Archive for July, 2010

The Sad Mag fam­ily is so excited to offer up a fresh issue of the mag­a­zine, launch­ing Wednes­day, August 4 at the Cobalt. Check out a sneak peek from the lat­est issue, writ­ten of the­atre leg­end Yayoi Hirano by Michelle Reid.

Yayoi Hirano and I sit at a card table in an empty room, while out­side there are the famil­iar sounds of Granville Island on a week­end after­noon: ducks, chil­dren, cars faintly thun­der­ing across the bridge over­head. Yayoi is wear­ing black sun­glasses and low black heels, dressed in lay­ers of black fab­ric. She is com­posed and ele­gant, her youth­ful appear­ance bely­ing the longevity of her career as a dancer, mask-maker, mime artist, sto­ry­teller and founder of the Yayoi The­atre Move­ment Soci­ety, which is now two decades old.

—Michelle Reid

Illus­tra­tion: Kristina Fiedrich

Patrick Spencer speaks with Sad Mag about bring­ing music to the peo­ple in Sad Mag Issue 4, launch­ing this Wednes­day, August 4. Check out a sneak peek of this arti­cle by Justin Mah.

I really like old tra­di­tional folk songs: there’s a song called “Red River Valley”—it’s an old bed­time story-type song that’s been around for more than a hun­dred years. I notice when I play that song—and I play it in my own way, kind of upbeat—it doesn’t sound like an old folk song, but at the same time, peo­ple over fifty years old, for instance, will rec­og­nize it and will stop and lis­ten and will say, ‘Hey, I really liked hear­ing that, I haven’t heard that song since my grand­mother used to sing it to me as a child.’

—Patrick Spencer, as told to Justin Mah.

Photo: Jonathan Tag­gart

Thank you to every­one who made it out to the screen­ing of “Paris is Burn­ing” at 1181 Tight Lounge last night. We had a great time!

Spe­cial thanks go out to Lind­sey Fraser from the Van­cou­ver Queer Film Fes­ti­val, who part­nered with Sad Mag to make the screen­ing hap­pen. Thank you also to 1181 Tight Lounge for offer­ing up their classy digs, and to DJ ROBO SANTA for tak­ing us into the night with great tunes.

For more fan­tas­tic films, don’t miss the VQFF tak­ing place from August 12–22. Until then, make your own queer media with Sad Mag’s Show Us Your Pride photo con­test: you give us pho­tos, we give you prizes!

The infec­tious SpandyAndy will be giv­ing a very spe­cial per­for­mance at Sad Mag’s launch party for the antic­i­pated sum­mer issue! Read about Lau­ren Schachter’s inter­ac­tion with the span­dexed won­der in issue #4. Here’s a sneak peek:

He loves to shock strollers on the Van­cou­ver Sea­wall with his hyper­bolic pelvic thrusts, and even encour­ages spec­ta­tors to ban­ish their self-consciousness and get their dance grooves on in pub­lic. Spandy believes dance to be “the per­fect lan­guage,” because once you’re danc­ing with­out inhi­bi­tion, your hap­pi­ness can’t be misinterpreted—and it’s infectious.

—Lau­ren Schachter

Photo: Shane Oost­er­hoff

Marina Bychkova’s Enchanted Doll line has cap­tured the imag­i­na­tions of some of the world’s great­est com­mer­cial artists, includ­ing Mike Parker, Pres­i­dent and CEO of Nike, and Fab­rizio Vitti, lead shoe designer for Louis Vuit­ton. In this sneak peek from Sad Mag issue 4, Rebecca Slaven speaks with Bychkova about the love for dolls she has had from the start.

Bychkova pulls out a box con­tain­ing hun­dreds of paper dolls—many based on char­ac­ters from pop­u­lar cul­ture such as Scully from the X-Files, Prince Charm­ing, and Sailor Moon. “While other girls played with dolls, I made dolls. I remem­ber when [Disney’s] Aladdin came out; I made a Princess Jas­mine doll and showed it to my class­mates and all of the girls wanted one. I made like twenty of those dolls for sale and then came to school and said, ‘You want a doll? A hun­dred rubles please!’” she laughs while feign­ing to sell them from an imag­i­nary trench coat.

—Marina Bychkova, as told to Rebecca Slaven

Photo: Tina Krueger-Kulic

Sad Mag and friends at the Van­cou­ver Queer Film Fes­ti­val and 1181 Tight Lounge are proud to present a screen­ing of “Paris is Burn­ing” to kick off the Van­cou­ver 2010 Pride Season.

Jen­nie Livingston’s doc­u­men­tary has become a cult clas­sic in the GLBT com­mu­nity for its inti­mate and touch­ing look into drag and ball cul­ture of New York City in the 1980s.

Van­cou­ver is Burn­ing
Tues­day July 27, 2010
1181-Tight Lounge
Doors at 6pm, screen­ing at 7:30pm
FREE!
This is a 19+ event

View the Face­book event page.

Hav­ing a baby is absolutely ter­ri­fy­ing — even in tra­di­tional cir­cum­stances. Add to that find­ing a womb and an egg donor, decid­ing who the bio­log­i­cal father will be, end­less gov­ern­ment forms, and hav­ing to pay upwards of $30,000 in bureau­cratic fees and you under­stand the com­pli­ca­tions of a gay cou­ple hav­ing a child via sur­ro­gate preg­nancy in Canada. Play­wright Dave Deveau’s newest pro­duc­tion, Tiny Repli­cas, explores the many issues this sit­u­a­tion raises.

Tiny Repli­cas is infor­ma­tive, touch­ing, and funny as it fol­lows a gay male cou­ple, Simon & Ethan, on their jour­ney of con­ceiv­ing a child from start to birth. Reveal­ing the power strug­gles that arise with the gov­ern­ment, soci­ety, and their involved friends, Tiny Repli­cas is at its strongest when delv­ing into Simon & Ethan’s rela­tion­ship. The sit­u­a­tion may be spe­cific but the theme is uni­ver­sal — how do cou­ples cope with hard­ship, change, and grow­ing up? Though it tem­porar­ily quashed my child­bear­ing desires, Tiny Repli­cas is a ten­der, brazen delight.

Tiny Repli­cas runs from July 21–25 at the Cultch, as part of the Nean­derthal Fes­ti­val. For tick­ets, visit www.thecultch.com.

Photo by Bran­don Gaukel.

Sad Mag wants you to show us your pride! We’re look­ing for emerg­ing, pro­fes­sional, ama­teur, and wanna-be pho­tog­ra­phers to show us what you’ve got. Take a pic­ture of some­thing you do or see dur­ing Vancouver’s Pride Sea­son, sub­mit it to Sad Mag’s Show Us Your Pride photo con­test, and have a chance to win great prizes from Sephora and Bang-On tshirts.

How to enter:

1. Take a photo of some­thing you do or see dur­ing the Van­cou­ver 2010 Pride Season
2. Sub­mit it by email to pride [at] sadmag.ca before the dead­line on Fri­day, August 6 at 11:00 p.m.
3. Win! Win! Win!

Our esteemed edi­tors will select a first and place sec­ond win­ner to receive:

FIRST PLACE
A skin­care gift bas­ket from Sephora Pacific Cen­tre, worth $100, and a gift cer­tifi­cate from Bang-On t-shirts Davie Street worth $50.

SECOND PLACE
A gift cer­tifi­cate from Sephora Pacific Cen­tre, worth $25, and a gift cer­tifi­cate from Bang-On t-shirt Davie Street worth $50.

Please send your sub­mis­sion to pride [at] sadmag.ca with your name, email address, and tele­phone num­ber. Only win­ners will be con­tacted. Your infor­ma­tion will not be archived or sold.

See the Face­book event.

Pre­sented by:

I moved to BC from Cal­i­for­nia when I was seven and yet, fif­teen years later, I still think of myself as an Amer­i­can. Like it or not, the flag-waving, pie-eating, fireworks-blasting, apple seed-spreading Amer­i­can iden­tity that seems so gar­ish and cloy­ing to many of my Cana­dian friends was, at least, a tem­plate I could work off of.

For me, the trou­ble was that Cana­dian identity—at least on the surface—seemed to come down to a laun­dry list of the ways Canada was not the United States. Which obvi­ously posed a prob­lem: How could I be Cana­dian and Amer­i­can if being Cana­dian meant not being American?

When trav­el­ling with a friend in Lon­don, a man at a street stall for pocket watches (Eng­lish major crack) asked our nation­al­i­ties and I imme­di­ately responded, “She’s Cana­dian, I’m Amer­i­can.” My friend and I had a long con­ver­sa­tion after­wards in which she wanted to know why I was still cling­ing on to my nation­al­ity after hav­ing spent most of my life in Canada. In truth, it has noth­ing to do with a notion of national supe­ri­or­ity or a hatred of the Great White North, but rather an unshak­able feel­ing that I was always out­side of Cana­dian cul­ture, never hav­ing seen Mr. Dres­sup for instance, and was stub­bornly unwill­ing to sac­ri­fice my Americanness—superficial as it was—to join the party. I tried com­pro­mises, call­ing myself a West-Coaster or an Amer­i­can Van­cou­verite, but it was a flimsy attempt to rec­on­cile the issue. I sort of resigned myself to being a bit of an out­sider, winc­ing at the “Amer­i­cans are so stu­pid” lines thrown out by my friends, who would quickly make fum­bling apolo­gies when they remem­bered my duel status.

Then, on a lazy day roam­ing around Van­cou­ver with a friend, we decided to be cul­tured indi­vid­u­als and see what indie films Tin­sel­town had to offer. It came down to Mac­Gru­ber or The Trot­sky. Sur­pris­ingly, we went with the latter.

It wasn’t that The Trot­sky gave me a Cana­dian iden­tity, but rather that it made me real­ize that I’d been delud­ing myself for years. I am Cana­dian, and some­times a nation­al­ity comes down to the small­est things—like the beau­ti­ful and nuanced scene in which Jay Baruchel, per­pet­ual teenager, mocked Ben Mul­roney to his giant face and fore­head. Any movie that can do that deserves to be her­alded as an instant clas­sic. And would an Amer­i­can get that joke? Hardly. Sure, they may have occa­sion­ally seen what my friend Leanne refers to as Mulroney’s plas­tic Ken hair, his spray-tanned hands grip­ping a micro­phone while awk­wardly ask­ing pre­ten­tious and dull ques­tions in both Eng­lish and French. But they would not have been fuelled with the pure, unfil­tered resent­ment of a true Canuck, faced with the sheer onslaught of nepo­tism and smarm that is Ben Mulroney.

Even bet­ter, the Big Brother to the south never gets a men­tion in the movie, unlike Paul Gross’s extremely self-conscious and hokey west­ern also released this year, Gun­less. This is not a Cana­dian film that felt it had to give the mid­dle fin­ger to Uncle Sam in order to earn its cre­den­tials, nor is it self-consciously Cana­dian, mak­ing cracks about beavers or Moun­ties. Instead The Trotksy is the some­what sur­real story of a 12th grader who believes he is the rein­car­na­tion of Leon Trot­sky and tries to union­ize any group of peo­ple he comes into con­tact with. The movie’s tone is warm, funny and sweet, but it doesn’t fit eas­ily into any of the gen­res that it plays with; The Trot­sky wades some­where in the realm of a coming-of-age polit­i­cal high school romance that never takes itself or its char­ac­ters very seriously.

Many reviews try to argue that a lot of the sub­ject mat­ter and humour flies over the heads of its tar­get audi­ence – assum­ing, I guess, that this film is aimed at teenagers. But The Trot­sky doesn’t really seem to have a tar­get audi­ence. After all, who pens a screen­play about a 17-year-old who thinks he’s the rein­car­na­tion of Leon Trot­sky and hon­estly believes that their tar­get audi­ence is other teenagers? If the movie is aimed at Uni­ver­sity stu­dents and adults, then it’s right on tar­get: well-placed jokes about Marx­ist crit­i­cism, pub­lish­ing his­tory and the fran­coph­one Que­be­cois should be right up the alley of any self-respecting Human­i­ties major in the lower mainland.

But more impor­tantly than that, it is sim­ply refresh­ing to see gen­uine Cana­dian iden­tity onscreen that at no point feels it has to be apolo­getic, defen­sive or lit­tered with stereo­types in order to be acceptable.