Description Daily 01

Valerie and Matt happen upon a punk band outside Miss Cora's Kitchen in Kensington Market on Halloween day.

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What's going on? Mission Statement

Description Daily 00: Mission Statement

For National Podcast Post Month 2010, Valerie and Matt ride a bus and sort of explain what this daily podcast might be about...sort of.

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Okay, guys, so I'm back! Woohoo!

Well, I'm at least back for this month, or as much of this month as I can pull off. Since you last heard from me, not only are Matt and I still together (whew), but my actual description work for Canadian television has taken off. I produced described video for the current season of a show called Healthy Gourmet, am now working on another cooking reality show, only with more yelling, Conviction Kitchen; and will be doing the latest season of the pretty popular CBC series Little Mosque on the Prairie - which I did the first season of when working for someone else, so that one's pretty sweet. Add to that some documentaries and various things in the States, and it's kind of nuts.

Another purpose of doing NaPodPoMo not mentioned in the Mission Statement is to use material I recorded for at least two episodes I haven't had time to edit together. It doesn't look like I'll be able to make proper Description episodes of them in the forseeable future, so I'll make improper Description Daily episodes of them. As for the proposed music, I'm following what I did last year and not getting anyone's permission. We'll all survive, I hope.

Of course, the past episodes of Description remain here, and the episodes of last year's NaPodPoMo series, No Mood Swing, are still here (I'm still pretty happy with them, frankly).

If you've been with me throughout Description, I can't thank you enough for that. Maybe this will help. Or maybe it will get you sick of me enough to not care that I've podfaded. Should be a win-win. :-)

Description 76 - Walking the Walk to the Club

I try to explain my absence on my way to see the latest immigrant to Canada to change my life.

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Associated links
Podcamp Toronto 2010
plentyoffish.com (your mileage may vary)
The Shops at Don Mills (inauspicious site of the first date)
Annex Billiards Club @Toronto Plus

When Matt and I got together, one thing I was hoping we could do on a regular basis was go to The Tap, pretty much my local, the home of Moe Berg DJing Saturday nights, a place I've mentioned many times here. Unfortunately, I could only take him there once: on its final night before closing.

I'd heard from Kevin on Facebook that The Tap had run into major tax problems or something and would be closing for good February 18, a few days after the terrible revelation. Moe had been sick, so unable to do one more DJ set before the end (he was able to get there later on the fateful night). So Matt and I went, ordered our beers, snuggled up on the couch which had been broken to the point where our asses were almost on the floor, and watched that night's Olympic hockey game. Then we left the other guys - Kev, Craig, Barry, Moe, et al - to finish cleaning out the beer fridge with whatever dodgy coolers had been left in the back in '97 or something.

While it's still a horrible thing that The Tap has closed, it does make a twisted kind of sense. Everyone is moving on with their lives, getting married, having kids (one of the old bartenders brought in his new baby in a stroller - what were they gonna do: shut 'em down?), getting mortgages...hell, even I'm moving on somehow with that guy in the bottom left of that photo up there. Who knows how much further we'll all go, or when/how we'll regress. But a shift does seem to have occurred, and I'm pretty excited to find out what happens from here.

Last time I walked by The Tap a couple days ago, after getting groceries for our next supper we'd be cooking together, I saw the windows were still sloppily covered from the inside by newspapers, but in the upper left-hand corner, there was still a hand-lettered sign that said "Don't Stop Believin'!"

Whether we ever get The Tap back or not, that's still what we have to do. No matter what. (Oh, wait, that's another song they'd play there...)

Description 75 - Be...In This Place

And that place would be New Brunswick, an underrated province where I spent a beautiful, breezy and fire-y Canadian Thanksgiving. Includes music by The Monoxides, a mangling of history and stringy red seaweed you eat.

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Associated links
beinthisplace.ca
VIA Rail Ocean train from Montreal to Halifax
City of Moncton: Our Tide Is Rising
Woodstock: New Brunswick's First Town
(You're starting to get the idea that people in New Brunswick are good at slogans.)
Woodstock Sanctuary House
George's books @Google Books and his books @Amazon.ca
History of New Brunswick @Wikipedia
The Acadians @CBC.ca
Meduxnekeag River Association
The Best Dulse!
Paris 1919
The Monoxides: @myspace, @Facebook and @ReverbNation
The Monoxides Annual Holiday Show @Facebook
Iron Giant @myspace
Thanksgiving (Canada) @Wikipedia
Tourism Saint John
Irving Nature Park

The person on the phone ended up being my birth grandmother: one of the people who would call and know who I was.

The photo for this episode was taken at a convenience store on the way down to Saint John. I had seen those flags on houses as the train was heading along the east side of the province, only I hadn't seen the stars on them, so I thought they were French flags, which my hosts thought was strange in that the Acadians are not so crazy about the French French that they'd go around flying their flag. After some discussion and Wikipedia, we determined they were Acadian flags. On the whole trip, I had kept my eye out for an image of New Brunswick I couldn't get anywhere else, and it turned out to be the display in this convenience store.

I have two major regrets about screwing up the sound for the soundseeing tour of Woodstock. One is that my birth mother's arms almost falling off from the cold came to no purpose. Another is that I didn't get to mention Fusion Coffee Company, which we went into briefly. It's a really wonderful licensed café with coffee and food and drinks and music (sometimes live) and a very nice atmosphere. It serves as a creative hub for the small town, and my birth mother goes there often. When we went in there, I met the owner, who knew who I was and could not have been more welcoming. It's the sort of place that a lot of people in small towns wish they had, but usually don't, so I wanted to give this one all the support I could. Hopefully, I'll have other chances to do that audio-wise. But, hey, at least it can get more Google juice in text form.

Lost November, Lost Episodes

Ooookay, so I guess I couldn't do a weekly podcast and a daily podcast without the monthly podcast falling by the wayside. Sorry about that. That daily podcast for National Podcast Post Month, No Mood Swing, is finished (though still available at that link - and hint: there's a tiny Walking the Walk update in the last episode), and hopefully that means I can get back to business on this thing. I think I can post Description 75, about my Canadian Thanksgiving trip to New Brunswick, either this week or next.

Something else I've been working on is re-archiving the episodes after learning a while after the fact that my .mp3 host had stopped hosting. Episodes after Description 49 were moved to a couple different spaces of mine. As for episodes before 49, they're going to the beautiful and venerable (and very deserving of your donations!) Internet Archive, home of No Mood Swing, most of Movies For the Blind (that weekly podcast) and thousands and thousands of other things way more important than anything I've cranked out. So far, I've uploaded three batches, which are now arranged on three convenient pages:

Description 40-49 - (July 2007 - January 2008) Featuring Sam the Record Man, the Toronto Fringe, the Jays game, the Dalai Lama, my day doing location support and my trip to the Christmas Story House.

Description 30-39 - (January-June 2007) Including the trips to London, Paris and Hull :-) along with me making Kraft Dinner, driving home and going to Tim Horton's.

Description 19-29 - (June-December 2006) With the two-parter on NXNE, the Montreal Christmas parade, The Doodlebops, the Cleveland visit and the first episodes about Nuit Blanche and the U.S. absentee ballot process.

I want to wait a short while to put up the first 18 because I'm still missing a few, and maybe you might be able to help if you have a troubling habit of archiving podcast episodes you've listened to over the years. (Heck, I did it with Dubber and Spoons to an extent.) If you go into those archives already up, you'll see I'm already missing Description 23 (Honest Ed's) and the enhanced version of Description 37 (The Drive Home). At the moment, I'm still working on finding Description 18 (Valerie Takes the Streetcar), Description 14 (Michael Ignatieff's First Date), Description 05 (Monte-freakin'-forte!) and the first two Descriptions. I must have them somewhere, but let's just say that while I've been pretty good at backing things up, I suck at keeping them together and organised. So as I keep searching - and create that new episode for you, don't forget - if you happen to run across any of those missing episodes somewhere, please let me know and you will get props to no end. Thanks!

Toronto Tourism Done Right

BlogTO pointed out today that the Canadian Tourism Commission has an amazing series of videos about Toronto on YouTube. In fact, they have a YouTube channel of amazing videos about places all over the country, but me being me, I'll focus on the Toronto stuff for now.

Clocking in at no more than about two minutes, these videos look fantastic, but aren't cheesy. They just naturally let the awesomeness shine through about everything from West Queen West to the Distillery, Casa Loma to the Islands, from the AGO to the Brickworks to Woody's in Boystown...and even more. If you don't live here, you really need to check them out. If you do live here, check them out anyway and I'll bet they might get you to feel maybe a teensy bit proud of this place.

Here's an example below, featuring an area I walk through very often: Yorkville, but you'd do best to go through the comprehensive playlist (and don't forget it's two pages).

For NaPodPoMo: No Mood Swing

Evidently, it's not enough I have this monthly podcast and another weekly podcast - I have to come up with a daily one. But it's just for National Podcast Post Month (NaPodPoMo), which I dodged last year, but this year won't. A podcast episode every day in November, and in my case, each will be under 10 minutes. Yikes.

But don't worry - I'm not foisting it on you, unsuspecting Description listener. The podcast, No Mood Swing, will be on another feed...with this one exception: my mission statement for the project, where I give an idea of what I'm going to do on this thing. If you want to subscribe, awesome! If not, no problem, and thanks for putting up with this one thing in your feed. That's the one thing about being less than 10 minutes: compared to what I usually do here, it goes by like (snapping fingers) THAT!

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Description 74 - GOing

I venture into suburbia in a big green and white clanging flattened metal hexagon, and live to tell the tale. Featuring music from The Most Serene Republic, a surprise cameo by a constable, looking up a word I didn't know and a bird in a nice suit.

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(Yes, you can download it. I'm migrating all episodes to other hosts, working backward. Thanks for your patience on that.)

Associated links
Go Transit Official Site
GO Transit @Wikipedia (and follow the link in the article for "conurbation".)
The GO Concourse @ Union Station
That Paul Janz song (Again, because much of the video was shot in Union Station. Sorry.)
Mississauga.com
The Most Serene Republic
And here comes the IODA Promonet stuff...
The Most Serene Republic
"Heavens To Purgatory" (mp3)
from "...And The Ever Expanding Universe"
(Arts & Crafts)

Buy at Napster Buy at Rhapsody
More On This Album

Canoeing the Credit River
Lakeshore Lions Arena

The Most Serene Republic are forging on with their tour (at the Mod Club here tonight as I write this) although recently they had a lot of their gear stolen in Vancouver. That's a hard blow for any Canadian band, so check out their official site in the links for details on what was stolen, so you can watch for it if you're in that area.

A GO Train was the location for the tv series Train 48, which aired on Global from 2003 to 2005. A version of an Australian soap, it centred around a group of commuters heading home each night from Toronto to Burlington (technically, that would have to be Aldershot, right?). The train was the only location for the show, and the episodes were taped the same day they aired (having great improv actors helped), so things could be topical and cheap - and the cheap part was how Global was able to do an original drama series at all back then. That's grist for another episode, I guess, if I could find a way to keep it from being depressing. :-)

I cut quite a lot of the soundseeing tour of the concourse hall. Sure, I could go on about the Second Cup and the juice place and the Cinnabon and the Dairy Queen, but...meh. As you might have noticed by my boundless energy in this episode, the place is nothing more than functional.

When I first lived in Toronto way back when, there was a bar where the newer food court is now - called Choo-Choo's, I think (whatever it's called, it has moved nearer to the stairs to the Great Hall of Union Station). It was actually where I made my first mixed drink order. Due to my fairly uneventful teenage years, I had very little context for concocting a beverage in my head. I knew I loved Coke, and thought I'd like Kahlua because it wasn't fruity, so I walked up to the barkeep at the age of 19 and asked for a Kahlua and Coke. He asked me to repeat that, and I did. He stood there perplexed for a moment, then went to fill my order. He poured a shot of Kahlua and a highball glass of Coke, then gave me the glasses.

"Um, no, I'd like them together," I said.

He raised his eyebrows. "Together?"

I nodded, he shrugged, then poured the shot into the Coke. He watched as I drank this mix perfectly content, because it was exactly what I wanted. I would go on to perplex less seasoned bartenders than him for the following two years, before university life would mature me to the level of gin and tonics.

Hang in while our host is down

You might have noticed this in the last little while, but our lovely hosts at publicbroadcasting.ca have been down and are not connecting. Really sorry about this, and we'll get things together as soon as possible.

Updates on Updates and Nuit Blanche Again

As usually happens when I do a post without a show, a new episode is coming next week. One of the things I've been doing instead of an episode lately has been FINALLY transitioning a part of my first website to blog form. Incompletely Conspicuous, my almost-10-year-old (holy crap!) website about the band The Pursuit of Happiness, has always had a news section called Updates, and I figured it was time to drag it kicking and screaming (if it felt like exerting effort) into the 21st century by turning it into a blog, so I could...er...update more easily and include more doodads and interactivity. So if you like TPOH and want to know about some of the interesting things its people do because the band isn't really around anymore, take a look and feel free to subscribe.

Now, it's also time for good ol' Nuit Blanche, what I've called "NXNE for modern art" during the now-four years I've been doing podcasts about it. The subject of Description 25, 45 and 61, the all-night city-wide art exhibition - starting tomorrow night - will most likely be the subject of Description 76 (yes, two podcasts away...not guaranteeing that). My focus this time is probably going to be the happenings around the Art Gallery of Ontario, because it will be open FOR FREE from 6:55pm to 3am for various snazzy things. Since the AGO re-opened with its full Frank Gehry makeover, I've wanted to do a soundseeing tour there, but hadn't yet made it there during the couple hours on Wednesday night when I could afford admission. So here's my chance. Yay!

But what I'm going to do is more about the AGO than Nuit Blanche (sort of like Description 61 was as much about the Crystal at the ROM than Nuit Blanche), so this does not in any way get you off the hook if you're anywhere near town to experience the event. There are at least 130 projects of all kinds to explore and sometimes participate in, reportedly closer together in the downtown core than last year (which was my beef then), helping out even more with car-free zones and open-all-night TTC with a $9 pass to take as many trips as you want. There's also the Nuit Blanche app for my iPod Touch and your various smartphones to help you out when you're pounding the pavement in the dark not knowing which way is up (correction: whoops, it's not for the Touch - I have to stick with the mobile version of the official site). For info on all that stuff I just mentioned, go to the official Nuit Blanche site, and also check out suggestions and tips from our friends at Torontoist.

Granted, some years are better than other years, but even at its worst, Nuit Blanche is as accessible as contemporary art gets, and frankly, it's as accessible and happy and warm-fuzzy as Toronto usually gets. So celebrate art, the city, and each other.