Filed under: art, books, comics, fake news, fashion, interviews, movies, music, news, reviews, technogeekery | Tags: Coachella, Coachella news, reviews
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-Management
Filed under: fashion, music, reviews | Tags: "That's Not My Name", Commodore Ballroom, concert reviews, Jules De Martino, Katie White, Melissa Skoda, photos, The Ting Tings, Vancouver, We Started Nothing, We Walk
-Shawn Conner, photos by Melissa Skoda
So the Ting Tings returned to Vancouver last night, and after all I’d heard about the live show I wasn’t going to miss the duo a second time (third, if you count the misfire at CMW in Toronto). This goes against my innate indie-rock snobbery, which states that if I miss a band the first time, and it gets more popular by its second go-round, I am beholden to dismiss the act as overrated. Especially if, as in the case of the Ting Tings, the show had been sold out months in advance.
The Ting Tings are not, however, overrated. What the Manchester band (most likely) is, is a flash-in-the-pan, but a great one. I can’t imagine a second album from these guys (drummer/guitarist Jules De Martino and singer/guitarist/fashion plate Katie White) living up to the charm and energy of We Started Nothing, their debut, but there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the ride while we can.
The Ting Tings circa 2009 is a lean, mean dance machine, with barely enough material to fill an hour but almost all of it first rate. Needless to say, the highlights were what anyone who’s heard the singles would expect—the title track, “Great DJ” and, for a roof-raising encore, “That’s Not My Name”. Surprises were few, but the Goth-tinged “We Walk”—one of the album tracks that demonstrates there may be more to this band than catchy pop tunes and dance beats—was a great set-opener: disarmingly dark yet punchy.
And at a show where the girls outnumbered the guys, White—in blue tights, red shoes, and funky hat pulled down over her eyes —was the evening’s hero, posing for photos to satisfy cellphone shutterbugs and bounding onto De Martino’s drum riser to play guitar in a rock-star fashion that brought cheers from the crowd. It won’t last forever, but right now at least, the Ting Tings are deservedly at the top of the indie-pop/dance heap.
Filed under: fashion | Tags: agent provocateurs, American Apparel, Bjorn Borg, Borje Salming, Dragon's Den, fashion, Ginch Gonch, Juno Awards, La Senzas, Marky Mark, men's underwear, Michael Kissinger, murse, Rick Campanelli, Rick the Temp, Sam Roberts, Saxx, T-Boxers, the Trews, Timbits, Trent Kitsch, Victoria's Secret, Y-front briefs
-Michael Kissinger
Last week I walked out of the Juno Awards swag room at the Shangri-La Hotel, slightly drunk, with three pairs of underwear in my man purse.
I’m not sure which is more of an accomplishment, the fact I can still rock a “murse” without shame, or my substantial haul of gaunch. Both are worthy of praise and reflection, but I’ll focus on my impressive underwear booty for now.
Despite inroads made by ex-Maple Leaf Borje Salming, tennis great Bjorn Borg and tighty-whitey advocate Marky Mark, men’s underwear has long been treated as an afterthought in fashion circles—the unsophisticated, slightly retarded younger brother of the La Senzas, Agent Provocateurs and Victoria’s Secrets of the world. That’s slowly changing, however.
In 2004, the Canadian English Oxford Dictionary included the term “gaunch” and its regional variations “gonch” and “gotch” in its esteemed pages for the first time. That same year, Montreal-based Ginch Gonch launched its “playful rebellion against the boring, ordinary underwear worn by most men” with loud fabric prints and saucy taglines such as, “regardless of your
inches, we cover you in our Ginches.” Shortly after that, perhaps not coincidentally, anti-sweat shop, pro-orgy clothing company American Apparel appropriated the once-ubiquitous and much-maligned men’s Y-front briefs of yore, transforming them into overpriced hipster wear.
But bright colours and irony are parlour tricks when it comes to men’s undies, as technology and design have remained relatively stagnant. Two companies are aiming to correct this gross injustice, and they’ve decided that lathering musicians and media types at the Juno Awards with free samples is good place to start, although I always assumed that people like Sam Roberts and members of the Trews preferred to go commando. Maybe it’s the beards.
T-Box, from Istanbul, began as a line of T-shirts, creatively and compactly packaged, which, according to its press bumph, allows it to be “consumed anywhere.” Hmmm. The company’s “T-Boxers” are no different, with two shrink-wrapped pairs taking up the same amount of space in my bag as a handful of Timbits would. (On a side note: former MuchMusic VJ and current ET Canada host Rick the Temp, sorry, Campanelli, kindly gave me an extra pair of his complimentary T-Boxers since extra large was too big for his eternally young and boyish figure.)
Out of the package, T-Boxers look like wrinkled crepe paper. Equally bewildering, each pair comes with a single Euro one-cent coin. While it’s fittingly European, I’m not sure that a brown penny is really the marketing angle an underwear company should be taking. Same goes for teabags.
As far as material goes, my T-Boxers weren’t as soft and comfortable as I had hoped for, and they fit a little tighter and higher
on the thigh than my ruggedly handsome frame is accustomed. That said, I appreciated the ergonomics of the packaging, and the snugness inspired me to run faster during my Sunday ball hockey game.
Saxx Apparel, on the other hand, is all about fit. Launched by Kelowna’s Trent Kitsch, who won last year’s audience award on CBC’s Dragon’s Den, Saxx bills itself as an “evolution in men’s underwear.” Built with “comfort side panels”, Saxx apparently “greatly improves men’s comfort by preventing contact and offering non-restrictive support.” Simply put: “It keeps your balls away from your leg,” as a company rep repeatedly told me and anyone else within earshot. In layman’s terms, the comfort panels isolate your junk from the rest of your body, effectively creating a pouch for your pouch.
At first I thought this would feel a little off-putting, but once I got home, sobered up and pulled on a pair of the ³Bamboo² Saxx, I was pleasantly surprised. The material was soft and the fit impeccable. In fact, Saxx fits bigger than most underwear, so a size large suited this burly, murse-toting dude just fine. As for the separation of church and state, Saxx’s side panel technology is subtle but effective, which is really what all gaunch should aspire to.
Next up: the fashion resilience of men’s purses, appropriate summer footwear, shirtless dudes playing Frisbee: who’s to blame?, and why 99.9 per cent of people who eat Subway sandwiches on public transit are male.
Filed under: fashion, interviews, music | Tags: "That's Not My Name", Calvin Harris, Eskiimo, Great DJ remix, interviews, Jules De Martino, Katie White, The Ting Tings, the Ting Tings tour dates, Ting Tings T-shirts, Tom Neville, Vivienne Westwood
The songs on the Ting Tings‘ debut might sound like happy-go-lucky pop, but listen to the lyrics and you’ll definitely hear an edge, if not a chip. It’s a holdover from the two musicians’ previous experience with the music industry, when Katie White and Jules De Martino were part of a band called Eskiimo. After that group split, the vocalist/guitarist and drummer, friends dating back to pre-Eskiimo days, almost gave up on music for good. But the two licked their wounds, wrote some songs, threw a few promotional parties, and eventually pressed their own copies of a single, “Great DJ”.
The breakout success last year of that song, as well as “That’s Not My Name” and We Started Nothing, the (Sony) debut, has made the Ting Tings one of those unlikely stories that makes even the most jaded pop music fan sit up and take notice. Here’s a band whose tunes—not just catchy but smart and sassy—just about everyone likes. The chemistry between White and De Martino, meanwhile, has made the live show a must-see. De Martino called from a St. Louis tour stop, and answered our questions, kind of… but he definitely talked.
-Shawn Conner
SC: How has the show changed as the two of you have become more adept at playing as a two-piece?
JDM: We’ve been signed to a major record label and obviously we have all these opportunities to go around the world and play all these gigs, these opportunities that open daily. But we like to keep things very much in hand. We do our own artwork, we produced our own album. The two of us onstage have an enormous amount of energy. It’s something about the energy we have that makes us feel fulfilled when we come off stage. I think the worst thing about this industry is when you start feeling unfulfilled, whether or not you’re earning any money. Selling records, going around the world, and people start saying “you can do this advert, it’s going to bring in so many thousands of pounds, and someone’s offered you this, you can stay at the penthouse suite.” It’s really easy to go, “That would be really good.” But it’s one of the decisions we’ve made, we’re a pop band but it’s kind of run like an indie band. We do everything ourselves. Sometimes that frustrates labels or the management, because they want you to be this huge thing overnight.
SC: When you started out, you were just traveling around in Katie’s Mini, right?
JDM: That’s right. Now we have a tour bus, and seven people who travel with us. Katie has a guitar tech but that’s because most of the day we’re doing promo and we don’t have time to set up. They [the crew] are really an integral part of what we do. They’re great people. Katie’s got a female guitar, she was adamant about that. Obviously in this business when you go to crew it’s all men, sitting on the bus burping and farting. So she was adamant about getting a girl to come on tour with us. She [the guitar tech] is kind of more of a boy than a girl. She lifts really heavy stuff.
SC: You had an unpleasant experience with the music industry before signing to Sony with the Ting Tings.
JDM: The last time, it went wrong in many ways. In fact it inspired semi-consciously a lot of the material we wrote lyrically. A lot of people think these are out and out pop songs, which they are, but they are written about our past experience. “That’s Not My Name” is about feeling invisible, not being heard. When we were signed as a band [Eskiimo] before, the first thing they [the record company] projected—we had a lot of talent and were making some great music—was how far Kate would go in the sense of men’s magazines, revealing herself and being sexual. I remember clearly we sat at the meeting, and she’d put together some ideas, because she’d done fashion design, and they literally pushed that aside, and focused on how raunchy Katie was prepared to be. As if the only thing we wanted was to get a record deal. I remember looking at Katie and she had her middle finger stuck up and I was thinking, “Oh no. She’s lost it.” But she was like, “Fuck you guys, I’ve spent three days putting this scrapbook together and you haven’t even looked at it. All you’ve done is come into this meeting thinking I’m gonna go in these trash magazines.” I remember we got back on the train back to Manchester, and the other members in the band were going “Katie, you’ve got to be more diplomatic.” And I was like, “No, not at all.” And two-three weeks later we got a call saying we got dropped.
SC: Obviously that experience made you determined to call the shots, from where you tour to the artwork to the merchandise.
JDM: We’ve done some wild stuff with our merch, especially when we started. We had white T-shirts and pots of paint, and we were doing our own merch after the gig, and we’d sign the T-shirts or tell people to put them on and throw paint at them, or put handprints or footprints on them. I studied fine art, and Katie got involved with a lot of fashion design students in Manchester, and she got fascinated by fashion. So she was cutting her own clothes. The funniest thing, when we broke through, there was a Vivienne Westwood dress that came through for her to wear to an event. And I was like, “Wow, that’s incredible, it’s worth a fortune, God you’re so lucky.” I’m the drummer, no one ever gives me designer stuff. And I went out and when I came back to the studio and she’d cut it to pieces. She’d put on all these little teapot doilies on it. At the time I was like, “You’re a fucking crazy bitch. You should’ve put it on eBay.” But it did look good. And that’s what she’s always done. We still try to do that. Those wallets, it takes ages to make one, we get a guy in London to make them. We’ve just said when you’ve got time, make them. We did a party in Manchester recently, and it turned into a huge paint fight. My drum kit and the guitars got covered, and they look just phenomenal, like something off the first Stone Roses record. That’s what we love doing, is having a connection with the audience, getting a reaction. We have two T-shirt designs at the moment, designed by a Swedish girl. We ran a competition, we want someone to come up with a great T-shirt. So we commission her. She started a website now, designing T-shirts. SHe was just a student. We love that, it’s so much more refreshing than going to a company that designs T-shirts.
SC: You’ve got the one album out, and bunch of remixes and a few live tracks. What would you recommend if I had a few extra bucks to download some additional Ting Tings music?
JD: Definitely Calvin Harris remix of “Great DJ” , it’s amazing. And there’s a Tom Neville remix of “That’s Not My Name” that’s good as well.
SC: What about the Live in Soho tracks?
JD: That’s just a bloody record label thing.
Filed under: fashion, reviews | Tags: Animal Collective, Ariel Pink, Ariel Pink live, Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Ariel Rosenberg, concert reviews, Conscientious Objector, Kate Reid, Media Club, Paw Tracks, pink velour stirrup pants, R. Stevie Moore, What Else Am I Not Supposed to Do?, Who Could Win a Rabbit?
-by Kate Reid, photos by Liz Stanton
Ariel Pink sounded like his own biggest fan as he bawled his way onto the stage at the Media Club last Saturday night. He shuffled about in too-tight, pink velour stirrup pants like an emaciated, thrift-store-styled scarecrow and screeched “New world order!” at the packed crowd below. With his head down, striped shirt, and greasy, blond tresses, Pink at times looked like an eerie apparition of a resurrected (but newly vertically-challenged) Kurt Cobain. Pink shares the lo-fi, pop sensibilities of Nirvana, but his sound is a timeless, hard-to-pin-down nebula of layered noise that’s pleasing to the ear despite (or because of) the intentional muddied production values. The closest act I can think to compare him to is the criminally unknown DIY basement recorder pioneer, R. Stevie Moore. It turns out that Pink collaborated with the guy on a bunch of tracks, like “What Else Am I Not Supposed To Do?” from Moore’s latest album, Conscientious Objector, and Pink cites him as a major influence, so there you go.
In the past, Pink (born Ariel Rosenberg) has been pegged as a difficult act to translate live, and a lot of critics have hated his slapdash, unrehearsed performances. There wasn’t much to bitch about on Saturday, though—Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti sounded tight in their own loose sort of way and despite the Media Club’s craptastic sound system, Ariel Pink sounded, well, practiced. If that feels like an insult, it isn’t.
Back in 2004, Animal Collective signed Pink as the first act on their Paw Tracks label and it’s not hard to understand why. Both acts split audience members into two camps: those who love the erratic spontaneity of their cobbled-together live shows, and those like myself, who wish the songs retained some of the original form they took on the album. I first saw Animal Collective during their Sung Songs tour and could barely distinguish my favourite track, “Who Could Win a Rabbit?”, from the rest of the throbbing beats and incessant whirring that made up the set that night. Pink has taken a lot of shit for basically giving me what I ask for in a live show—a recognizable reinterpretation of his albums—so maybe audiences just need to give a proper listen to the recordings before they’re scared off by the real thing. Those velour pants were a little (ahem) blatant—beware the view from the front, ladies and gentlemen.
Some Ariel Pink songs sound so distorted you’ll feel like you need to poke a pencil in the cassette so you can reel the tape back onto the spool—then you’ll remember you buried your Walkman in the bottom of your junk drawer five years ago and you’re listening to the track on a bloody iPod.
I don’t know if Pink’s live act has improved or if critics now know what to expect after all the Paw Tracks hype, but “For Kate I Wait” is still the best track Pink’s ever recorded and I was definitely able to recognize and love it live. At one point Pink lurched into the crowd and was devoured by a sea of hungry fans, but he emerged a few minutes later—a sweaty, discombobulated mess—and hurled himself back onstage. I suppose I give Ariel Pink more leeway than Animal Collective simply because Pink’s albums sound so much messier—I expect the same jagged edges in his live performance so I was pleased he could deliver. If you go to the show expecting some eccentric pop sounds and don’t mind an artist who shows a little asscrack when he crowdsurfs, you’ll probably dig Ariel Pink—I sure did.
Filed under: fashion, music | Tags: (the angels wanna wear my) red shoes, Bruce Springsteen "I'm on Fire", elvis costello pump it up, haunter, haunter winnipeg, high and lonesome whisky awards, king's head pub, nipples, Oh My Darling, pump it up, Ragpickers, Ragpickers Winnipeg, Ragpickers' all-you-can-wear sale, rasputin, ridley bent, sue foley, the Afterbeat, the angry dragons, the Braggarts, the bushtits, the Geek Street Band, the latest slander, the Quiffs, the wind ups, the wind ups cavern, ukrainian labour temple, vintage clothing, volcano suns, watching the detectives
-eugene osudar, Winnipeg
rarara/ragpickers
ragpickers
vintage clothing
and their once a year
20$ all you can (im)possibly
wear on your bones
in 20 minutes
sale/get naked
cuz some do
hundreds free/fall
slip/through the well/
coming portal
just to layer
the layers on the bare
skin/rag/pickers
this coming
saturday at high noon
the lineups of
naked freezing
goose/bum/ping
flesh
well not really
not until they’re in/through
the out/doors
and shedding
the brrrr/shiverrring
layers
ragpickers
where shows are held
upstairs
in the summer,
fringe plays
in the fall,
dress/up balls
in the spring,
ray/ging whore/moans call
and winter,
debuting the bushtits
in february
(lucky 13 friday)
another all female band
that i’m looking forward too
oh for The Quiffs!

Winnipeg's the Quiffs play a Canada Day street festival (circa 2008?).



are you into the music
a new band
of blue/ing hi/note
haunter
reminding me
of volcano suns
long ago
dancing to the subliming
playful melodics
i’m on fire
a springsteen cover
lovely
geek street band/
gotta play more than
once a year!
the afterbeat
at dylan O’s
ska/show
and dancing madly
the youngsters
joined the oldster
who (moi?) began the movement
to sweat/soak t/shirts
from first drum beats
and mike’s call to
dance
“you can all learn something
from eugene”
Oh holy fuck!
“he hasn’t missed a show
in the last year.”
dancing wic/ked/ly
that’s it
2009
rock even har/der
dance mar/tyr (croo/ked/ly)
still
saturday
sue foley
after several weeks recording
a new disc in the midst
of a severely cold winterpeg snnnnnaP!
and the show at the hammer
and sic/kle red style
ukrainian labor temple
blues/ed
acoustic and electric sets
dancing mayhem
shay/na/wes
and the courageous
few
terry said, now that’s where
i’d be, as sue played her solo
stage front
so i took that as The Cue
to forward march
and dance right in front
of sue’s sizzling solo
watching the detectives
her fingers teased
filing the fret/board
she flirts her red shirt
while i was dragging the lake
with my dancing shoes
the angels wanna wear my
(elvis costello)
dancing shoes
her fingers
blue/me
ahhhhhhhhh
way!
rushing madly
to a line/up
at the king’s head
for the braggarts
irish punk covers
dance floor dangerously
packed and jump(ogo)ing
madness
all mayhem all sweat
all nipples
“can you see my nipples?”
the drunken young man asked
nodding i,
“you’ve achieved sweaty
t/shirt hardened nipple stage.”
sunday night
blues jam
high and lonesome
big dave
and the whisky awards
bigger than the golden globes
silver/coated whiskey bottles
and certificates of honor
this is your moment
now
youngsters
l cohen
/be at the cavern
friday 23rd
for the wind ups
winding up the dance floor
roar/ing through
covers like Jam/like Police
like Alice Cooper/like Angel City
like Ramones/like Squeeze
like elvis costello/
like Clashhhhhh
like
are you listening
to the latest slander?
pump
it
up!
me!
you!
dancing!
and ridley bent
saturday night 24th
at the times changed
oh and earlier
in the day
the sale
of all sales
20 dollar$
20 minutes
rarara
rasputin!
rarara/
ragpickers!


































