd Sat, 1-4pm • Injured Workers in Pursuit of Justice denied by WCB

EDMONTON OUTDOOR CLUB (EOC) • edmontonoutdoorclub.com • Offering a variety of fun activities in and around Edmonton • Free to join; info at info@edmontonoutdoorclub.com EDMONTON UKULELE CIRCLE • Bogani Café, 2023-111 St • 780.440.3528 • 3rd Sun each month; 2:30-4pm • $5

FOOD ADDICTS • St Luke's Anglican Church, 8424-95 Ave • 780.465.2019, 780.634.5526 • Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA), free 12-Step recovery program for anyone suffering from food obsession, overeating, under-eating, and bulimia • Meetings every Thu, 7pm

LOTUS QIGONG • 780.477.0683 • Downtown • Practice group meets every Thu MADELEINE SANAM FOUNDATION • Faculté St Jean, Rm 3-18 • 780.490.7332 • madeleinesanam.orgs/en • Program for HIV-AID’S prevention, treatment and harm reduction in French, English and other African languages • 3rd and 4th Sat, 9am-5pm each month • Free (member)/$10 (membership); pre-register

NORTHERN ALBERTA WOOD CARVERS ASSOCIATION • Duggan Community Hall, 3728106 St • 780.435.0845 • nawca.ca • Meet every

• Telus World of Science Edmonton, 11211-142 St • Learn about natural Alberta, about conservation and the natural spaces you can visit in the Edmonton area • Feb 12, 6-10pm • Free (seating is limited, RSVP at Alberta.RSVP@natureconservancy. ca or 1.877.262.1253 ext. 6860)

NATURE CONSERVANCY OF CANADA SPEAKER SERIES FEATURING KEVIN VAN TIGHEM • Telus World of Science Edmonton,

RECOGNIZING PATTERS IN THE SKY •

Empress Comedy Night: featuring a professional headliner every week Every Sun, 9pm

Comedy night open stage hosted by Lars Callieou • Every Sun, 9pm (DJ to follow)

EDMONTON SPEAKER SERIES HOSTED BY THE NATURE CONSERVANCY OF CANADA

11211-142 St • 1.877.262.1253 ext. 6860 • natureconservancy.ca • Talking about carnivores • Feb 12, 6:15-10:45pm • Free

Society of Alberta, 5215-87 St • schizophrenia. ab.ca • The Schizophrenia Society of AlbertaEdmonton branch provides a facilitated family support group for caregivers of a loved one living with schizophrenia. Free drop-in the 1st and 3rd Thu each month, 7-9pm

587.786.6554 • sugarswing.com • Friday Night Stomp!: Swing and party music dance social every Fri; beginner lesson starts at 8pm. All ages and levels welcome. Occasional live music–check web; $10, $2 (lesson with entry) • Swing Dance Social every Sat; beginner lesson starts at 8pm. All ages and levels welcome. Occasional live music–check the Sugar Swing website for info • $10, $2 lesson with entry

DRUID • 11606 Jasper Ave • 780.710.2119 •

ab.ca • 780.427.1750 • culture.alberta.ca/paa/ eventsandexhibits/default.aspx • An exhibit that draws upon archival holdings to show the many ways that the First World War changed the province forever • until Aug 29, 9am-4:30pm

TIBETAN BUDDHIST MAHAMUDRA • Karma Tashi Ling Society, 10502-70 Ave • Tranquility and insight meditation based on Very Ven. Thrangu Rinpoche's teachings. Suitable for meditation practitioners with Buddhist leanings • Every Thu, 7-8:30pm • Donations; jamesk2004@hotmail.com

University of Alberta Observatory, CCIS 5th Floor, SW corner • ualberta.ca/~stars • stars@ualberta. ca • Dario Colombo will show attendees how scientists teach "pattern recognition" to machines and how everyone can be astronomer through citizen science • Feb 12, 7-7:30pm • Free (no tickets needed)

SEEING IS ABOVE ALL • Acacia Hall, 10433-83 Ave, upstairs • 780.554.6133 • Free instruction in meditation on the Inner Light • Every Sun, 5pm VIEWS OF THE NIGHT SKY • University of

• Club Bilingue Toastmasters Meetings: Campus St; Jean: Pavillion McMahon; 780.467.6013, l.witzke@ shaw.ca; fabulousfacilitators.toastmastersclubs. org; Meet every Tue, 12:05-1pm • Fabulous Facilitators Toastmasters Club: 2nd Fl, Canada Place, 9700 Jasper Ave; 780.467.6013, l.witzke@shaw.ca; fabulousfacilitators. toastmastersclubs.org; Meet every Tue, 12:05-1pm • health aware Toastmasters: St Michael's Care Centre, 7404-139 Ave, Lower floor, Follow the signs; Alternating Wednesday and Thursdays from 6:15pm to 8:45 pm, Feb 12, 18, 26; contact 780.240.8965 • N'Orators Toastmasters Club: Lower Level, McClure United Church, 13708-74 St: meet every Thu, 6:45-8:30pm; contact bradscherger@hotmail.com, 780.863.1962, norators.com • Upward Bound Toastmaster Club: Rm 7, 6 Fl, Edmonton Public Library–DT: Meets every Wed, 7-8:45pm; Sep-May; upward.toastmastersclubs. org; reader1@shaw.ca • Y Toastmasters Club: Queen Alexandra Community League, 10425 University Ave (N door, stairs to the left); Meet every Tue, 7-9pm except last Tue ea month; Contact: Antonio Balce, 780.463.5331

WASKAHEGAN TRAIL ASSOCIATION • waskahegantrail.ca • A guided hike from Whitemud Park to Hawrelak Park; Meet at McDonalds, 14920-87 Ave; Feb 15, 9:45am; Hike leader Joanne 780.487.0645 • A hike from Goldbar Park to Rundle Park; Meet at McDonalds Capilano, 9857-50 St; Feb 21, 9:45am; Hike leader Johanna 780.428.8561 • Guests welcome; annual membership $20

WOMEN IN BLACK • In Front of the Old Strathcona Farmers' Market • Silent vigil the 1st and 3rd Sat, 10-11am, each month, stand in silence for a world without violence LECTURES/PRESENTATIONS ALBERTA & THE GREAT WAR • Provincial Archives of Alberta, 8555 Roper Road • PAA@gov.

so much more • Feb 16, 12-4pm

MAKING WAVES SWIMMING CLUB •

FAMILY HISTORY DAY • Provincial Archives of Alberta, 8555 Roper Road • culture.alberta.ca/paa/ eventsandexhibits • Discover the tools available to trace your family geneology. Free tours of the facility, and hands-on workshops will be available • Feb 16, 10am-3pm • Free (reserve at paaevents@ gov.ab.ca or 780.427.1750)

geocities.com/makingwaves_edm • Recreational/ competitive swimming. Socializing after practices • Every Tue/Thu

PRIDE CENTRE OF EDMONTON • Pride Centre of Edmonton, 10608-105 Ave • 780.488.3234 • A safe, welcoming, and non-judgemental drop-in space, support programs and resources offered for members of the GLBTQ community, their families and friends • Daily: Community drop-in; support and resources. Queer library: borrowing privileges: Tue-Fri 12-9pm, Sat 2-6:30pm, closed Sun-Mon; Queer HangOUT (a.k.a. QH) youth drop-in: Tue-Fri 3-8pm, Sat 2-6:30pm, youth@pridecentreofedmonton.org • Counselling: Free, short-term by registered counsellors every Wed, 5:30-8:30pm, info/bookings: 780.488.3234 • Knotty Knitters: Knit and socialize in safe, accepting environment, all skill levels welcome; every Wed 6-8pm • QH Game Night: Meet people through board game fun; every Thu 6-8pm • QH Craft Night: every Wed, 6-8pm • QH Anime Night: Watch anime; every Fri, 6-8pm • Men Talking with Pride: Support and social group for gay and bisexual men; every Sun 7-9pm; robwells780@hotmail.com • TTIQ: a support and information group for all those who fall under the transgender umbrella and their family/supporters; 3rd Mon, 7-9pm, each month

ST PAUL'S UNITED CHURCH • 11526-76 Ave • 780.436.1555 • People of all sexual orientations are welcome • Every Sun (10am worship)

Alberta Observatory, University of Alberta • Chat with astronomers who are currently undertaking research in astronomy, and look through telescopes to explore the universe. Free public talks during the first half of our observing session (should the sky not cooperate) • Weekly until Feb 26 • Free

WOMONSPACE • 780.482.1794 • womons-

QUEER

WOODYS VIDEO BAR • 11723 Jasper Ave

BUDDYS NITE CLUB • 11725 Jasper Ave • 780.488.6636 • Tue with DJ Arrow Chaser, free pool all night; 9pm (door); no cover • Wed with DJ Dust’n Time; 9pm (door); no cover • Thu: Men’s Wet Underwear Contest, win prizes, hosted by Drag Queen DJ Phon3 Hom3; 9pm (door); no cover before 10pm • Fri Dance Party with DJ Arrow Chaser; 8pm (door); no cover before 10pm • Sat: Feel the rhythm with DJ Phon3 Hom3; 8pm (door); no cover before 10pm

EPLC FELLOWSHIP PAGAN STUDY GROUP • Pride Centre of Edmonton, 10608-105 Ave • 780.488.3234 • eplc.webs.com • Free year long course; Family circle 3rd Sat each month • Everyone welcome

EVOLUTION WONDERLOUNGE • 10220-103

TOASTMASTERS

780.554.7436

St • 780.424.0077 • yourgaybar.com • Community Tue: partner with various local GLBT groups for different events; see online for details • Happy Hour Wed-Fri: 4-8pm • Wed Karaoke: with the Mystery Song Contest; 7pm-2am • Fri: DJ Evictor • Sat: DJ Jazzy • Sun: Beer Bash

G.L.B.T. SPORTS AND RECREATION • teamedmonton.ca • Blazin' Bootcamp: Garneau Elementary School Gym, 10925-87 Ave; Every Mon and Thu, 7pm; $30/$15 (low income/student); E: bootcamp@teamedmonton.ca • Mindful Meditation: Pride Centre: Every Thu, 6pm; free weekly drop-in • Swimming–Making Waves: NAIT pool, 11762-106 St; E: swimming@teamedmonton.ca; makingwavesswimclub.ca • Martial Arts–Kung Fu and Kick Boxing: Every Tue and Thu, 6-7pm; GLBTQ inclusive adult classes at Sil-Lum Kung Fu; kungfu@teamedmonton.ca, kickboxing@ teamedmonton.ca, sillum.ca

G.L.B.T.Q SENIORS GROUP • S.A.G.E Bldg, Craftroom, 15 Sir Winston Churchill Sq • 780.474.8240 • Meeting for gay seniors, and for any seniors who have gay family members and would like some guidance • Every Thu, 1-4pm • Info: E: Tuff69@telus.net ILLUSIONS SOCIAL CLUB • Pride Centre, 10608-105 Ave • 780.387.3343 • edmontonillusions.ca • Crossdressers meet 2nd Fri each month, 7:30-9pm INSIDE/OUT • U of A Campus • Campus-based organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transidentified and queer (LGBTQ) faculty, graduate student, academic, straight allies and support staff • 3rd Thu each month (fall/winter terms): Speakers Series. E: kwells@ualberta.ca LGBTTQ OLDER ADULTS SYMPOSIUM • Sage, 15 Sir Winston Churchill Sq NW • lgbtq-older-adults-symposium.eventbrite. ca • A conversation about programs, services and housing issues facing an older generation • Feb 24, 8:30am-2:30pm • Free, RSVP to createtherippleevents@gmail.com or

pace.org, womonspace@gmail.com • A non-profit lesbian social organization for Edmonton and surrounding area. Monthly activities, newsletter, reduced rates included with membership.

Confidentiality assured • 780.488.6557 • Mon: Amateur Strip Contest; prizes with Shawana • Tue: Kitchen 3-11pm • Wed: Karaoke with Tizzy 7pm-1am; Kitchen 3-11pm • Thu: Free pool all night; kitchen 3-11pm • Fri: Mocho Nacho Fri: 3pm (door), kitchen open 3-11pm

SPECIAL EVENTS BEAD MARKET • Ramada Inn Edmonton South, 5359 Calgary Trail • 780.486.7543 • TreasureStoneBeads.com • Have fun with beads, gemstones, charms, pearls and more beading supplies • Feb 28, 11am-5pm • Free CHINESE NEW YEAR CARNIVAL 2015 • Chinese Catholic Parish, 10140-119 St • 780.482.7481 • CNYC2015@gmail.com • mhocccp.wix.com/cnyc2015 • Enjoy the ever popular high energy lion dance, unique Chinese arts, crafts, novelty, Chinese calligraphy and more • Feb 14-15

DEEPSOUL.CA • 587.520.3833; call or text for Sunday jam locations • Every Sun: Sunday Jams with no Stan (CCR to Metallica), starring Chuck Prins on Les Paul Standard guitars; Pink Floydish originals plus great Covers of Classics: some FREE; Twilight Zone Lively Up Yourself Tour (with DJ Cool Breeze); all ages EDMONTON EPICUREAN SOCIETY DINNER • The Common, 9910-109 St • 780.970.4581 • EdmontonEpicurean.com • info@EdmontonEpicurean.com • Executive Chef Jesse MorrisonGauthier creates an original menu to pair with new world wines • Feb 24, 6:30-9:30pm • $80 (members), $90 (guests); attendance must be confirmed by Feb 15

FAMILY DAY AT CITY HALL & CHURCHILL SQUARE • City Hall, Sir Winston Churchill Square • 311@edmonton.ca • 311 • edmonton.ca • Skating, hay rides, bannock-making & games on the Square. Free skate & helmet rentals. Live entertainment & crafts in City Hall • Feb 16, 12-4pm

FAMILY DAY AT THE EDMONTON PUBLIC LIBRARY • Various locations around Edmonton • epl.ca • Join the Edmonton Public Library for various events • Feb 16

FAMILY DAY FESTIVAL • Steele Heights Baptist Church, 5812-149 Ave • 780.478.1553 • office@ shbc.ca • shbc.ca • Featuring wagon rides, skating, sledding, professional entertainment, bouncy houses, face painting, tropical foods, crafts, and much more • Feb 16, 1-5pm

FAMILY DAY FUN • Edmonton Valley Zoo • edmonton.ca • Participate in an Animal Families Scavenger Hunt, try Winterscaping and learn why the Edmonton Valley Zoo is an Arctic Ambassador Centre for Polar Bears International. Warm up inside while and visit the Polar Bear craft table and

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

HAIR MASSACURE • West Edmonton Mall - Ice Palace • hairmassacure.com • A mass headshaving event organized in the Edmonton area that raises awareness and money to help children facing life-threatening illnesses • Feb 14, 9am-9pm

MAC N'CHEESE AFFAIR • University of Alberta Faculty Club • eventbrite.ca/e/the-campus-foodbank-present-the-mac-n-cheese-affair-2015-tickets-10859979491 • A banquet and silent auction.

Dress to impress and join in celebrating 24 years of fighting hunger on the U of A campus • Feb 27, 5pm (doors), 6pm (show) MARDI GRAS MASQUERADE BALL • Mirage Banquet, 8170-50 St • frenchquarteredmonton.ca • A fundraiser for YESS and African Victims of Ebola • Feb 21, 6pm rhyThms oF The earTh: a celeBraTION OF BLACK HISTORY MONTH • Carrot Community Arts Coffeehouse, 9315-118 Ave • artsontheave.org • Featuring an eclectic mix of events including poetry slams, dance workshops, food tasting and more • Feb 1-28, 12-11:30pm • Most events are free, some require pre-registration or purchase of a ticket

ROMANCING THE PYRAMID • Muttart Conservatory, 9626-96A St • A six-course Valentine's Day dinner in the Tropical Pyramid, wine pairings from Color de Vino, dessert from the Dandylion, transportation to and from the event in a Lincoln Towncar and so much more • Feb 13 • Six tables will be auctioned off to the highest bidders.

Portions of the proceeds will go to United Way and Meal Share

SCRAMBLED YEG • Brittany's Lounge, 1022597 St • 780.497.0011 • Open Genre Variety Stage: artist from all mediums are encouraged to occupy the stage and share their creations • Every Tue-Fri, 5-8pm SILVER SKATE FESTIVAL • Hawrelak Park, 9930 Groat Rd • silverskatefestival.org • An extravaganza of art, culture, recreation and sports programming • Feb 14-23 TASTE OF SOMALIA • Imaan Restaurant, 9411-118 Ave • artsontheave.org • Sample the delicious cuisine of Somalia • Feb 19, 6:30-9pm • $15 (available until Feb 17) URBAN GREEN COHOUSING INFORMATION SESSION • Old Strathcona Library (upstairs), 8331-104 St • delladennis@telus.net • urbangreencohousing.ca • Feb 22, 2-3:30pm • Free; all ages

WINTER BIKE TO WORK (SCHOOL) BREAKFAST • Earth's General Store (Downtown), 10150104 St • Michael@egs.ca • egs.ca/node/704 • Winter cyclists, its time to get your bike on! Join in on a free pancake breakfast (please bring your own mug) and have some fun • Feb 13, 7-9am • Free with a bike

WINEFEST EDMONTON • Shaw Conference Centre, Hall D, 9797 Jasper Ave • 1-866.228.3555 • katie@celebratewinefest.com • celebratewinefest.com/edmonton.html • Sip different kinds of wine, a try-before-you-buy event. Wine experts will be on hand to share their knowledge as guests taste. A Sobey's Liquor will be on-site so visitors can purchase finds for home. A tasting notebook and a Riedel glass are included in the ticket price • Feb 13-14 • $80 (Fri), $75 (Feb 14), $80 (Sun) WINTER BIKE TO WORK DAY 2015 • Downtown Edmonton, 1 Sir Winston Churchill Square • michael.kalmanovitch@gmail.com • winterbiketoworkday.org • Join other Edmontontians and bike to work • Feb 13, 12am-11:30pm • Register your ride at winterbiketoworkday.org WINTERFETE • Alberta Legislature, 10800-97 Ave • 780.427.2826 • assembly.ab.ca/visitor/annualEvents.html • Spend family day with a scavenger hunt, magic & puppet show, crafts, autographs with local sports celebrities, snowman making contest, and so much more • Feb 17, 12-4pm YEAR OF THE SHEEP CELEBRATION • Chinatown / McCauley Neighbourhood, 9700-107 Ave • Includes a dragon dance, lion dance and firecrackers. Enjoy dim sum, steaming bowl of pho, hot pot, ramen and sizzling Korean barbecue.

Listen to the lions roar at noon • Feb 21, 12-3pm • Free

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C I S MU

!

S N A F THIS YEAR IN VUE! COMING

Festival Survival Guide May 21st

Music Gear Guide June 18th

34 AT THE BACK

CLASSIFIEDS To place an ad PHONE: 780.426.1996 / FAX: 780.426.2889 EMAIL: classifieds@vueweekly.com 130.

Coming Events

To celebrate 30 years of promoting visual art in Strathcona County, the The Art Society of Strathcona County Is Proud to Present A Special Open Art Show April 15 to 19, 2015 at the A. J. Ottewell Community Centre (Red Barn), 590 Broadmoor Blvd, Sherwood Park • Open Art Competition for All Alberta Residents • Cash Prizes, Gala Reception • Categories for Visual Art in Various Levels of Skill, including 3D, Photography and Digital • Entries will Close March 29, 2015 • Check our website for the Show Call: www.artstrathcona.com The members of the Society are looking forward to you joining us in celebrating our 30th Anniversary.

1600.

Volunteers Wanted

Crisis Line Volunteers Needed: The Sexual Assault Centre is recruiting volunteers for our 24 hours crisis line on an ongoing basis. We offer over 50 hours of crisis intervention training at no charge. If you are empathetic, caring, nonjudgmental, want to gain experience within the helping field, and/or want to make change in your community this is an excellent opportunity for you! Please call Shannah at 780-423-4102 ext. 226 or email at shannahb@sace.ab.ca for more information.

Habitat for Humanity hosts Women Build Week March 10 – 14, 2015 Volunteer with us on a Habitat build site to help build homes and hope with other women!

Our expert staff provides training with a focus on safety in a fun and welcoming environment. Take home an inspiring sense of accomplishment. Tools, equipment and lunch are provided. Visit https://www.hfh.org/volunteer/ women-build/ or contact Kim at kdedeugd@hfh.org or by phone 780-451-3416 ext 232 Office Volunteers Needed: Duties include: - Reception coverage (i.e. answering and transferring phone calls, greeting clients, etc) - General office work (i.e. photocopying, data entry, etc) -

Qualifications Friendly, non-judgmental - Willingness to learn - Ability to use Microsoft Office

If you would like more information or are interested in volunteering please contact Shannah at 780-423-4102 ext.

226 or shannahb@sace.ab.ca

Wanted: Volunteers for our Long Term Care facility!

Individuals or groups welcome!

Vulnerable Sector search by EPS is required Please contact Janice Graff Volunteer Coordinator – Extendicare Eaux Claires for more information: 16503-95 Street, Edmonton jgraff@extendicare.com 780-472-1106 ext 202

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

2005.

Artist to Artist

ACRYLIC ARTISTS! Don’t miss GOLDEN Working Artist Samantha WilliamsChapelsky’s lecture/demo on the 1001 ways you can use GOLDEN acrylic paints, mediums, gels & pastes, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2015, 7-9PM in the Studio at The Paint Spot (10032-81 Avenue, Edmonton).

Admission, $10, confirms your place and is refunded to you at the event as a coupon. Plus, GOLDEN gives a generous Just Paint goodies bag to all attending artists! Further information or RSVP: 780.432.0240; accounts@paintspot.ca; www.paintspot.ca.

ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: BUDAPEST The Open Call will begin on June 25, 2014, we have every months jury selection until April 15, 2015. Apply early!

HMC International Artist Residency Program, a not-forprofit arts organization based in Dallas, TX / Budapest, Hungary – provides national and international artists to produce new work while engaging with the arts community in Budapest, Hungary.

FOR APPLICATION FORM, questions please contact us.

Email: bszechy@yahoo.com

EDMONTON INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL October 1-10, 2015 Call For Submissions is now OPEN! Categories include dramatic & documentary features, short films and movies made by Albertans.

30% off entry fees until March 15 (earlybird deadline).

Submit NOW to Alberta’s longst running international film festival. www.edmontonfilmfest.com

2005.

Artist to Artist

Opportunities for artists to exhibit in Budapest: Open call for book artists! Library Thoughts 5 :An exhibition of the Book as Art Artist’s Books and book-related art Deadline: March 1, 2015 fee: USD$ 35 Book as Art exhibition organized at MAMU Gallery, Budapest June 12 – July 3, 2015 . The exhibition curator Beata Szechy.

Part of the AIR/HMC, Budapest, International Artists in Residency program. info, application form e-mail Beata Szechy bszechy@yahoo.com http://www.hungarianmulticultural-center.com Facebook: Budapest International Artist Residency

UNFINISHED PAINTING CHALLENGE IV Hey artists, we all have at least one painting that we can’t seem to finish, don’t we? How about bringing yours to our Unfinished Painting Challenge IV, and choosing a work someone else couldn’t finish to try your hand at? After all, one person’s junk is another person’s inspiration!

We will be exchanging work and accepting returned, finished work until Friday, February 13. An exhibition of all the finished works runs February 20 – April 20. Join in, or just come and see an exhibition of redeemed paintings and our archive of ‘before-and-after’ images. This is a super-fun event! Further information: The Paint Spot, 10032 81 Avenue, Edmonton; 780.432.0240; www.paintspot.ca; accounts@paintspot.ca.

2010.

Musicians Available

Mark (Sharky) Schauer plays pedal steel, DOBRO, lap steel, 5 string, and mandolin. Last employers were Ian Tyson and Tommy Hunter. Looking for full time road work and sessions.

Phone 403-638-3026 or 403-507-0712.

ENJOY ART ALWAYZ www.bdcdrawz.com

LOCAL ARTIST SEEKS REPRESENTATION Will pay accordingly $$$ .

For more info contact BDC at monkeywrench@live.ca www.bdcdrawz.com

Well developed original Funk, Soul and Rock’n Blues band looking for a Manager. Looking for someone with experience in the industry to work hand in hand with the group in the efforts of the group reaching new heights in it’s career. Dan - 780-932-8159

2020.

Loft Art Gallery and Gift Shop Workshops for January to April 2015 See www.artstrathcona.com for updates on workshops, comprehensive information, supply list and to register.

Register early to avoid disappointment

Loft Art Gallery and Gift Shop – Opens January 31 with new artwork by the artists of the Art Society of Strathcona County.

Ottewell Centre, 590 Broadmoor Blvd. Open Saturdays and Sundays 12 to 4 pm for your viewing and purchasing pleasure. Local artwork for your home, business or gift giving.

Musicians Wanted

Bassist, 53, needs lead instrumentalist for blues jamming in Leduc, backing tracks available. sirveggi@telus.net, 986-2940 Guitarists, bassists, vocalists, pianists and drummers needed for good paying teaching jobs.

Please call 780-901-7677 Looking for players for blues rock Contact Derek at 780-577-0991

3100. Appliances/Furniture Old Appliance Removal Removal of unwanted appliances. Must be outside or in your garage.

Rates start as low as $30.

Call James @780.231.7511 for details

ALBERTA-WIDE CLASSIFIEDS •• AUCTIONS •• NEED TO ADVERTISE? Province wide classifieds. Reach over 1 million readers weekly.

Only $269. + GST (based on 25 words or less). Call this newspaper NOW for details or call 1-800-282-6903 ext. 228.

COLLECTOR CAR AUCTION. 9th Annual Red Deer Speed Show & Collector Car Auction. March 13 - 15, Westerner Park. Special Guests Rick & Kelly Dale American Restoration. Dan & Laura Dotson - Storage Wars.

Consign today. 1-888-296-0528 ext. 103; egauctions.com.

VALENTINES DAY Antique and Collector Auction! 11 a.m. Saturday, February 14. Wainwright Legion, Wainwright, Alberta.

Furniture, collectibles, oil/gas, advertising & much more!

Scribner Auction 780-8425666; www.scribnernet.com.

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•• CAREER TRAINING •• MEDICAL BILLING Trainees needed! Learn to process & submit billing claims for hospitals and doctors! No experience needed! Local training gets you ready to work! 1-888-627-0297.

ARE YOU an individual who would like to pursue a career in the Print Media and could use a little help getting started or wish to continue your print journalism studies? Eligible applicants are Albertans/NWT who are: graduating high school students intending to pursue journalism studies; existing journalism students; or staff members of AWNA member newspapers who wish to return to school for refresher courses. For more information, please visit: http:// www.awna.com/bursaries.

MEDICAL TRANSCRIPTIONISTS are in huge demand!

Train with the leading Medical Transcription school. Learn from home and work from home. Call today. 1-800466-1535; www.canscribe. com. info@canscribe.com.

•• EMPLOYMENT •• OPPORTUNITIES WELDER - Flagstaff County seeks permanent full-time Welder, will consider Apprentice/Journeyman. Competitive salary, benefits, pension plan. Apply to: Kevin Kinzer; kkinzer@flagstaff.ab.ca. More details at flagstaff.ab.ca.

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SEEKING A CAREER in the Community Newspaper business? Post your resume for FREE right where the publishers are looking.

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•• EQUIPMENT •• FOR SALE A-STEEL SHIPPING Dry Storage Containers. Used 20’ & 40’ Seacans high cube & insulated containers 40’ HC. Winter Specials in stock now. Self unloading delivery.

Phone toll free 1-866-5287108; www.rtccontainer.com.

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NorwoodSawmills.com/400OT. 1-800-566-6899 ext. 400OT. METAL ROOFING & SIDING. 30+ colours available at over 40 Distributors. 40 year warranty.

48 hour Express Service available at select supporting Distributors. Call 1-888-263-8254.

STEEL BUILDINGS/METAL BUILDINGS 60% off! 20x28, 30x40, 40x62, 45x90, 50x120, 60x150, 80x100, sell for balance owed! Call 1-800-457-2206; www. crownsteelbuildings.ca.

REFORESTATION NURSERY SEEDLINGS of hardy trees, shrubs, & berries for shelterbelts or landscaping.

Full boxes as low as $0.99/ tree. Free shipping. Replacement guarantee. 1-866-8733846 or www.treetime.ca.

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•• MANUFACTURED •• HOMES 3 BRAND NEW 20 X 76 Triple M Homes. Starting from $108,000. Available for immediate or spring delivery. For more information call United Homes Canada 1-800-4617632 or visit us at www. unitedhomescanada.com.

BLOW OUT ALL 2014 models on our lot. Any homes sold that are our 2014 models off our lot will get a discount of $2000.

Delivery included for 300 kms.

For more information call Marg at Craig’s Homes in Lethbridge, Alberta at 1-855-380-2266.

LOW OIL + Canadian Dollar = Great Savings! New SRI 20’X76’ Modular Homes. Immediate delivery. Call Delee 1-855-358-0808; www.westerncanadianmodular.com.

•• SERVICES •• CRIMINAL RECORD? Think: Canadian pardon.

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Debt recovery? Alberta collection to $25,000. Calgary 403-228-1300/1-800-347-2540.

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Equity Mortgages for purchases, debt consolidation, foreclosures, renovations. Bruised credit, self-employed, unemployed ok. Dave Fitzpatrick: www.albertalending.ca. 587437-8437, Belmor Mortgage.

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FREEWILLASTROLOGY ARIES (Mar 21 – Apr 19): Do you have an entourage or posse that helps you work magic you can't conjure alone? Is there a group of co-conspirators that prods you to be brave and farseeing? If not, try to whip one up. And if you do have an inspirational crew, brainstorm about some new adventures for all of you to embark on. Scheme and dream about the smart risks and educational thrills you could attempt together. According to my reading of the astrological omens, you especially need the sparkle and rumble that a feisty band of allies can incite.

TAURUS (Apr 20 – May 20): The cosmos seems to be granting you a licence to be brazenly ambitious. I'm not sure how long this boost will last, so I suggest you capitalize on it while it's surging. What achievement have you always felt insufficiently prepared or powerful to accomplish? What person or club or game have you considered to be out of your league? What issue have you feared was beyond your understanding? Rethink your assumptions. At least one of those "impossibilities" may be more possible than usual.

GEMINI (May 21 – Jun 20): When I attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, my smartest friend was Gemini writer Clare Cavanagh. She headed off to Harvard for her graduate studies and later became a preeminent translator of Polish poetry. Her work has been so skillful that Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czselaw Milosz selected her as his authorized biographer. Interviewing Milosz was a tough job, Clare told blogger Cynthia Haven. He was demanding. He insisted that she come up with "questions no one's asked me yet." And she did just that, of course. Formulating evocative questions is a Gemini specialty. I invite you to exercise that talent to the hilt in the coming week. It's prime time for you to celebrate a Curiosity Festival.

CANCER (Jun 21 – Jul 22): "Somewhere someone is travelling furiously toward you," writes poet John Ashbery, "at incredible speed, travelling day and night, through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, recognize you when he sees you, give you the thing he has for you?" This passage might not be literally true, Cancerian. There may be no special person who is headed your way from a great distance, driven by a rapt intention to offer you a blessing. But I think Ashbery's scenario is accurate in a metaphorical way. Life is, in fact, working overtime to bring you gifts and help. Make sure you cooperate! Heighten your receptivity.

Have a nice long talk with yourself, explaining why you deserve such beneficence.

VUEWEEKLY.com | FEB 12 – FEB 18 , 2015

LEO (Jul 23 – Aug 22): In 1768, Britain's Royal Society commissioned navigator James Cook to lead a long naval voyage west to Tahiti, where he and his team were supposed to study the planet Venus as it made a rare transit across the face of the sun. But it turned out that task was a prelude. Once the transit was done, Cook opened the sealed orders he had been given before leaving England. They revealed a second, bigger assignment, kept secret until then: to reconnoitre the rumoured continent that lay west of Tahiti. In the coming months, he became the first European to visit the east coast of Australia.

I foresee a comparable progression for you, Leo. The task you've been working on lately has been a prelude. Soon you'll receive your "sealed orders" for the next leg of your journey.

VIRGO (Aug 23 – Sep 22): According to computer security company Symantec, you're not in major danger of contracting an online virus from a porn website.

The risk is much greater when you visit religious websites. Why? They're often built by inexperienced programmers and are more susceptible to hackers' attacks. In the coming weeks, Virgo, there may be a similar principle at work in your life. I suspect you're more likely to be undermined by nice, polite people than raw, rowdy folks. I'm not advising you to avoid the do-gooders and sweet faces.

Just be careful that their naiveté doesn't cause problems. And in the meantime, check out what the raw, rowdy folks are up to.

LIBRA (Sep 23 – Oct 22): Life has a big, tough assignment for you.

Let's hope you're up for the challenge. There's not much wiggle room, I'm afraid. Here it is: you must agree to experience more joy and pleasure. The quest for delight and enchantment has to rise to the top of your priority list. To be mildly entertained isn't enough. To be satisfied with lukewarm arousal is forbidden. It's your sacred duty to overflow with sweet fulfillment and interesting bliss. Find ways to make it happen!

SCORPIO (Oct 23 – Nov 21): You may have never sampled the southeast Asian fruit called durian. It's controversial. Some people regard it as the "king of fruits," and describe its taste as sweet and delicious. Naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace said it was like "a rich custard highly flavoured with almonds." But other people find the durian unlikable, comparing its aroma to turpentine or decaying onions. TV chef Anthony Bourdain asserts that its "indescribable" taste is "something you will either love or despise." I foresee the possibility that your imminent future will have metaphorical resemblances to the durian, Scorpio. My advice?

Don't take things personally.

ROB BREZSNY FREEWILL@VUEWEEKLY.COM

SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22 – Dec 21): Talking will be your art form in the coming week. It'll be healing and catalytic. You could set personal records for most engaging phone conversations, emails, text messages and face-to-face dialogs. The sheer intensity of your self-expression could intimidate some people, excite others and generate shifts in your social life.

Here are a few tips to ensure the best results. First, listen as passionately as you speak. Second, make it your intention to communicate, not just unload, your thoughts. Tailor your messages for your specific audience. Third, reflect on the sometimes surprising revelations that emerge from you. They'll give you new insights into yourself.

CAPRICORN (Dec 22 – Jan 19): Let's say you want to buy an 18-karat gold ring. To get that much gold, miners had to excavate and move six tons of rock.

Then they doused the rock with poisonous cyanide, a chemical that's necessary to extract the good stuff. In the process, they created toxic waste. Is the gold ring worth that much trouble?

While you ponder that, let me ask you a different question. What if I told you that over the course of the next five months, you could do what's necessary to obtain a metaphorical version of a gold ring? And although you would have to process the equivalent of six tons of raw material to get it, you wouldn't have to use poison or make a mess. Would you do it?

AQUARIUS (Jan 20 – Feb 18): In 1899, the King of the African nation of Swaziland died while dancing. His only son, Sobhuza, was soon crowned as his successor, despite being just four months old. It took a while for the new king to carry out his duties with aplomb and he needed major guidance from his grandmother and uncle. Eventually he showed great aptitude for the job and ruled until his death at age 83. I'm getting a Sobhuza-type vibe as I meditate on you, Aquarius. New power may come to you before you're fully ready to wield it. But I have confidence you will grow into it, especially if you're not shy about seeking help.

PISCES (Feb 19 – Mar 20): In the 1951 animated movie version of Alice in Wonderland, Alice says to herself, "I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it." I hope you won't be like her, Pisces. It's an excellent time for you to heed your own good advice. In fact, I suspect that doing so will be crucial to your ability to make smart decisions and solve a knotty problem. This is one of those turning points when you really have to practice what you preach. You've got to walk your talk. V

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25 Quarterback known for kneeling 27 Ali of “Love Story” 29 Middle daughter on “Downton Abbey” 32 Raised sculptures 36 From ___ (at some distance) 37 Grade alongside the review “These Mick Jagger chewables are the worst”?

41 Used a Breathalyzer 42 Former Cabinet member Donna 43 One of the simple machines 45 “The pain reliever hospitals use most,” its old ads said 49 Baseball great Ernie Banks’s nickname 52 ___ polloi (commoners) 53 “I ___ real American...” (Hulk Hogan theme lyric) 54 Wise friend of Pooh 56 “Let’s suppose that...”

58 Got 100% on 59 Jamaica’s Ocho ___ 61 Group including only elements number #13 and #2?

63 Criminal’s alter egos, briefly 64 “Aloha Oe” instruments, for short 65 English horn relatives 66 Stuff in the trap 67 Stuff in the trap 68 Stuff in the trap

Down

1 Desert that means “desert” in Arabic 2 Lacking energy 3 Many toothpastes 4 “___ Gratia Artis” (MGM motto) 5 1974 Charles Bronson classic

38 AT THE BACK

6 See 5-Across 7 Of ___ (so to speak) 8 Category 9 “Better Call Saul” star Odenkirk 10 Coffee shop connection 11 Phobia 12 Jukebox selection 13 “Hit the bricks!”

17 Lets out 21 1860s White House nickname 24 ___ Ishii (“Kill Bill” character played by Lucy Liu) 26 Whoopi’s Oscar-winning “Ghost” role 28 Marijuana producer 30 Leather color 31 “48 ___” (Eddie Murphy movie) 33 Gabor of “Green Acres” 34 Most in need of a bath 35 Keep from trespassing on 37 NFL ball carriers 38 “___ Punk!” (movie about punk rock in Utah) 39 Debt repaid in regular payments over time 40 “That’s ___ can stand!”

44 Sports entertainment gp. founded by Ted Turner (and defunct by 2001) 46 Los Estados Unidos, for example 47 Folded food 48 ___-slipper (orchid variety) 50 Company supplying vans and cardboard boxes 51 “Perfect Strangers” cousin 54 Like some vaccines and exams 55 Website anyone can edit 57 “That was ___, this is now” 58 Dextrous start 60 Concorde’s letters 62 “You’ve Got Mail” ISP ©2015 Jonesin' Crosswords

My 15-year-old son has been watching sadistic porn—and ONLY sadistic porn—for a couple of years. He also tells us (husband and me) that, though he's not had sex (which he defines as penetration), he's had oral sex, handjobs, etc, and that he didn't "flash on" violent images at those times. But he says he thinks about this type of porn all the time—all day, every day—and fantasizes about doing sadistic things to the girls he dates. This all came out as we started having conversations about respect and dating! I proceeded to freak the hell out (though not around him). As the mom and as a woman, I'm upset. I want information, but it makes me sick to read about sexual violence. Particularly when I know there's an unwilling partner involved, as my son hints he prefers—gang rapes are an example.

Though we try to be open and talk about relationships, sex, real-world stuff, this caught me completely off guard. My husband doesn't believe there's much reason to worry (yet?), because to us, his friends and family and girlfriends (as far as I know), he's a very different type of person. He's involved in school sports and his grades are good. He has friends. There have been zero instances of violence from day care into high school. He has an extremely close relationship with his older brother.

There's nothing I've seen that would have made me believe he was even capable of thinking about this stuff. I don't know if this is a huge red flag or if I'm making this a bigger deal than I should. I'm just terrified he's going to harm someone. I'm also shamefully awkward around him now. I hate that my view of him has changed. Are there signs—more signs—that I need to watch for? Is he already a danger to himself or others? Where did we drop the ball?

Parent Absolutely Needs Information Concerning Kid's Erotic Development

very small," Cantor says. "It is true that psychopathic sex killers have violent sexual fantasies, but it doesn't work the other way around: having violent sexual fantasies doesn't mean anyone is likely developing into a psychopathic sex killer. The great majority of people who enjoy violent (or violentlooking) porn are into healthy BDSM. Going just by the numbers, this is (by far) the most likely outcome."

What do we know about people who develop into psychopathic sex killers—or some other sort of sex offender—and what should you watch for?

"We don't know much," Cantor says.

"Politicians will spend enormous sums on punishment but barely anything on research to prevent sex crimes in the first place. What is very clear, however, is that psychopathic sex killers are psychopathic: they have a callous disregard for the well-being of others and often have a long history of conduct problems, generally apparent much before age 15. A history of good peer friendships, healthy family relationships and a typical social and dating life all argue against PANICKED's son being a danger to others."

lection of essays edited by Tristan Taormino; Playing Well with Others: Your Field Guide to Discovering, Exploring and Navigating the Kink, Leather and BDSM Communities by Lee Harrington and Mollena Williams; SM 101: A Realistic Introduction by Jay Wiseman; and The Loving Dominant

by John and Libby Warren.

"Healthy members of BDSM/kink communities are essentially the opposite of psychopaths," Cantor says.

"Although they are sexually aroused by violent (or violent-looking) images, they are very highly attuned to the feelings of their partners and very much want to take extreme care never to hurt them. Their arousal includes the idea that what they're doing is providing pleasure, even though it might not look pleasurable to vanilla folks."

So that's what the good doctor had to say, PANICKED, and I believe we should listen to doctors. (An aside: vaccinate your fucking kids, you morons.) But we typically hear only from doctors—from the psychology, psychiatry and sex-research varieties—when we talk about a topic like sexual sadism. But I always think it's a good idea to talk to the people you're talking about, so ...

"I'm a woman," says Mistress Matisse, a writer, professional dominatrix and sex-workers-rights activist. "I'm also a sadist. Within the context of a BDSM scene, I derive intense psychological and sexual pleasure from hurting people, and over the last 20 years, I have dished out a great deal of physically intense sensations to a lot of people. BDSM is not just about pain, but that's the part I like best."

But Matisse is what you want your son to be when he grows up: an ethical sadist.

"Never in my whole life have I intentionally hurt someone without his or her informed, enthusiastic and ongoing consent," Matisse says. "Inflicting pain is my pleasure, but it's a pleasure I'm in control of at all times. I feel respect, affection and occasionally awe toward the people who let me push their bodies to the limit. We often laugh together as we play. There's a tremendous intimacy and trust on both sides.

"So it's entirely possible to be a happy, well-adjusted, loving person who's also a sadist," Matisse adds. "The lesson PANICKED needs to teach her son is that whether it's a tender kiss or a smack on the ass, he must have his partner's meaningful consent. If whatever he does springs from that, he'll be an ethical and responsible man."

Follow Cantor on Twitter @JamesCantorPhD. Follow Matisse on Twitter @mistressmatisse.

Their arousal includes the idea that what they're doing is providing pleasure, even though it might not look pleasurable to vanilla folks.

"Full props to PANICKED for not freaking out in front of her son and for having always kept the door open for these conversations," says Dr James Cantor. "I don't think she's dropped the ball: fate just suddenly dropped her into a whole new game."

Before we get to Cantor's advice for you, PANICKED, here's why you should listen to him: he is one of the top experts in the world on atypical sexualities and has worked with thousands of sexual offenders—and thousands of perfectly healthy kinksters. He is a clinical psychologist, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and the editor-in-chief of Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment. He knows what he's talking about. Now let's listen to Cantor ...

"The chances of there being something serious to worry about here are

So it's unlikely that your son is the next Ted Bundy, PANICKED. The likelier scenario is this: your son is really, really kinky. Some sons are. According to Cantor, not much research has been done into how people become kinky—there's zero money for that kind of research—but all of the healthy adult kinksters Cantor has worked with could list things they wish they'd known when they were kinky teenagers.

Here's one thing your kinky teenager needs to know: one day, he'll be able to explore his kinks with consenting adult partners—there are kinky women out there who enjoy bondage, erotic pain, consensual group sex (aka "gang rapes"), pretending to be "unwilling partners," etc—but for now, he'll have to stick to vanilla sex, which he enjoys, as his kinks aren't something he can spring on a high-school girlfriend. His kinks aren't something he can spring on any woman, ever. The stuff he's interested in can be explored only after a mutual interest is established, each and every item on the menu is carefully negotiated and consent is obtained and sustained.

"It would help to find this boy some role models," Cantor says.

At 15, your son is too young to find kinky role models in the usual places—munches, classes, play parties— but he can find role models right now in books written about safe, sane, consensual kink by safe, sane, consensual kinksters. A few suggested titles: The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge, a col-

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