Saturday, September 29, 2007

Score one for Voodoo!

For those of you keeping score at home, we'd like to point out that we called both the American subprime mortgage disaster that dominated the economic news this summer, AND a Canadian dollar at par, back LAST summer in our posting "The Curious Case of Canada's Currency".

Generally speaking we do not hold much truck with economics or political science, at one point one of our members actually declared that economics as a science had as much validity as voodoo.

I guess we have to give our props to voodoo now.

Friday, September 28, 2007

Where did all the cream go?

In a conversation with Spook Country author, William Gibson, we asked Gibson what he thought about when he read books. He replied quite frankly, why he was continuing to read whatever it was he was reading not doing something else, like going for a walk outside.

Recently, while listening to the new Cobblestone Jazz CD, from the stalwart electronica label, k7!, we experienced that same sensation. It has been months since anything related to music has graced the digital pages of The Daily Wenzel, but for the most part its because a lot of the new music we've come across just hasn't been that stellar. Perhaps our favourite new release of the summer was simply a dub remix version of some African Herbsman era Bob Marley. In fact, we were probably more excited about the reissue of the Germs' I #?@! Your Mom, and Suicide's classic debut albums in mp3 format than anything else. You can easily imagine us with Arturo Vega's droning keyboards turned up loud, chanting along to "Ghost Rider".

The one truly bright spot though has been the new Stars' album, In Our Bedroom After the War. "The Night Starts Here" has proven to be one of our favourite songs for these cool September nights. Similarly, "Take Me to the Right" bounces along with an infectious pop-edge that makes it relentlessly catchy.

Better musical news is on the horizon however, as we are waiting for the new Beirut, and the new Broken Social Scene discs to make their way to the office. We'll keep you posted.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

We Are In A Spooky Country

Granted it's late and the late night screening here is showing the horribly mis-cast, mis-directed, yet somehow still endearing, Scorpion King, although truth be told, people are mingling and shuffling around, preparing to head out somewhere else on the town. It certainly pales when compared to Deepa Mehta's Water, and intimate and highly moving portrayal of the state of widows in Gandhian India.

The real inspiration here however was William Gibson's latest novel, Spook Country. Picking up from threads left dangling at the end of Pattern Recognition, Gibson charts the courses of several characters searching for unifying pieces of information to a mysterious cargo container. More thrilling perhaps than his quick-moving prose, is the fact that Gibson sets a portion of Spook Country in his home city of Vancouver, and in many ways, he too captures the same sense of movement and promise (though in a far better manner, and with the benefit of being able to give a backstory to particular locations) that we had picked up in, on an early post back in June (see Vancouver, City on the Edge of Tomorrow).

For the record, here's to hoping for further posts, now that fall is underway. Perhaps the Calgary International Film Festival will inspire us.
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