Yup. We were at it again! It was street performing time for My Friend Lisa again this afternoon/tonight.

We all met up on Granville Street and found us a sheltered spot out of the rain and we played a bunch of songs. In fact we played a bunch of songs for nearly 4 hours at various spots along Granville street. We had an awesome visit from a man named Arnold. He was really drunk, and he had an upside down cross tattooed on his forehead. Thankfully Lani who is very experienced at dealing with the drunkin Arnold’s of the world was able to get him to not sit down smack dab in the middle of our circle.

We sort of had a nice rotating cast of performers that came and went as their schedules allowed, and worry not Renee for next time we will totally remember to bring out the awesome Casio of DOOM!!! for you to rock out upon. Although I have to say you were doing pretty good with the making up songs as we went!!

In this photo (from left to right) Jenna Mack (www.jennamackmusic.com)  Lani, Some Jerk, & Gabriel (www.myfriendlisa.com)
Being that it was such a beautiful freaking day out today, a bunch of us decided that working in that new street entertainment permit would be a great way to spend some delightful time out in the sun! It was awesome, we made up all the songs on the spot and we made some of the local community gardening folks super happy! They even insisted that we return again next sunday! I somehow managed to break a guitar string… on an acoustic guitar… like not on purpose….. that shit doesn’t really happen…. ever…. i wasn’t even playing smoke on the water….To be really honest I have always been curious about why you would find random missing strings on random acoustic guitars that you see out and about. Anyone who has seen my acoustic guitar and, perhaps more importantly, me playing it knows that I play it really really hard, I always have, yet in all my years of playing I have never ever broken an acoustic guitar string.  In fact I have carted an extra pack of strings around in my guitar case for years with the belief that one should always be prepared, and today with this unlikely scenario actually popping up, I was for the first time ever with out an extra set of stings in my case! :)

Such a clean string on a dirty guitar

looks like it was time to change strings anyway :)

Super Awesome

Lately I find myself doing a lot more music wise then I do photo wise (not to say that i am going to become a jerk with a camera /guitar/banjo/microphone or anything anytime soon) In addition to playing in our increasingly inaccurately described folk rock duo My Friend Lisa (there are four of us now) I have found my self playing with Mikala on a fairly regular basis. I have also been working on a raunchy punk rock side project with my other awesome friend Jenna (whom you may remember from this video) called “The Stank“ All that & I have been recording a few demos for other people! All in all it has been rather busy on the music front these past months.

All the while I have been tring to live up to the camera part of my jerk with a camera name though, as such this is a polaroid from Wednesday of my friend Mikala manhandling Chester!

We were working on some new material but its not quite ready for the masses yet so I will leave you with a cover of the worlds best band EVAH!!!

Mikala & I covering Cactus by the Pixies

This is an instagram that Shannon took during last rehearsal. I liked it so I stole it.

…this is a repost from the the MFL website…

We had mentioned this on twitter but we have been so busy I forgot to mention it on the blog. My Friend Lisa is no longer just a duo! We have welcomed Renee (keys) & Lani (violin) into the fold!! We are still finding our footing with all this but have a listen to our off the floor cuts from last nights studio kitchen rehearsal.

Our favourite song ‘London’
My Friend Lisa – Dec.14.2011 – London

And our complete failure at playing Smashing Pumpkins Disarm.
My Friend Lisa – Dec.14.2011 – Disarm
I personally blame the kettle boiling over at that exact moment. :)

Not perfect but we have only played together a couple of times so I figure we are on the way to AWESOME!!

Now I haven’t posted a lot of actual words this year. (seriously be happy that i’ve posted anything at all) but do actually I have a lot of things to talk about. A big one is This years East Side Culture Crawl. For those that are not in the know about Culture Crawl; SHAME ON YOU!! GET OUT OF THE HOUSE ONCE IN A WHILE!! GEEEZZZE!! :) According to the website the East Side Culture Crawl is…

“A FREE 3-day visual arts phenomenon. This event involves more than 10,000 people visiting artists in their studios in the area bounded by Main Street and Victoria Drive north of First Avenue in Vancouver, Canada.”

That all said IT IS AWESOME! You should probably instantly drop everything and plan out how to visit as many of the 336 artists over the three days as you can. Seriously don’t just half assed not even bother to plan, and end up only going to one of the the 4 or 5 buildings that have the most artists in a single afternoon sometime between a late breakfast and an early dinner and then say ‘we went’ & that ‘you saw what Culture Crawl has to offer!’ Do that on Friday, then go street hoping on Saturday and then go to as many other places as you can on Sunday. Then once you are nearly as exhausted and the rest of us only then can you you say you have truly experienced the Crawl and you will be happier for it :)

As I started this long diatribe out with, We, (we being my darling wife and I) are participating for the first time this year. mostly because this is the first time we have lived in the neighbourhood and been remotely prepared to think about participating :) That said, I am no where near prepared for anything of the sort & nor is my house really :)

We live in our house and as such we are totally fine right now with large unfinished pieces of random plywood leaning against Ikea cupboards as room dividers. My idea of clean is simply get all the junk off the floor in some way & hurray we have achieved clean. :) Needless to say there are more the a few house projects that need to be done for what is rapidly becoming next week

That is not to mention all the projects that we need to do to basically have something to display for the crawl

I have been mixing up photography & table saws and I have a few really intereting projects that if all goes according to plan I will have it all displayed up on our wall for all you to see when you come.

I apoligize for instagram photos as I havent bothered to take a ‘real’ camera down to the woodshop. These get the point across though :)

I have also been attempting to mix photography with ceramics

That is 1/2 tone of clay. The Xterra was so loaded! :)

Oh and also My Friend Lisa will be rocking out at our studio (times to be decided)

OH YA and this is only me! My darling wife will have all of her awesomeness displayed up as well!!!

Oh ya I will have some film screenings happening

um…. there is more I am sure

we might bake cookies

FUN!!!

so YOU NEED TO COME OUT TO THE CRAWL!!!!

here is a handy leaflet that you can email around or link to!!

We were rocking out and I took photos :)

So I play music in this little band called My Friend Lisa. We had our first show last weekend here is a re-post from the My Friend Lisa Blog

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Last night we played our first ‘real’ show EVAH!! and here are some photos!


we opened for Freddie from the Autumn Portrait.

Here are some archived snippits of video that were streamed up to Ustream..

A small warning however, these clips where recorded and streamed with an iPhone so the audio/video quality are not the best :)

Here we have a series of attempts at an epic ‘My Friend Lisa‘ photobooth photoshoot.

The Idea: Simply we wanted to have Darren & I jumping up as high as we possibly could at the exact same time with Shannon standing in front with an epic rockstar pose.  Seems like it should be simple enough, right? WRONG!

Above: This was the absolute best photo out of all our many futile attempts to jump at the same time.
Below: Me cursing out Darren for being a bad keeper of time, while Shannon laughs :)

Above: We try it again

Below: We simply give up and move on to the obligatory Rock Star band pose.

All in all fun!

Oh and yes Darren isn’t wearing any pants. Why because he is the drummer, and drummers don’t wear pants. :)

Sunday saw us with not much to do so after a super quick breakfast we meet up with J&S and Kris out on Bowen Island. I had a guitar with us (which is absolutely required when one is taking a boat somewhere) and our returning boat was basically empty so we shot some photos. Some are shot by me, some by josh and some by Shannon. I don’t know who took these photos of me but I took the three of Shannon.

Now because I always assume that everyone that reads my blog, is also religiously following my every move/whim on twitter, as well as reading all about My musical escapades with My Friend Lisa, I often forget to mention the other things that I am doing with my time outside of blogging random photos with little to no explanations.

I am in a band. It is fun, I love it & in getting the new camera I find myself flexing my old filmmaker muscles. As such we did a super quick off the floor video cut of us playing one of our original songs.

All shot with the Canon 5D Mark II and the 85mm lens. Super fun!!

Yup there was a time that I called my self a filmmaker. Around the time that I started blogging was when I was on my way out of film making and into photography.

This is a video that I made in 2000 using an analog 8mm camera and captured analog into a 300 mHz computer with 128mgs of ram and edited in Adobe Premiere. It would take days to render out the effects that I was rocken and when I wasn’t happy with something I would change it and then re-render it for days again. I won an award from the local film society and everything.  But this is what I wanted to do with my life. make silly art films about nothing in particular. Long story short I became a photog instead. :)

What amazed me was things I was searching for 10 years ago are here now! Things like super shallow DOF, super easy editing, & among other things, simply super good looking video footage.

I talked to My guy down at Vistek yesterday (yup when you drop fat cash you get a guy) and he said that the mark iv is set to arrive some time next week. So I should have it in my grubby fingers very soon! :)

But I need to pack for snowbaording awesome now! See ya on the mountains :)

As promised I have played a little bit with the 4×5 Omega! Here is the first and only color Polaroid to come out of it :)

Impromptu My Friend Lisa band photo!

….you get photos of us recording. After we move and I am done painting I may finish a long draft about all our new recording adventures, but till then you get photos