I had a chance to sit down with writer/stars Jason Jones and Mike Beaver, as well director as Warren P Sonoda, to talk about the film, Christmas and Dave Foley’s ass.

What made you guys want to do a low budget Canadian comedy?
Mike: Yeah, we really wanted to do that.
Warren: It was a very conscious choice. We could have done a big budget American blockbuster, but we were like “No, no, no, we don’t need anything more than $50 and this case of Canadian.”

Would a big budget have helped?
Warren: You know what it was? It was just expediency. Jason and Mike wrote the script and they asked if I’d like to make it. I said, “I’d love to, but it’s a Christmas movie and we have to do it in the winter.”
Mike: It had snow but we wrote into your script that it didn’t have snow. Because, even in Canada, you don’t know if it’s gonna snow anymore.
Warren: More importantly, with everyone’s schedules, I only had them for two weeks. So the reason why we decided to do it this way is because we could. There was no other way.
Mike: We lucked out because of the crew, the actors, how everyone just nailed every single take… we didn’t take too long on each scene. It was a tight schedule and we just lucked out. The stars aligned and everyone stepped up.

Why did you guys decide to take the handheld verité approach?
Jason Jones: It’s just how we wrote it. We decided on the format before we decided on the story. We were watching Mike’s home videos…. sorry, Mike was forcing us to watch his home videos and we were like, “Wouldn’t it be great if we took the best moments of all these videos and made a movie of that.” That was kind of the first idea. We talked about our similar stories, our Christmas stories, our birthdays and whatnot and combining elements that way.
Mike: Funny enough, some of the scenes in the movie are still from that original video tape. It was little moments, the sisters and the kids, the way they’re moving around and talking and cooking. The side you knew was real was what we translated into the script.
Jason: The story was the archetype of both our families. Two parents who shouldn’t be together… don’t print that.

Whose family is the story closest to?
Mike: I’d say mine.
Jason: Character-wise, it’s closest to Mike because he has two brothers. I had a brother and a sister. The core story really had nothing to do with our families.
Mike: The story was manufactured. On a normal Christmas, every family has a separate team. I don’t think it varies too much from family to family.

Jason, did you learn anything about your wife Samantha Bee by playing her husband onscreen?
Jason: I learned that if we ever get 10% of that couple in us, it’s time to break up. No. The question that comes up the most is, “They say you write what you know. Is this what you know?” For some reason I always write these doughty put-upon wives for Sarah to play… and that’s cuz she is.

Are you comfortable in a lead role, cuz normally you’re a supporting guy.
Jason: I like supporting roles. I like the roles that you do and are cut out before you even shoot them. My specialty is getting cast and then getting on plane to go shoot it and then them saying when you get off the plane, “Oh, we cut your role.” Those are the roles you want. No, it’s great. No one’s giving me any parts in Hollywood. Write it for yourself and come up here and do it.
Warren: That’s where Mike and Jason really took the bull by the horns. They weren’t waiting around for someone to give them a movie to do. It was out of that necessity to be creative. I’m glad we were able to do Coopers’ Camera because these guys should be in more movies… way more movies and they will.
Jason: As long as we write them.

Let’s talk about Christmas. What was your happiest Christmas moment ever? Or unhappiest?
Warren: My brother stayed up all week for me making this model war set. I was like 10 years old. My family gave that to me along with a Super-8 camera. So we made little movies.
Mike: Mine are more the sour memories. One Christmas that I felt terrible at, we woke up in the morning and my parents got us a bunch of gifts. But the big present they got us, there was always the one big present, was a VCR. My dad was trying to explain to us what it was cuz we didn’t really know what it was. “It’s a VCR!” My brother lost it. He was like, “This is awful. This is the worst Christmas ever.” It brought a real sour onto the whole day. Then we started watching movies.
Warren: He bought you movies?
Mike: He rented them. Of course he didn’t buy us movies.
Warren: They were like $100.
Jason: “Ninety-nine dollars! What the fuck?”
Mike: But that was the worst Christmas because my brother complained and whined and it was awful.
Jason: My best Christmas ever? Any Christmas I wasn’t beaten. My Dad liked to make, well they were happy jokes in the end but they were cruel jokes in the middle. I wanted a drum set really badly. It was exactly like A Christmas Story. Final present behind the tree and it obviously wasn’t a drum set. He pulls it out and it was in a big box and I was like, “Oh maybe it is a drum set.” I started opening it and there was another box inside. And another box inside. And another box inside.
Mike: Oh, that gag.
Jason: I got to the final box and it was just a little drum. He was like, “Sorry, I couldn’t afford it this Christmas.” I was like “Oh great, thanks.” I was miserable. Then he was like, “Hey come with me, I need you to help me get something in the basement.”
Mike: Awww…
Jason: And the drum set was downstairs.
Mike: That’s a father who loves you. My favourite Christmas is the one where my mom cut me a cheque for $200. And that’s a true story.
Jason: “Get some clothes, they’re terrible.”

Dave Foley has a remarkable ass.
Warren: It was for real. It was all him.

Was he very open to the idea of exposing his ass on screen?
Warren: He had no idea he was going to do nudity. He offered it. Mike and Jason wrote it in as this sex-obsessed neighbour. Dave’s the one that said, “If he’s sex-obsessed then he should be having sex, with no clothes on.”

Would it be fair to say then that Dave Foley offers the ass?
Mike: Yeah, he offers the ass.
Jason: It was actually contractual that he has to perform pants-less. It’s a weird thing.

This conversation always happens when I’m talking with three dudes.
Jason: He had a VERY large cameo.
Mike: Let’s go take a shower guys!

Did you guys do all your own stunts?
Jason: Oh yeah, we did all our own stunts.

What’s the best way to take a convincing punch in the nuts?
Mike and Jason: Tuck!

Was it difficult for you guys to act drunk for most of the movie?
Warren: There’s a lot of drinking in this movie
Mike: We’ve done it a lot. It’s not the easiest thing to act convincingly so it’s still funny and still gonna generate laughs, but still subtle enough that you buy it. That line me and Jason are on is a tightrope.
Jason: It’s also weird in this movie because we start sober, accelerate to 100, hunch over a bit, crash, then get up again. It’s six days of drinking crammed into 16 hours.
Warren: Being exhausted for the entire shoot helped people get into the zone of being trashed.

Are you guys all whiskey men?
Warren and Jason: No.
Mike: I used to collect the labels off the necks of Jack Daniels bottles and keep them in my wallet as badges of honour. “Look how much whiskey I’ve drank!” Like in high school you wanna be cool. “I’m a boozer. I’m gonna follow in my dad’s footsteps. I’m so cool I drink JD straight.” I used to think I was Keith Richards in high school for a bit.
Jason: But not the rock part.

There’s a lot of crude humour but I was never grossed out.
Mike: You’re a sick man.

Well, to give you an example, I saw the new Kevin Smith movie and there’s a scene where Jason Mewes, rather graphically, gets his face crapped on. And that just disgusted me.
Jason: We try to capture the scatalogical or gross-out humour in an actual scene. It was literally like, “Hey, we’ve got this really dramatic scene, wouldn’t it be funny if it was on the toilet?” Or he just told his son he’s a hermaphrodite as we’re sitting in front of a pile of puke after he just tried to kill himself with Lysol. Then he tries to clean it up with the Lysol he tried to kill himself with.
Warren: After I read the hermaphrodite Lysol suicide scene, I said I have to make this movie. If I shoot any one scene, this is the scene I do.

What are some tips on giving a really good gift to somebody for Christmas?
Warren: Give something that you wanna get so if they don’t like it you can just take it back.
Jason: Truthfully, it’s listening to my wife and I never do it. They drop hints all year. You just gotta listen. But now I have an iPhone so I can write them down immediately. I never used to do that. Listen. They do drop hints all year long and you just gotta collect those and go with one you can afford.
Mike: I’ve stopped doing it.
Jason: It’s just cash or a cheque?
Mike: No, no, no. My wife and I will go, “Christmas is coming up, do we wanna give gifts? Well we had that big dinner out last week so how about that was Christmas?” I get that from my family. Christmas was fucking cancelled at Thanksgiving in 1995.
Jason: Christmas is cancelled.

I should state I haven’t seen or heard about the large majority of the estimated 4000 films playing at VIFF this year. So I’ll add to this post as I see good ones. I should also state that I’m very bad at making estimates too.

Achilles and the Tortoise
Dir: Takashi Kitano
Country: Japan
A comedy about a young boy with dreams of becoming an artist that is directed by (and stars) Takaski ‘Beat’ Kitano. Come watch the master who made Zatoichi at work.
Sat Sept 27, 6:30PM at Granville 4
Tue Sept 30, 4:00PM at Granville 7
Mon Oct 6, 7:15PM at Granville 6

Filth and Wisdom
Dir: Madonna
Country: UK
What the hell? Madonna directs Eugene Hutz from Gogol Bordello. The VIFF guide proclaims that this film is proof that Madonna is a better director than Mike Leigh and Guy Ritchie.. As if! Still probably worth checking this one out.
Thu Oct 9, 9:00PM at Granville 4
Fri Oct 10, 11:30AM at Granville 3

God’s Puzzle
Dir: Takashi Miike
Country: Japan
A VIFF favourite returns. Takashi Miike has made a career out of cranking insane movies like Audition, Ichi the Killer, Gozu and Sukiyaki Western Django (out now) at an insane rate. This one is a sci fi and probably crazy as well. By the time you finished reading this, Miike just finished another movie.
Thu Sept 25, 10:00PM at Granville 7
Fri Sept 26, 2:30PM at Granville 3

Gomorrah
Dir: Matteo Garrone
Country: Italy
Italian Mob movie that really has people talking. Watch five storylines all weave together like a bowl of worms. You thought I was gonna say spaghetti, didn’t you? I would never do that. Based on a best selling novel that forced the author to go into hiding because of the secrets it revealed. What a wimp!
Tue Oct 7, 9:30PM at Granville 7
Wed Oct 8, 4:00PM at Granville 7

Hunger
Dir: Steve McQueen
Country: UK
Artstar Steve McQueen directs a movie about an IRA leader’s six week hunger strike. Depressssssing!
Mon Oct 6, 9:15PM at Granville 3
Tue Oct 7, 11:00AM at Granville 4

[Rec]
Dir: Jaume Balaguero, Paco Plaza
Country: Spain
Terrifying Spanish horror that has already been remade for North American audiences. This is widely regarded as one of the scariest movies to come out in the past few years. The remake is called Quarantine and comes out pretty soon. It stars the sister from Dexter and pretty much everyone I’ve talked to hates her. So maybe you should check this out instead. For the people who watch movies on their computers, I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t let you know a high quality DVD rip of this movie is pretty easy track down online.
Wed Oct 8, 9:45PM at Granville 7
Thu Oct 9, 4:00PM at Granville 7
Thu Oct 9, 9:30PM at Granville 2

Serbis
Dir: Brillante Mendoza
Country: Philippines/France
Arthouse Alert! Strangely similar to 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. Set in a porn theatre in the Philippines, this one follows the lives of the family who run it and the male prostitutes who frequent the establishment. Oh, and about halfway in, a transsexual gives an onscreen blow job where you see everything.
Thu Oct 9, 9:00PM at Granville 4
Fri Oct 10, 11:30AM at Granville 3

Tokyo!
Dir: Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-Ho
Country: France/South Korea
Three directors one movie. Two of these directors are brilliant. One I’ve never heard of. Can you guess which one? Hint: The Host and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are two of my all time favourite movies. (Sorry, could only find the en francais version of the trailer)
Wed Oct 8, 2:00PM at Granville 4
Thu Oct 9, 7:00PM at Granville 7

Waltz With Bashir
Dir: Ari Folman
Country: Israel/Germany
The easy comparison here is Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which we’ll gladly use as well. One of the buzz films at the Toronto International Film Festival and rightly so.
Sun Sept 28, 10:00AM at Granville 7
Thu Oct 2, 9:30PM at Granville 7
Sun Oct 5, 1:00PM at Granville 7

Tony got into art and fashion in an unlikely way, his English sucked. Unable to get into the University of British Columbia, he enrolled in the communication design program at Emily Carr. When he wasn’t studying, he was sneaking into the darkrooms and screenprint labs to hone his talents. After graduating he did a brief stint as a commercial designer in Hong Kong then returned to Vancouver. Fashion wasn’t the goal from the onset and he began making limited edition art prints, or “fucking exclusive” art prints as they’re called on the Wrongwroks website.

“I found out that paper was expensive so I printed on a whole bunch of Fed Ex boxes and anything I could flatten out. It started out as an art thing but then I got into fashion because people don’t buy the boxes. So I printed the same graphics on t-shirts.”

Wrongwroks streetwear is playful urban art brandalism, offering clever and cheeky apes of popular fashion lines like Supreme and Marc Jacobs or poppy cartoon characters like SpongeBob and Doraemon.

“When people first see my stuff they think it’s kind of fake and I’m ripping off someone. Like the Supreme logo or Doraemon. Japanese are really strict about counterfeits and it doesn’t exist in that culture. Later, when they pick up what it is though, boom, everyone wants it.” Demand overseas is so high that some shirts have been printing everyday in factories since last year. Wrongwroks is carried in stores all over Asia and is especially popular in the notoriously fickle Harajuku fashion district in Tokyo.

Much like the quintessential “big in Japan” artist/fashion designer, Kaws, Tony provides art and T-shirt junkies with a steady supply of familiar and delicious eye candy that one can’t help but buy. A jovial and likable Tony openly admits this much. Like Kaws, he’s trying “to do something in a style where people go, ‘Oh, I want it.’ But people don’t know why they want it. That’s the trick.”

While Tony is busy appropriating imagery for his designs, the companies he’s taking them from are paying close attention. Not just for legal reasons, though there have been a few, but for new ideas.
“They’ll use the same graphic and collaborate with a real company and make a whole bunch of clothes. With Doraemon they did the same thing as me except with no Adidas sneakers. I do that clothing, they do that clothing. I do a keychain, they make a keychain. The only difference is no Wrongwroks logo and no kicks. People think my stuff is everywhere, but no, that’s not mine.”

Tony doesn’t have any immediate plans to conquer North America with his line. All of Asia and parts of Europe are fine for now. “North America is cool but it’s not the biggest. It doesn’t matter where I sell. The more people who wear my stuff, the more happy I am.”

www.wrongwroks.com
All images courtesy of Wrongwroks.

His band July Fourth Toilet was playing at one the Vancouver Art Galley’s popular FUSE parties to promote their new album “Balls Boogie.” The event, called Go KRAZY! All Night, was meant to be an all night musical celebration of VAG’s current exhibit. The turn out was excellent and even someone from The Georgia Straight was there to pen this half-assed review “My friends went into the room where July Fourth Toilet was performing its eight-hour show, but they quickly came out as they said it was boring, crowded, and sweltering in the room.” One can’t help but wonder if the writer was even there though as his review has no mention of the show getting shut down.

Around 1:30 AM Go KRAZY! All Night got crazy with a capital H. In the middle of an epic July Fourth Toilet set spread out over three rooms, the plug got pulled and the show was over. The reason the all night show was shut down early was because, oh and this is just incredible, a couple was busted shooting heroin in the Vancouver Fucking Art Gallery. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of a show be cancelled due to heroin abuse. However it’s almost poetically fitting that this happened at a July Fourth Toilet album release show, a band that’s both dark and funny.

I watched Dayton knock back a bubble tea and he told me all about the difficulties of making it as an artist in our fair city, the new July Fourth Toilet album, and the mess that went down at the art gallery .

Dayton: I’ve been doing stuff in this city since the early Nineties and most people don’t know or care because there’s no infrastructure here. Lots of culture but no infrastructure. I’ve been doing my thing forever. I’m sort of semi-tooting my own horn here but I’m trying to make a point. Near 99-00 I did a newspaper. I co-edited it and co-created it. It eventually became a comic book funded by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle money; it was called The Drippy Gazette. I was a cultural voice with the free column in Terminal City and I didn’t get paid one red cent for any of that shit. Well, I got paid for a brief period of time but then they reneged on that.

That was the beginning of the end for Terminal City as soon as they started paying people.
Getting to my point. Do I have any paying writing gigs right now? No. Is there anything I wanna write for in this city? No, not really. I’ve got a Bachelor of Fine Arts. I make art and have it on display quite regularly. Granted, I did the thing at the VAG the other night with July Fourth Toilet. I was part of the whole Nog A Dod scene so I have some stuff in the Nog A Dod book. All that west coast psychedelia from the Nineties. It took a publisher from Chicago to put that book out probably because no one in Canada would put it out. It’s making waves all over Europe. So I got that. But do I have any art shows coming up or any interest? No. I’ve put out six albums and I’ve got two more in the can. Do I have any label interest or support? No. I did a movie Male Fantasy and it’s finally out on DVD. I didn’t get paid for it and the director Blaine Thurier didn’t get paid because it was a no-budget film. I did all the festivals and I got an agent out of the deal so that was a plus. I actually got an agent out of the deal who says he’ll rep me when I move to Toronto. So that’s why I’m leaving Vancouver. Maybe nothing will happen in Toronto but I’m living in a city that’s for the rich and cultureless. I think I’d be more successful doing shit somewhere.

A lot of people say that.
I’m not the only one!

My theory on why there are so many talented people in this city struggling to get by is because people have better things to do than cultural events in this city. Maybe not for you and me but…
…In their minds.

Right. We have mountains, and beaches and forests. Look at a city like Toronto. What else is there to do there except cultural events?
Jason McLean’s out there. Jason McLean called me and he said “My God, it’s insane. People go out over here.” It was his wife’s birthday and within 24 hours they planned a party and 40 people showed up. And they just moved to Toronto. He says there’s no limit of cultural stuff to do there. People go out, they do it, they partake, it happens. Here, I’m struggling and no one could give a rat’s ass who I am and yet I do all those things I mentioned. No one cares.

Why don’t you tell me about the new July Fourth Toilet album. It’s out now and you’re releasing it independently?
Yeah, no label would touch it because it’s not easily classifiable by genre. People want stuff that they can market easily. Not stuff that’s good. I might sound full of myself here but I’m very critical. I’ve written for years, listened to music for years and had to review albums for years. I myself also have to be very critical with myself and make sure what’s coming out better be worth coming out as opposed to something that’s just adding to the cultural dung heap. Every album I make has gotta be good. Sure there might be flaws I notice later but generally I think I’m pretty successful. So it doesn’t easily fit into a genre and it’s a little bit funny. It’s dark too. Comedy people would put it out if it was straight comedy. But it’s also got weird instrumentals that definitely aren’t funny. Then it’s too funny for other labels to put out. Also, labels are folding everywhere.

Are you just going to give it away or are you going to try and sell it?
No, it’s on vinyl. It’s gotta be a vinyl record. It’s designed to have two sides. Everything about it had to be on vinyl but it comes with a free MP3 download.

So tell me about how the FUSE show at the Vancouver Art Gallery came about cuz it sounded like an interesting event.
If you go to the site there’s a whole history of the band that’s done in the first person. We broke it down year-by-year and show by show for 14 years. Every show has a different context and a different theme. I think people who run galleries might really like that. It wasn’t too hard to pitch when they found out that, as a band, we’re malleable. That malleability showed that we’re not just a regular four-piece rock band. That made it easy for them to book us for this all night party. They seemed like they were into it from the start. When we saw the space we began to shape our performance.

What was the theme you went with for this performance?
Here’s the thing, we wanted to make the most amazing disappointing second album ever. The first album was warm psychedelic pop. This is the most amazing disappointing second album ever. A mind-blowing, disappointing second album. We want you to keep coming back to it again and again and go “what the hell is going on here.” As a bit of loose template there was this budget department store record called “Up Up and Away.” You’d see it and you’d think “Oh good, I love that song [by Jimmy Webb].” Turns out it’s just a bunch of session hacks plugging away at that song and then it’s all their own songs after that. No covers after that. So they’re doing a cover of “Up Up and Away” then it’s all their own songs. Then you flip the record over and you listen to the second side and all the sudden there’s these four psychedelic rock instrumentals. It’s compelling. So we used that as a loose template. We wanted to open with a very innocuous song “Me and Bobby McGee” [by Kris Kristofferson], which is kind of like “Up Up and Away.” We had to open with a song that is just so common, then move on with our own hard driving rock. The other caveat was it needed G-Funk keyboards so we also added some G-Funk keyboards. Then when you flip the record over—that’s why it’s a record—and it opens with the song “Thanks Drugs.” You’ll notice it’s almost the same backing track of “Stoned on You” which is on the first side with completely different lyrics, harmonies and melodies going on. That’s because with these department store albums sometime you’d buy “MacArthur Park” by the Stone Jammy Rock Band. Then you’d go, why is there this song called “Most of All it’s You” the same as this song called “Lisa” that’s on the Generation Gap album. I always found that kind of funny; renaming songs and putting them on different albums by different bands. So we wanted to do that our own way…. So we did that and then we put in our five instrumentals. It couldn’t rock though. So we took the rock away and had very exploratory visions in sound. It’s a bit of a trip and then ends with a nice warm ballad. We wanted a nice soft song to end it as you’re going on this intense journey of substance abuse and stereotypical visions of masculinity.

Substance abuse and stereotypical visions of masculinity? That’s a very nice segue into me asking you more about what went on at the FUSE show.
Clancy Dennehy has a 30-second on the record called “Enter the Princess.” He re-envisioned it live as a 40 minute piece. It’s an intense little piece but he stretched it to 40 minutes and did it in the Rotunda, which is that big circular stairway. So there are all these people in robes—male and female chanters—he’s got his gongs and this weird projected light in the centre and some Kokoro dancers. We were doing some cosmic synthy stuff in Courtroom B, on the third floor, a lot like what is on side B of the album. The Rotunda thing wrapped up around 10. Then we played Courtroom A, which was like side A of the album. Hard driving rock in a cold classic courtroom… it kind of worked. So at 10 and midnight we just did a really good hard-driving rock set. It was awesome in this nice wooden courtroom with all these beautiful rugs. Meanwhile, there was a lot of other stuff going on in the gallery but I didn’t really know about so much as I was too busy running around.

Was it well attended?
It was but people seemed unsure how to find us. So the rock sets were awesome. Then we moved into courtroom B and we started adding to what was going on in there. Because there were musicians in there the whole time doing their thing. So we started adding to it. July Fourth Toilet was playing across the hall from each other. We weren’t listening to what we were doing but we were playing simultaneously. We’re really starting to get rolling—just building and building and building—then all the sudden the lights go out.

What time was this?
Oh god, this would be after midnight. Around 1:30. So the lights go out and Jay Mirus from Much Music goes to find another lighting source and we’re noticing there’s less people. Where did all the people go? This guy tells us that the security guard was not letting people up. I went “why not?” and he said “I don’t know, I almost had trouble coming back in and I went to use the washroom.” This is crazy because the show was supposed to go till 5am. Well, I find out that they made a big decision to shut the FUSE down.

And why was that?
Well, I heard from a few authorities that basically in the gallery there were a few people who turned the art gallery into a shooting gallery. Mixing some heroin with some original George Herriman in the comic section of the gallery. I was kind of suggesting, well why don’t you just take them out to the alley? Why let one bad apple spoil the party? They also said there was a lot of post-bar crowd coming and it was just too much to handle.

Would you be able to speculate if it one was one of the rowdy bar people who was shooting heroin?
I don’t know who was shooting heroin. Maybe it was an art piece?

What do you think it is about this show that brought out opiate users?
I have some theories. But it wasn’t so much that. It was these rowdies wanting to fight that I heard about. Granted, I do think that the security guards there didn’t seem like they could handle too much. They seemed challenged. They didn’t have the proper answers to questions. I asked one of these guys a million questions and his only answer was “I don’t know.” The security could not handle this. Then again, you look at our history of our city in the last 30 years and there is a history in this city of people rioting, showing up at fireworks with knives…

And now people showing up at the art gallery with heroin?
Yeah, but I’m not even thinking about that but the rowdies that showed up along with that. The post-bar rowdies. This city’s got that history. Then to counteract that, we have this over aggressive authority figures that act on way too much power. “Oh well, since we’re here at the GnR riot, we might as well pummel these people who just want to get home that have nothing to do with the concert as well.” That’s what this city is like. Its too extreme. It’s absurd. One person I know’s theory is that it dates back to Mayor Tom Campbell who had the whole Gastown riots and that abuse of authority. We have poor city planning. City planning is run by developers and people with money. It’s like “Hey, having a bunch of bars all on the same street brought nothing but problems to other cities, but hey, let’s see if our city can do this.”

Have you been on Granville on the weekend? It’s terrifying.
It’s disturbing. At my work people come in asking what to do. I tell them to avoid Hastings because it’s unpleasant but it’s not really dangerous. It’s got preservation through neglect. It’s a neglected street, not for long though. But where you’re gonna find trouble is Granville. Walk along Granville and that’s where the problem is. Don’t go along Granville. It’s scary. It’s true, you could get seriously hurt. It’s blocked off, there’s paddy wagons, it’s a nightmare. It’s like “Hey, we need to find a solution to this problem that we ourselves caused. We need to find a solution that we, the people in authority, caused.” That’s the city’s mentality and this is just an extension. Can you have a nice safe all-night gallery event? It worked last year but I guess not this year. We had a great time, I gotta say that. It was awesome. The show was awesome but it’s a shame we had to quit the show early. One gal thought the show was still going and was wondering what was going on next. I went “No, didn’t you hear?” She was so depressed. People paid $20 so they could get violent or shoot heroin? Like what the? In an art gallery?

Why would you do this?
Would this happen in any other city?

No.
No, this would not happen in another city. City’s can do these big events with ten times as many people and there’s never a situation like this. Why do these kind of things repeatedly happen in our city?

I wish I had an answer.

July Fourth Toilet’s Album “Balls Boogie” is available at better record stores that actually sell records.
July Fourth Toilet’s Website
July Fourth Toilet on MySpace

One of the niftier lines they’re launching is the Converse Music Collaboration, a series of shoes inspired by dead musicians like Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jerry Garcia and Ozzy Osbourne.

My favourite from the collection were these. It’s like getting four shoes from the price of two. Converse is going to make a fortune from selling laces this fall.

For making it in, Converse hooked me up with a glass of wine and a pair of these stylish Canvas Jack Purcells. If you didn’t know, Jack Purcell was a badminton champion from the Thirties. Badminton was really popular back then because they actually played with a live bird. I really liked them but ended up giving them to my girlfriend. Check her out in them.