You can take the girl out of the Star Trek conventions, but you can’t take the Trekkie out of the girl. There’s really no other reason that Sarah started talking to Hanson about Star Trek and Star Wars when they were in town to promote their new album, Shout It Out.
In honour of May The Fourth, she shared their conversation with AOL Music Blog. You can check it out here.
Filed under Films, Music, Shameless Promotion, Television
Luminato, Toronto’s big, arty theatre/ music/ magic/ visual arts/ dance/ literary/ food/ everything festival announced the full lineup for this year’s event (a.k.a. Luminato6) yesterday at the Sony Centre.
Here at Risky Fuel, we love at least half of the things that Luminato, 6 or otherwise, celebrates, so I went down to check out what they have to offer this year.
The main highlights for our fellow indigent music lovers are obvious, as this year’s free concert series at David Pecaut Square (which will be fitted with dancing windsocks for the entirety of the festival) will include shows by K’naan (Friday, June 8), Rufus Wainwright (Saturday, June 10) and a matinee event with Dan Mangan and Kathleen Edwards (Saturday, June 16), but there were a number of events that I found just as, if not more, intriguing.
Here are, at random, five that got me disproportionately excited:
Love Over and Over: The Songs of Kate McGarrigle
June 15, Massey Hall
Kate McGarrigle was awesome for giving us her children, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, but she was also quite brilliant in her own right. The McGarrigle sisters wrote some absolutely lovely music and they sung even more beautifully, with a pitch-perfect and intuitive gift for harmony that no one (save for maybe the twins of Tasseomancy) has been able to match since.
This year at Luminato, family, friends and fans will be paying tribute to the late folk icon with a star-studded performance of her music. Anna McGarrigle, Rufus, Martha, Bruce Cockburn, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Emmylou Harris, Jane Sibbery, and members of Broken Social Scene and Stars, are scheduled to appear, so this concert is basically a music geek’s wet dream, and the closest we’ll get to a live version of the incredible McGarrigle Hour album now that we’ve lost Kate.
Irvine Welsh
June 12, TIFF Bell Lightbox
The Scottish author who made me feel like the biggest bad ass when I was a hopelessly bookish teenager is releasing a prequel to Trainspotting called Skagboys and he’s coming to Toronto to talk about it. This fills me with all sorts of twisted nostalgia, because I miss Sick Boy, Begbie and Renton. And my own youth.
Deltron 3030
June 11, David Pecaut Square
I made this graphic to represent my love for Lovage.
Deltron 3030, better known in the Risky Fuel household as “A Significant Part of Lovage,” will be playing with Montreal’s Nomadic Massive. This is exciting for me, because it means the chance to see Nathaniel Merriweather himself, Dan the Automator, along with Kid Koala. And then I’ll try my hardest to pretend that Mike Patton and Jennifer Charles are there, because this is the closest I will ever, ever get to my beloved Lovage again.
Toronto Carretilla Initiative
June 8-17, The Distillery District and various places through the city
According to the press release, “For Austrian-born artist Rainer Prohaska, preparing and consuming food is a fine art. The Toronto Carretilla Initiative sets to boldly immerse audiences in the process of cooking across the city. The project marks the first time that Luminato’s Food Program will include an experience that marries elements of visual arts with culinary craft.”
Basically,this dude is going to set up arty installations in which people can prepare food and then eat it. Then he closes up the show and moves on to the next location. It sounds both weird and delicious, which are two things that truly speak to me. Locations will be announced on the Luminato website as the event progresses in case you want to stalk the food-making sculptures with me.
Stewart Goodyear: The Beethoven Marathon
June 9, TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning, Koerner Hall
Concert 1, 10:00 a.m. –1:45 p.m., 3 hours and 45 minutes with intermission
Concert 2, 3:00–6:30 p.m., 3 hours and 30 minutes with intermission
Concert 3, 8:30–11:30 p.m., 3 hours with intermission
This crazy bastard is going to play Beethoven for over 10 hours!
I’m excited about pianist Stewart Goodyear’s attempt to play all 32 of Beethoven’s sonatas in the course of one day (it’ll take over 10 hours in total) for three reasons:
1. It’s a genuinely interesting undertaking.
2. It sounds like something the latest BBC incarnation of Sherlock would do when he’s bored and then Watson would act completely annoyed by the project, but he’d still smile and lick his lips and begrudgingly tolerate the whole experiment, because he loves his nutjob flatmate.
3. As a fitness geek, I’m really curious to know what, if any, training he’s doing for this event. Almost 11 hours of physical activity, even with intermissions, is extremely demanding. How is he building the endurance to handle this? What is he going to eat/drink to refuel himself during those breaks? Is it even possible to remain alert and proficient enough to play piano well after that long, no matter how good and how well prepared you are?
Luminato runs from June 8 – June 17 this year. Go visit their website (launching soon) for more details.
As a teenager, I was completely consumed by the equally twisted and touching love story between inmates Tobias Beecher and Chris Keller on HBO’s groundbreaking prison drama, Oz. Romeo and Juliet were just stupid teenagers. Antony and Cleopatra, comparatively, lacked drama and sacrifice. Lancelot and Guinevere weren’t nearly star-crossed enough.
But Beecher and Keller? They had everything. Love, jealousy, passion, agony, angst, beauty, terror, and arm bars. They were complex and almost as perfect for each other as they were toxic for each other.
Since the end of Oz in 2003, there’s been something missing in my life. As Augustus Hill, the de facto narrator of the show once said, “The worst stab wound is the one to the heart. Sure, most people survive it, but the heart is never quite the same.” I survived the end of the show and the end of Beecher and Keller’s story, but my heart has never been the same. There’s been an emptiness there that no other pairing can fill.
At least, there was an emptiness until my friend and slash-pusher, S, convinced me to watch Sherlock. Now, many people have been trying to get me to watch the BBC’s modern day take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic character since the show debuted in the summer of 2010, and I had every intention of getting around to it eventually. But everyone else who was telling me to watch it was using words like “clever,” “brilliant,” and “fun.” S said used a word that magically transformed Sherlock from potential future viewing to immediate, must-see TV: homoerotic.
That was all it took. Within the next week and change, I had watched all six of the show’s 90 minute episodes. It’s every bit as wonderful and brilliantly written and expertly acted as everyone told me. And yeah, Benedict Cumberbatch (who is, in fact, a real human being and not one of Salad Finger’s puppets) is as oddly dreamy as Sherlock some suggested. But, most importantly to my stunted and scarred heart, it offered a story that could potentially fill my void.
Dr. Watson and Sherlock just might be the new Beecher and Keller. Don’t believe me? I have assembled the following proof with my Sherlockian pop culture skills:
It all starts with a tortured blond man who has been through a traumatic experience.
Dr. John Watson served in Afghanistan.
Beecher was Schillinger's prag.
Their trauma has left them visibly altered.
Watson has a psychosomatic limp.
Beecher has a swastika tattooed on his ass.
Then a tall, dark sociopath walks into their lives.
Sherlock Holmes, the dreamy and brilliant crime solver.
Chris Keller, dreamy and cunning crime-causer.
The troubled blonds start to overcome their issues.
Watson loses his limp and runs around with Sherlock.
Beecher shits on Schillinger's face.
The blonds and sociopaths fall in love.
According to subtext and fandom, at least.
According to cannon. And a healthy fandom that continues to this day. Not that I'd know anything about that.
The tall, dark sociopaths engage in varying degrees of nakedness.
On the BBC, fangirls got to see Benedict Cumberbatch in a sheet.
Meanwhile on HBO, Meloni's wang got so much screentime that it deserved separate billing.
In times of trouble, the pairs find themselves on different sides iron bars.
While they were handcuffed together!
Well, sometimes you don't need handcuffs.
And, finally… (SPOILER ALERT for Oz season six and The Reichenbach Fall) Continue reading
Filed under Relationships, Television, The Misadventures Of
I have a cold, so I stayed home and stuck wads of toilet paper up my nose while Aaron went out into the world, played hockey, saw other people and acted like a functional human being. About an hour into my quarantine, I started to get really bored. I turned to social media for amusement, and then I made some dumb jokes in an effort to get people to pay attention to my sad, sickly ass.
First, I compared Lana Del Rey and her unique(?) stage presence to SCTV’s Perry Como skit. It’s uncanny!
Then I came up with the following equation to explain Madonna’s new video:
+
+
=
Filed under Music
American Idiot cast member Scott J. Campbell
Aaron and I went to the opening of American Idiot at the Toronto
Centre For The Arts on Thursday night. He went out of a slightly
morbid curiosity. I went because I was reared on alternative rock and
show tunes in almost equal measure, and the show seemed like it was
made especially for me.
As a rocker, I was more amused than satisfied with the production. But
as a Broadway baby, I was completely entranced.
The 90 minute musical based on Green Day’s 2004 concept album of
the same name isn’t a perfect marriage of rock ’n’ roll and musicals,
but it is a very good musical that is fueled by the spirit of rock.
Much like Spring Awakening (director Michael Mayer’s other
groundbreaking show that infused popular music with a more traditional
theatre structure) used pop to express sexual frustration and coming
of age melancholy, Idiot harnesses Green Day’s fury, frustration and
passion to tell the story of a trio of friends facing a post-9/11
world.
Indeed, American Idiot is almost a companion piece to Spring
Awakening, or at least its angsty big sister. If Spring Awakening is a
pubescent teen flailing around, furiously masturbating and learning
about love and loss for the first time, then Idiot is on the verge of
adulthood, clad in combat boots and existential crises, writing angry
poetry about an empty world that is nothing like the one they were
promised.
The plot is bare bones to the point of abstraction (it’s really not
much more complex than the high concept pitch I tossed out two
paragraphs ago) but Idiot is more about feeling than story. And
everything from the choreography, the balls-out performances by the
cast, and the brilliant stage design really nails that essence. It’s
not quite as in-your-face as an actual rock concert, but American
Idiot is one of the most visceral musicals I’ve ever seen – although
experienced is probably a more accurate description.
American Idiot runs until January 15 at the Toronto Centre For The Arts
The cast will also be performing as part of CityTV’s New Year’s Eve
Festivities tonight.
I Overcame My Autism And All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir
Risky Fuel 