If anyone needs me...

I'll be hanging out here for a while.

Geraldine

Glasvegas are a Scottish (duh) band that's getting some buzz across the pond. They've got a Velvet Underground/Echo and the Bunnymen/Phil Spector thing going on. Here's they are doing Geraldine live at the BBC. Epic shit.

Isn't it ironic?

Westminster Council bans Banksy

The striking mural, painted under cover of darkness, was intended as a stinging criticism of Big Brother society. So it will come as little surprise to its creator, Banksy, that bureaucracy has ordered the removal of one of his largest works.

The Times has learnt that Westminster Council has demanded that a mural by the pseudonymous graffiti artist, a 7m (23 ft) criticism of Britain’s CCTV culture, must be painted over.

The only reason this is of interest to me is that I happened to stumble on this mural when I was "over there."

(Image pinched from Hypebeast 'cos I haven't downloade dmy own photos of it yet)

That's it. I got nuthin'.

LDN

London Calling

Albion

Herding cats

I've been trying to put together a weekly soccer game for a while now, but interest has been spotty at best.

So this resonates with me right now:

But does it taste like chicken?

Obama pig quip creates faux outrage

On Tuesday, Obama argued that McCain's policies were similar to those of President George Bush even though Republicans were trying to repackage themselves as agents of change, an Obama theme. Obama said it was like putting lipstick on a pig, a reference that the McCain camp said was a sexist dig at GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
...
The latest dispute started Tuesday in a campaign appearance in Virginia. Obama compared the policies of McCain to those of President Bush.

"John McCain says he is about change too, and so I guess his whole angle is: 'Watch out George Bush, except for economic policy, healthcare policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics, we're really going to shake things up in Washington.' That's not change. That's just calling the same thing something different.

"You can put lipstick on a pig," Obama said. "It's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still going to stink after eight years."

What stupid controversy. It's obvious the use of the pig idiom wasn't directed at Palin. The fish one, though? Totally about Palin's vagina.

"Health" Minister

Clement scolds doctors

Health professionals who support Vancouver's safe injection site are unethical and immoral, federal Health Minister Tony Clement suggested on Monday.

"The supervised injection site undercuts the ethic of medical practice and sets a debilitating example for all physicians and nurses, both present and future in Canada," he scolded in an address to the Canadian Medical Association general council meeting in Montreal.

Aw well this is just swell.

Penguin receives Norwegian knighthood

The knighthood ceremony began Friday morning with speeches and a fanfare before Nils arrived, under escort with the King's Guard Colour Detachment. Nils then reviewed the troops lined up outside the penguin enclosure at the zoo, waddling down the row of uniformed soldiers, occasionally stopping to crane his neck and peer inquisitively at their crisp uniforms before being guided forward by his handler.

Nils was then knighted by British Major-General Euan Loudon on behalf of Norway's King Harald V. Gen.

-Globe and Mail

TGIF

I feel that, Larry.

The Olympics are terrible

I am the most annoying person to watch the Olympics with. I'm a condescending former elite athlete who loathes the armchair fan. I love sports. I love athletes. I hate fans. I'm especially annoyed by those who believe their dalliances in amateur childhood athletics give them insight into the travails and accomplishments of Olympic athletes.

This is the preamble to a Salon piece by Jennifer Sey, who believes her dalliances in amateur childhood athletics give her insight into the travails and accomplishments of Olympic athletes.

You loved Nadia and begged your mom to sign you up for gymnastics classes. You went two days a week until you were in junior high. But then your body developed and boys noticed and hanging out at the mall or trying out for the cheerleading squad seemed a lot more appealing than spending the afternoon in a chalky, musty gym scared out of your wits to do what the coach was demanding.

I was practicing 12 hours a week by the time I was 7, traveling up and down the New Jersey Turnpike each weekend for competitions. I moved away from home when I was 14, trained 40 hours a week while attending high school, endured untold abuses by overenthusiastic coaches who weighed me twice a day to make sure I didn't inadvertently get fat during my seven-hour practice.

And yet, though she won the U.S. Nationals in '86, Sey's greatest accomplishment on the international stage seems to be this:

Canada's Conservative government: still dicks

Health Minister issues incoherent broadside against InSite

“Allowing and/or encouraging people to inject heroin into their veins is not harm reduction, it is the opposite. … We believe it is a form of harm addition,” Tony Clement said Tuesday in Mexico City, where he is attending the XVII International AIDS Conference.

Yeah, Tony, because all the people using InSite now would be clean and sober otherwise. Look, choadwad, people are going to inject heroin into their veins without any encouragement from anyone, whether you like it or not.

(Clement) also said that the federal government supports various forms of harm reduction for intravenous drug users such as needle exchange, methadone treatment and rehabilitation, but rejected safe injection as illegitimate. “We're not prepared to allow people to die” by condoning their continued drug use, Mr. Clement said.

So let me get this straight: giving people needles with which to shoot up is okay, but providing a safe and clean environment in which to do so is out of order? How does that make any sense?

Mr. Clement has never clearly stated why the government supports needle exchange and rehab programs but so sternly opposes the existence of a facility where drug users can actually use the safe needles and be encouraged to enter rehab. The sticking point appears to be that, at Insite, drug users cannot be arrested and prosecuted.

Oh I see, Clement and his conservative cronies have no fucking idea what harm, reduction means. See, Tony, the point of a harm-reduction approach to drug use is to treat addiction as a health care issue as opposed to a criminal matter. You can't have it both ways. And what, exactly would be the fucking point of a safe injection site where the clientèle gets arrested for using its services? That's stupidity that beggars belief.

No, the reason behind the Harperites' opposition to safe injection sites is ideology, nothing more.

"Drugs are bad, you shouldn't do drugs mmkay?"

The kids don't stand a chance

This article from anti-semitic anti-establishment mag Adbusters has been causing a stir among various fixie-apologists around town.

Style-wise, it's weak sauce, though this one line is Hall of Fame shit:

The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks.

And for a piece calling out the fundamental shallowness of of hipster culture, this ain't exactly the Mariana Trench of insight. Perhaps that's the point-how do you deconstruct something so empty?-but strip away the academic jargon and all that's left is grumpy old man kvetching about the kids. And that's my shtick, motherfucker.

I suppose internet success is measured by the length of the comments thread, making this article the damn DaVinci Code, but that's not much to hang your hat on. I have some limited first-hand experience with how touchy hipsters in this town can be: getting their goat is not much of a challenge.

In conclusion: someone please please punch this guy.

*Speaking of hipsters, this site is either the worst perpetrator of hipster crimes or the most brilliant satire since that Obama New Yorker cover. In this po-mo age, I'd say its both.

Ch...ch...changes

As you can see, I've messed about with the template here. It's a little squished at the moment, but I'm working on that.

Linkage

I've added some links on the sidebar for you to check out. Or not. I don't care.

Why so serious?

Caught "The Dark Knight" last week. Despite the critical praise and word of mouth hype, I found myself feeling let down. This rare dissenting review sums up why:

The Dark Knight is noisy, jumbled, and sadistic.
...
But the psychological twists in The Dark Knight—especially the transformation of Dent into “Two-Face”—are baffling as drama. They play as if they’d been penned by Oxford philosophy majors trying to tone up a piece of American pop—to turn it into an uncivil Shavian dialogue, Don Juan in Hell with mutilations and truck crashes.

Oh, the verbiage probably wouldn’t matter if those truck crashes were any fun, but the tumult is spectacularly incoherent. Nolan appears to have no clue how to stage or shoot action. He got away with the chopped-up fights in Batman Begins because his hero was a barely glimpsed ninja, coming at villains from all angles in stroboscopic flashes. There are more variables here, which means more opportunities to say “What the f--- just happened?”

That pretty much covers it. Even Heath Ledger's much ballyhooed final performance as The Joker disappoints: it's good, but I was surprised at how limited his screen time was. The film felt overstuffed: too many characters (making the Harvey Dent/Two Face plot line the linchpin of the story was a fatal mistake), too much expository dialogue and superfluous action sequences (the bit where Batman goes to China was completely uneccesary). Maybe it's the fact that moviegoers today are forced to shell out $12 for a matinée, and thus demand more bang for their buck. A shame that seems to translate into such bloated and incoherent products.

Do you believe in magic?

B.C. transportation minister Kevin Falcon does.

"My opinion is, as the price of fuel goes up, it will change the technology of what we're driving, whether it's hydrogen or solar-powered or electrical-powered vehicles, which I think is most likely. That's the weakness of the Peak Oil projections.

"I think the bottom line is, we'll all be driving something. So you just can't ignore the infrastructure."

Does this technology currently exist in an economically viable form? Well, no. Nor is there any reasonable expectation that such alternatives will emerge anytime soon (well, there's biofuels. Oh. Wait.) So I have to wonder: what the fuck are you talking about, man?

That a paid in full member of the ruling class should buy into such technotriumphalist jabber is no real surprise, but in terms of public policy, this is faith-based shit right here. It's one thing to claim that, in the future we will all be conveyed to and fro by magic, four-leaf clover-eating winged unicorns, quite another to implement a massive publicly funded four leaf clover planting campaign. Or something.

Time for a parade!

Mark Steyn (right) and supporters celebrate today's decision by the Canadian Human Rights Commission to dismiss a Muslim group's complaint against Maclean's magazine. Steyn, a known musical theatre aficionado, penned the 2006 article that prompted the complaint.

I'm a loner, Dottie: a rebel.

Matt Taibbi ain't buying what John McCain is selling.

At least that's the impression I get. It's a little ambiguous:

Rather than serving up the "straight talk" he promises, McCain is enthusiastically jumping aboard with every low-rent, fearmongering, cock-sucking presidential aspirant who's ever traveled the Lee Atwater/William Safire highway.
...
With his chameleonlike, whatever-gets-you-through-the-night ideology, McCain intends to use the same below-the-belt, commie-baiting, watermelon-waving smear tactics that Clinton used against Obama in the Democratic primaries, except at tenfold intensity.

More from Planet Fucked

Massachusetts teens enter suicide pregnancy pact.

As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year.
...
School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, "some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. "We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy," the principal says, shaking his head.

Mark my words: pregnancy pacts will be the rainbow parties of 2008.

PandaPandaPanda

Picking up where we left off a while ago (with the panda bears, not the bearded showtunes fan and the basement dwellers who love him), Beijing-based graphic novelist Coco Wang has produced a series of comics about the recent earthquake in China and its aftermath, including one on the aforementioned pandas. Moving stuff.

(via Boing Boing)

Bring the noise

This overview of a recent gig showcasing what passes for musical talent here in Vancouver made me want to put a bullet in the brain of the whole damn scene. I'm not shooting the messenger here; I actually want to know who creates and who enjoys stuff like this:

their "set" was completely different at Pat's (it involved eight people amongst the crowd blowing on rape whistles while Josh Rose fired sampled whistles back at them).

Honestly: what the hell? It seems to me that this electro noise punk bullshit is pretty much all there is out here these days. I guess pop songs are too hard to write.

Speaking of gigs, I just returned from North by Northeast in Toronto, which was memorable more for the misses than the hits. Young Rival, The Golden Hands Before God Conduct Incredible Magic Band and the Spirits, and The Hoa Hoas were all pretty great. However, we missed out on what were apparently great sets from The Rural Alberta Advantage, modernboys moderngirls and The Danks, among others. I guess that's the risk you run when you base your selections off 30 second song snippets off of MySpace. Bands that sound great in passing can genuinely stink live (yeah, I'm looking at you AMIT and your fucking 20 minutes of faux jazz piano wanking).

Rampant gun violence aside, Toronto itself is swell (and keep in mind that, coming from a born'n'bred Albertan, this borders on blasphemy). The demands of the festival kept me from doing the tourist thing, but that just leaves me something to do on my next visit, assuming we're not back to traveling by steam locomotive and horse and buggy in a year's time.

Pfff...Christ....

For some reason, the reaction to my last post reminded me of this:

On occasion, I read the newspaper and/or the internet.

Yeah, I know that by entertaining complaints over speech and opinion, Human Rights Tribunals as we know them are overstepping their original mandate to investigate and settle complaints of discrimination in employment and in the provision of services. But that’s not the worst part. By calling infamous high-school drop out, musical theatre aficionado and right-wing shitnugget Mark Steyn onto the carpet following a complaint by the Canadian Islamic Congress (among others) over the publication of excerpts of his farcically paranoid white-power fantasy “America Alone,” Human Rights Tribunals manage to achieve the heretofore impossible task of turning loathsome wretches like Steyn and the toad-like Ezra Levant before him into figures of public sympathy, feeding their persecution fantasies and stoking the fires of their egos to unbearable levels. And that is the greatest crime of all. Sigh.

On a different tack: OMG! PANDAS!


Above: Nom, nom, nom.

*BONUS BEARD FETISHIST UPDATE*
Um, you morons realize I'm on board with the whole "no prosecuting speech thing" right? Of course you don't.

QOTD

The Globe and Mail's Rick Groen on the new Sex And the City movie:

After all, bad summer films, full of furious hype and signifying nothing, are hardly exceptional these days, nor is the sound they typically make: the dull scrape of a culture hitting rock bottom. Yet this one seems uniquely bad; this one is a threshold-breaker with a different sound, the crack of rock-bottom giving way to a whole deeper layer of magma.

More from the fucked world

Dunkin' Donuts+Whining Wingnuts=Keffiyeh Kontroversy

I'm really of two minds here. Obviously Malkin's view is as rational and defensible as one could expect from a paranoid sociopath who should not be allowed any form of public expression not mediated by large doses of psychotropic drugs and/or electroshock therapy. I mean, the fucking thing is clearly not what Malkin says it is (unless she really does associate paisley with Hamas, a not altogether unlikely scenario given her politics and mental state).

On the other hand, I've been on a jihad against this type of neckwear for a while now. In fact, I rather fancy myself the Osama bin Laden of the anti-keffiyeh movement. As stupid trends go, its near total and unrelenting ubiquity among unwashed, skinny-trousered hipsters would be enough to make anyone vomit up their Ice Cappucino. Factor in the whole cultural appropriation thing and the fact that it's not a scarf but something you wear on your fucking head and, well, I'm having a hard time seeing the downside of demonizing this particular sartorial shenanigan.

I only hope one of these guys would turn up wearing goddamn ugly '80s eyewear. That's another ridiculous fashion trend I wouldn't mind shipping straight to some black site somewhere, never to be heard from again.

Snooze.

I guess I just haven't felt much like blogging lately. I'm working on it.

Fucked world

Exhibit A

"My Beautiful Mommy" is aimed at kids ages four to seven and features a plastic surgeon named Dr. Michael (a musclebound superhero type) and a girl whose mother gets a tummy tuck, a nose job and breast implants. Before her surgery the mom explains that she is getting a smaller tummy: "You see, as I got older, my body stretched and I couldn't fit into my clothes anymore. Dr. Michael is going to help fix that and make me feel better." Mom comes home looking like a slightly bruised Barbie doll with demure bandages on her nose and around her waist.

Exhibit B

Two years ago, Stephanie Kaster of Manhattan set out to plan the birthday party of a lifetime for her daughter. Granted, little Sophie didn't have many parties under her belt with which to compare it: She was not yet 3.

"I just thought, 'If I go to another paint-a-ceramic-bowl or stuff-a-bear party, I'll shoot myself,'" says Kaster.

So she booked a fondue restaurant, hired a musical troupe to perform as the Wiggles (her daughter's favorite group) and ordered a four-layer cake. Each guest took home a Fisher-Price guitar and custom CD.

The price tag? $5,000.

Take me now, Lord.

In other news, the recent profusion of Bull Bunyan-esque checked lumberjack shirts and tanking economy aren't the only signs that the 90's are back in a big way. Apparently shopping at thrift stores is "cool" again.

One-way conversations: on fashion

Picking up a dropped thread from a few nights back...

It's not that I have a problem with people who make a lot of effort to look good. My big beef is with people who go the extra mile to look like they are mentally handicapped sex offenders.

Art imitates art

The first two-thirds of this

are a lot like this.

"I Am Legend" is actually not a bad film (it helps to have low expectations. To wit: me to video store employee; "Do you have any copies of that shitty new Will Smith movie?). Though I can't imagine the surprising degree of quality is by design. After all, when a a sci-fi/horror/action film's worst bits are the sci-fi/horror/action bits, you know someone messed up.

Even I'm selling a lifestyle.

I had a very white weekend. Friday night, I went to an art show opening at a gallery on the edge of sketchville. The show was entitled "Orientalism and Ephemera" and was all about the "attraction and presence of the ‘East’ within our everyday experience." Which basically meant a combination of scruffy hipsters, self-consciously quirky artist types and folks in colourful "ethnic" garb swilling wine and talking about themselves. It was interesting, but very white. The next day, Saturday, I got up and did a 5K run (running being sort of my new "thing"). That evening we went out for dinner on socio-economically diverse Commercial Drive, then watched a video (aside: can we even call them "videos" any more?). Sunday, we cleaned our apartment and watched more movies: the German film "Mostly Martha" and "No Country for Old Men." Basically, more shit from that list.

Speaking of stuff white people like, this Tyee piece would make a great addition. I’ll give the writer points for self-awareness and for not being a self-righteous dink, but in a world where 90 per cent of the population doesn’t even have the luxury of choosing to not take a weekend getaway to Whistler, is this position really all that courageous?

Yeah yeah.

I know. And I haven't forgotten.

On housing prices

"The pathway to affordable housing is abundantly clear: Remove urban growth boundaries."

Thus says a report by pro-urban sprawl "think tank" Demographia that's getting some press here. According to the report, Vancouver's high housing prices are the exclusive result of "artificial restrictions on the supply of residential land." In Vancouver's case, that would be the Agricultural Land Reserve, land which the province sets aside for farming. In total, the ALR covers approximately 47,000 square kilometres- roughly five per cent of B.C.'s total land mass. I'm not sure how much of Greater Vancouver's land mass is taken up by the ALR and the Province article above is pretty vague on that score. As you can probably guess by the fact I'm writing about it, I have a lot of problems with these people.

The main problem with the Demographia report is this: supply is determined by natural factors (the ocean, mountains and international boundaries) as well as by artificial constraints such as land use regulations and reserves. Demand, on the other hand, is virtually unlimited. Vancouver's market has gone apeshit in recent years and, with the Olympics just around the bend, won't likely cool off for a while. Given these and other realities (the never ending stream of internal migrants like yours truly who follow the lure of the west coast lifestyle; immigrants flocking to regional ethnic enclaves), I don't see much chance of the demand dropping regardless of the increase in supply. Any drop in prices that opening the ALR for development would bring would be temporairy at best (indeed, I would argue that, given the white-hot demand, developers would be crazy to set prices below current market values). It's a stop-gap measure and not a long term solution, akin to solving traffic congestion by building more freeways: an intuitively sound theory, but in the end, one that results only in more congested freeways. In the meantime, the loss of the ALR would be irrevocable.

It could well be that my economic analysis is shite and that paving over all the greenfields in the GVRD would actually mean I could magically afford to buy out here. Colour me skeptical on that score. But what really burns my toast is the bogus-on-its face "we care" stance developers take when their nostrils are flared with the scent of fresh cash.

Let's be blunt: the people pushing these measures don't give a shit about affordability. If they did, they'd be, you know, building affordable housing. I see little to suggest these guys are interested in anything more than making a quick buck: shocking, I know. I just wish these dinks would at least have the courage of their convictions to use slightly less transparent specious arguments to justify their rapacious greed, because when I read shit like this:

The ALR has become a "sacred cow," (Philip Hochstein of the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association said). "Meanwhile, my kids can't afford to buy a house."

or this....

Hochstein said 60,000 hectares set aside for agricultural use isn't being used for agriculture. He said it may be unrealistic to anticipate that the Lower Mainland could be fed by food grown on that land, a goal when ALR was born.*

I want to hit someone with a ball peen hammer.

*because god knows land has to be used. It can't just, like, sit there. It will go bad, don't you know? Anyone else get the feeling this guy used the "blue balls" line a lot in high school?

Live and learn.

A great thing about getting older is realizing how much of what you believed when you were young is bullshit. A crappy thing about getting older is that knowledge always comes too late to make a difference.

/emo post

Tumbling down

Further to yesterday's post, I've decided to start a second blog. I'm going to maintain this one as an archive and repository for future expletive-laced rants. The other, cooler looking one will be for photos (mine and others'), blurbs, links, that sort of shit.

If you care, go here.

Should I stay or should I go?

I'm pondering moving/relaunching this thing to a different blog host thingy. I'm eyeing tumblr because the interface is simpler, it looks a lot cleaner and short form stuff is more fun. Plus blogger can be a real bitch. So, solitary reader, what do you think?

Freaky. I am freaked.

This morning, I was in the kitchen making coffee when my thoughts idly turned to the Oscars. I was thinking about the last few years and if any good movies actually won anything. The only one I could think of was gay cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain. Which led to more idle thoughts about Anne Hathaway's rack and Heath Ledger's excellent performance in that film.

Now, I'm not usually given to musing about hunky Australian actors, which made Ledger's surfacing from my subconscious and today's news that he's fucking dead all the weirder. I mean seriously: I think of an actor for the first time probably ever and six hours later word gets out that he's dead? I'm no believer in psychic phenomenon but what the fuck? Should I be worried about Anne Hathaway's tits? Should I start thinking really hard about David Caruso when I take a crap tomorrow morning? Jesus.

On this day....

On January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned all state and federal laws outlawing or restricting abortion in the United States, a landmark decision for abortion rights. It took another 15 years for Canada to follow suit. In that time, the pendulum has swung wildly and it seems as though reproductive rights are under siege.

Today's a good time to remember that the right to decide when to reproduce is a fundamental one and not to be taken for granted.

Okay, now tell me how I can combine the two.

Drinking is healthy, exercise is healthy, and doing a little of both is even healthier, Danish researchers reported on Wednesday.

Several major studies have found that light to moderate drinking -- up to two drinks a day on a regular basis -- is associated with a lower risk of heart disease, and some have also found this leads to a lower risk of some cancers.

But the Danish study, one of the largest of its kind to examine the combined effect of drinking and exercise, found there were additional protective effects gained from doing both.

Dear terrorists....

Hey guys! Gosh, has been almost a year already? I know, I know! But I've been real busy, as I'm sure you have been too. There's soooo much I want to talk to you guys about (did you see Top Model? OMG!), but I've got, like, no time. So here's a couple of things I think you guys would get a real bang out of 'cause they show how the decadent west deserves divine retribution or something! Check 'em out:

Associated Press assistant bureau chief: All things Britney now a "big deal"

Assholes who should probably get blown up.

That's all for now. We should totally catch up soon, tho'! Are you on Facebook?

TTYL

New Year, old complaints

Happy 2008. Here's some bile to get things started right.

This old-ish Sun article on privileged middle-class jackasses slumming it at Downtown Eastside bars pisses me off for a number of reasons. First, that there are kids who hope to achieve some cred by rubbing the hems of their $300 jeans against the grit of the underclass is not news. This type of class tourism has existed for as long as there have been privileged middle-class jackasses looking to temporarily escape their cloistered existence for a little bit of local colour. I'm glad to see that some of the people quoted recognize this, but I doubt that level of self-awareness is the norm. To wit:

Anna Zarzynfki, 22, comes regularly to this dance night at the Astoria. She says it's the low incomes of most of her young friends that is shaping the Hastings Street hipster scene.

"We're like the Mods of the year 2007," said Zarzynfki. "The reason we go to these dive bars isn't because it's a fad. It's because it's all we can afford. Economics always influences subcultures."

Mmhmm. I betcha $200 she learned that last bit at university. The real giveaway that it's not economics as much as elitism is the smugness and self-satisfaction that drips from these twats like a cocaine nosebleed:

"People are tired of going downtown where every club is the same," says Musgrave.

"It's just the same meatheads fighting the same guys and the same chicks that look like hookers."

In the DTES, it's all brawling crackheads and the chicks don't just look like hookers. Authenticity!

"I think a lot of people, myself included, are over downtown just because of the thugs-are-us mentality. There's an alternative needed."

Ah, well, how lucky for you to have that option. I have to wonder, though, what the inevitable gentrification that will follow the migration of the Great Neon Hiptard will mean to those DTES denizens who don't have the luxury of picking their spots when a scene is declared "over."

"These are kids who are more intellectual in their musical tastes and are less inclined to mix downtown with the thugs from the suburbs," says Biltmore manager Richard Roloff, aka DJ Dickey Doo, on the phone from the Canary Islands, where he is working as a DJ.

Uh, Dick? Reading Pitchfork and downloading Daft Punk remixes does not an intellectual make. As for the suburbs remark, from whence do you think all the little spandex-clad faggorts who pay money to watch you press keys on your laptop came?

The new-school Biltmore is aimed at Emily Carr School of Art types, says Roloff. "These are people who don't want to hear Beyonce."

Well, they do, but they don't really mean it. Look, dude, let's not pretend that there's some fundamental difference between the budding conceptual artist from West Van looking to get wasted and laid in some East Hastings bar and the frat boy engineering student looking to do the same on Granville. And no, having a photoblog is not a fundamental difference. To paraphrase Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: "You are all equally worthless." (As an aside, I do find it amusing that these hipsters have such disdain for the thug life, given how many of these 90 pound weaklings adopt the trappings thereof: gang signs, bling, shitty hip-hop, etc. Oh, I forgot: it's okay when it's ironic.)

And finally, the swirly tip on this turd sundae:

DJ Turkington lives in a cheap (for Vancouver) apartment in nearby Strathcona. He's done two years of liberal arts courses at Douglas College. He serves food at a restaurant and sells clothes at American Apparel.

Its like the a c.v. of someone applying for the job of "ridiculous asshole."