Video Cat exists, plus a new record store, and some Eugene Chadbourne/ Red Herring pics

The Chicago pizza at Little Caesar's is pretty good! But it's real hard to fall asleep while I am still digesting it. Though I had my last piece around 9:30, here I am at 2am, a gut full of cheese, wide awake... maybe I've just forgotten how to sleep if I'm not sweating?

All Eugene Chadbourne and Red Herring pics by Gord McCaw, not to be reused without permission

There's been some weirdness in my life over the Eugene Chadbourne shows that happened last weekend, but I'm glad most people had a good time. Alas, a few people caught COVID, including my wife, so I haven't been writing much, since she's either been self-isolating and needing tending to, or working from home, on Zoom calls; either way, I haven't had a lot of quality time at the ol' desktop (she's fine now, symptom free, and got an 811 all-clear to return to public activity as of this weekend). It's weird that, despite living in close quarters, we've both caught COVID at different times and managed not to catch it off each other, especially since we haven't tried very hard not to - I mean, it's kinda difficult to not breathe the same air as your spouse when you only have one kitchen, one bed, one bathroom, one dining table, one TV... I was wondering if whatever antibodies I acquired in May would still be working now, since one reads different things about re-infection, but I did not catch it again, despite being in close quarters with a few people who ended up sick. Sorry to anyone who did! (Facebook friends have suggested we should not be returning to indoor gigs, but I'm truly conflicted on that front, and if artists I care about come to town, I'm still going to plug their shows, and likely will still go. But know that if you go to an indoor show, there is a chance you will come out of it with some variant of Omicron. My own case, in May, probably developed at Central City, when I went to see Ford Pier...).  

Big thanks to Red Herring, for playing an extra set after some apparent miscommunications about show times - there's been a Rashomon-like level of confusion on a couple of points, and there were some people who were irritated about the noisy tableful of youths in Surrey the next night, who didn't make a very attentive audience. I had worn myself out stressing about the LanaLou's gig and making sure Eugene had what he needed for Surrey, so did not attend the Central City one, but the Central City shows continue - look up "Dancing Sawhorse" on Facebook if you are curious - and are also free, though there is some expectation that you eat or drink or such, and you should know that you might find yourself (if you are a performer) playing to (or, if you are an audience member, trying to hear over) a noisy, inattentive, socializing audience (we did tell Eugene of this possibility in advance but it's still too bad he drew that sort of crowd - it's not a given). At least the LanaLou's audience listened really well - it was a pretty focused crowd there. 

Eugene said of the Central City show, afterwards that his one regret is that the party left before he could whip out a Taylor Swift cover that they'd requested. Apparently his repertoire - as the dad of daughters - includes some Taylor Swift! 

Eugene Chadbourne's hands on banjo and guitar, by Gord McCaw, not to be reused without permission

Also thanks to Gord McCaw for taking great pics of both Red Herring and Eugene (he's posted a ton on FB, so look him  up). People who want more Red Herring can see them next Monday at the Princeton, which has no cover charge; their jams can sometimes take them very far from their recorded works (but also can occasionally draw noisy crowds; last time I caught them there, there was a drunk right up front demanding Johnny Cash and Wilf Carter covers!). Music starts around 7 or 730 or so.

 People who want more Eugene will have to wait a couple of years, probably...

All remaining photos by Allan MacInnis

...but that was last weekend. The main point of this post (besides giving my pizza some time to digest) is to say that THERE IS A VIDEO RENTAL STORE THAT I DID NOT KNOW ABOUT LEFT IN VANCOUVER.  I had no idea Video Cat existed until someone commented about it on Facebook last week. Earlier today - or technically yesterday - en route to a friend's, to watch 3D movies on his projection system, we stopped first at Best Buy on Cambie, then ventured south a few blocks (with my weirdly malfunctioning GPS telling me to go north; wtf?). Finally made it to the 3400 block, where the awning still, in fact, reads Black Dog Video, the previous incarnation of the store. And name change aside, it is very much still the "Black Dog experience" inside, with two additions - a box of graphic novels and a box of LPs on one of their sale tables, neither of which are things I recall seeing at Black Dog. 

I know only four surviving video rental stores in the whole lower mainland (unless you count niche markets, like places renting non-English-language content to Korean or South Asian or Russian customers); besides Video Cat, there's also Tom's Video (which seems to be mostly porn); Pic-a-Flic on Vancouver Island, which has a stock that probably now surpasses even Videomatica's in its heyday; and Willow Video out in Langley, which is huge, but seems to be moving more to a "sales" model than a rental one, and again, has a very diversified stock, including LPs, Laserdiscs, video games and more. There must be more out there, hidden away. But Video Cat may now be the biggest in Vancouver? I don't rent anymore myself - don't think I have in over ten years - but I have a lot of nostalgia for walking rental walls, which will ever be my preferred way of discovering what new movies have come out; while in most regards I have happily acclimatized to using the internet to get new information, I somehow haven't ever really found movie websites as useful or enticing or exciting as standing in front of a wall of movies, seeing one I don't know, and picking the box up and reading it... Who directed it? Any names I know here? What's the plot? From about 1985 to 2010 or so, that was the main way - not the only way, but the main one - thatI found out what new movies existed, since most of the movies I've been keen on never got a theatrical showing. I kind of miss doing things that way, even though at Video Cat I focused entirely on the sale stock. 

Both my friend and I studied the sale stock carefully and emerged with a few things; my two were blu-ray upgrades of Panic in the Streets and Mutiny on the Bounty (the Laughton/ Gable version, in a small hardbound "book" format which is out of print, as far as I can tell). My friend got Blake Edwards' SOB (the one where Julie Andrews bears her chest!) and a couple of other things. The prices were better than the first day of the Black Dog sale. And while at Video Cat there wasn't much I felt I needed, I am happy that I know where I can get Todd Haynes' Poison for cheap, if I want (unless one of you buys it). I might be tempted to return for it. I think it was $6? They had a CD of A-sides by the Fall for around the same price, which I contemplated and put back... The guy behind the counter was playing Albert Brooks' Lost in America on the TV and I enjoyed overhearing it as I perused...

The old Black Dog, incidentally, looks like it's going to be a record store! I ended up on Commercial Drive later in the day and snapped a pic of that - Soulessentials Records. It looked like people were at work inside refurbishing the store; the gate was open but the windows papered over. There's already quite a few record stores in Vancouver, and I seldom - sorry to Highlife - make it much past Audiopile when I'm on Commercial Drive, but there can never really be too many stores trafficking culture, can there? I wonder if the name signifies what kind of music they'll be specializing in...

The rest of the night was spent at my friend's place, watching a somewhat obnoxious (2D) 90's comedy (Clifford) which was the second time I'd seen Charles Grodin in a very short time period, after catching The Heartbreak Kid at the VIFF Centre. It's interesting that I used to think Grodin had an agreeably deadpan, low-key style and now I find him a bit shouty and unsubtle. The main course, however - at least from my point of view - was The Creature from the Black Lagoon, in 3D, which was how the film was shot and meant to be seen, but which I'd never been able to experience before. As with other older 3D movies, it had some issues with it; anytime rear projection was used, or there was a very distant forested background, the 3D didn't seem to know what to do with the less clear/ out-of-focus images, and tried to amp them up, creating a kind of shimmering pixellation and pushing them more to the foreground than they should have been, even making it occasionally challenging to decode the images. Recent 3D movies seem to be much better at avoiding such things! The 3D for The Creature was no big deal, but it was still fun to experience the film that way. Amusingly, though we'd had no idea at the start of the day what movie we would end up seeing, I had dressed very appropriately...

I think really, home projection systems are the day to go for watching movies - not much more expensive to set up than a good TV and blu-ray player, huge images, and apparently more power-efficient. I can't afford it, myself, but if you can, you should look into it - it's like having a movie theatre in your living room. And you don't even need physical media, if owning discs isn't your bag - you can also project streamed content. 

I have sufficiently digested my pizza and think I may brave sneaking back to bed. Might not blog that much this month, but I do have a few cool pieces under development... and Bev Davies had dug up a couple of other folk festival photos I'm dying to show you... more to come...