Prime Shots: Tenacious D
| ISO 800 | f/2.8 | 1/500 | 38mm | -0.7 Step Exposure Bias | Jacob Zinn |
| Jack Black and Kyle Gass of Tenacious D – often shortened to “The D” – returned to Vancouver on Sunday night, performing for a packed crowd at the PNE Amphitheatre. The comedy metal duo is touring on their third studio album, 2012′s Rize of the Fenix. |
Prime Shots: Apocalyptica
| ISO 1600 | f/2.8 | 1/40 | 50mm | Increased Contrast | Jacob Zinn |
| Paavo Lötjönen of Finnish cello metal group Apocalyptica performs in the shadows of the Commodore Ballroom. Tuesday marked the first time since 2008 that the band performed in Vancouver. |
Hardcore Hastings – A Brief History of Punk in Vancouver
JRNL 4270 – Advanced Storytelling
The Downtown Eastside – referred to as Canada’s poorest postal code – is considered the home of Vancouver’s punk community and arguably the start of the hardcore subgenre.
Hardcore Hastings briefly looks at the culture of Vancouver punk in the Downtown Eastside from the late ’70s to the early ’80s, when acts like D.O.A. and the Subhumans took a faster, rougher sound out of Vancouver and into the world.
This short documentary features interviews with Bev Davies, renowned concert photographer; Phil Addington, bassist of the new wave band Insex; and Wendy Thirteen, concert promoter and major supporter of local punk music.
They discuss the roots of punk and hardcore in the city, the atmosphere of historic DTES venues such as the Smilin’ Buddha and the neighbourhood’s notorious reputation.
- Black & White Photos courtesy of Bev Davies
- Archival Footage courtesy of Martyn Stubbs
- Thanks to the Museum of Vancouver for access to the Smilin’ Buddha sign
Prime Shots: Van Halen
| ISO 1600 | f/2.8 | 1/125 | 180mm | Jacob Zinn |
| David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen get up close during “Unchained”, the opener to Van Halen’s sold-out performance at Rogers Arena in Vancouver on Monday. The band is touring on their 2012 album, A Different Kind of Truth, their first album with Roth since 1984′s 1984. |
Tour Alert: Aerosmith & Cheap Trick Global Warming Tour
| JUN 16 |
Minneapolis, MN Target Center |
| JUN 19 |
Cleveland, OH Quicken Loans Arena |
| JUN 22 |
Chicago, IL United Center |
| JUN 27 |
Toronto, ON Air Canada Centre |
| JUL 01 |
Uniondale, NY Nassau Coliseum |
| JUL 03 |
Bristow, VA Jiffy Lube Live |
| JUL 05 |
Detroit, MI The Palace of Auburn Hills |
| JUL 07 |
Milwaukee, WI Marcus Amphitheater, Summerfest |
| JUL 17 |
Boston, MA TD Garden |
| JUL 21 |
Philadelphia, PA Wells Fargo Center |
| JUL 24 |
East Rutherford, NJ IZOD Center |
| JUL 26 |
Atlanta, GA Philips Arena |
| JUL 28 |
Dallas, TX American Airlines Center |
| JUL 30 |
Houston, TX Toyota Center |
| AUG 01 |
Denver, CO Pepsi Center |
| AUG 04 |
Oakland, CA Oracle Arena |
| AUG 06 |
Los Angeles, CA Hollywood Bowl |
| AUG 08 |
Tacoma, WA Tacoma Dome |
Get out the sunscreen – this’ll be one scorcher of a summer tour.
Aerosmith will heat up U.S. audiences this June, July and August on their aptly named Global Warming tour.
“The old Aerosmith is back with a new vengeance,” said frontman Steven Tyler.
Following a string of sold-out shows in South America, the Bad Boys from Boston announced their first return to North America since 2010. They’ve scheduled 17 dates in the U.S. and one in Canada.
The hard-rocking five-piece will be supported by Illinois rockers Cheap Trick, a band that was to accompany Aerosmith on the third leg of the Rockin’ the Joint Tour in 2005 until Tyler required throat surgery.
The first leg of the tour starts in Minneapolis and wraps up in Tacoma. Tickets for most shows go on sale this weekend through Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
Prime Shots: Showdown Over the City
| ISO 100 | f/2.8 | 1/4000 | 50mm | Jacob Zinn |
| Ryan Manning launches off the first jump with a backside grab at the fifth-annual Quiksilver Showdown Over the City on Grouse Mountain in North Vancouver on Saturday. |
Stuff Your Dad Likes: St. Patrick’s Day
| Jacob Zinn can’t give you fatherly advice, but he can borrow your car and return it with an empty tank. |
This Saturday is everyone’s excuse – Irish or not – to go out and get flat-out, straight-up, full-on, black-out drunk.
The annual St. Patrick’s Day celebrations often lead to heavy drinking and heavier upchucking of that nasty, green-dyed beer that most bars peddle every 17th of March. And even though your dad probably no longer pounds back brews until he’s incoherent, he remembers the days when he did.
Your old man might’ve spent hours searching for a four-leaf clover as a child, or had an irrational fear of leprechauns. It’s even likely he wore one of those green shirts that read “Kiss me, I’m shitfaced” and “Irish I had a Beer.”
Of course, only a minute percentage of those who wear those shirts are even part Irish, let alone full-blooded lads and lasses. In 2000, nearly 35 million Americans reported Irish ancestry – about six times the population of Ireland.
But pretending to be Irish is cool. It was cool when your dad was your age and it’s still cool now. Whether that means cheering for the Red Sox, listening to the Dropkick Murphy’s or eating an entire box of Lucky Charms, the Irish have shamrocked the world. (Or, in your case, it’s keeping down a pint of Guinness ‘cause your lightweight liver can hardly handle any beer darker than a pale ale.)
In promotion of healthy vital organs, your dad can’t recommend getting wasted, but he also sees it as a passing of the torch. If he drank ‘til his face was as green as his beer, then he knows it’s likely you’ll do the same – no matter how many times he tells you the vomit-stained consequences.
So as a disclaimer, please drink responsibly this St. Patrick’s Day. But if you’re going to drink irresponsibly, your sober dad will be more than happy to drive your drunk ass from the Blarney Stone/Doolin’s/Ceili’s to home.
Stuff Your Dad Likes: Hooters
| Jacob Zinn can’t give you fatherly advice, but he can accidentally delete all your cell phone contacts. |
The tight T-shirts. The orange short shorts. The bubbly (but often absent-minded) waitresses putting themselves through college.
Hooters is a white trash paradise built on American values such as freedom and chicken wings. It’s a two-star chain restaurant for the blue-collar working man to unwind after a hard day’s work with a beer in one hand and a burger in the other.
It’s home to both southern flavour and unabashed tastelessness, and if you’re dad’s a NASCAR-watching redneck at heart, he’s likely visited such a classy location.
I don’t think my dad has ever been to Hooters – or if he has, he says it was for the wings. But that doesn’t mean your dad hasn’t enjoyed a titillating Hooters Girl holding jugs in front of her jugs.
Hooters has pretty servers, cold beer on tap, sports on TV 24/7 and greasy, deep-fried U.S. delicacies. It’s the restaurant men escape to when their bachelor pad or man cave isn’t manly enough. (But don’t think it’s a restaurant for men only – every now and then, kids eat free!)
Sure, the food is subpar, but no one really goes there for the food. That would be like reading Hooters Magazine for the articles.
If your dad is like my dad and hasn’t been to Hooters, he’s at least been intrigued by seeing its impact in popular culture. From the running joke in Big Daddy to Lisa Simpson’s Hooters Manhattan Beach T-Shirt from Goodwill, the restaurant is a piece of Americana next to baseball and apple pie.
Even extended franchises aren’t safe from ridicule, like Larry the Cable Guy’s comedy bit on receiving “80,000 frequent boner miles” from Hooters Air, or the sad truth that the Hooters Casino Hotel on the Las Vegas strip has never made money from gambling.
Next year, Hooters will celebrate 30 years as America’s swankiest restaurant with hot pants-clad servers. And after three decades of ziplining orders to the kitchen and precariously carrying them out in front of their cleavage, the Hooters Girls are still orange with pride, and fathers everywhere are tipping them generously for it.
Because, like Hooters, your dad is delightfully tacky, yet unrefined.
Stuff Your Dad Likes: (Senior-Friendly) Technology
| Jacob Zinn can’t give you fatherly advice, but he can eat your share of the leftover pizza. |
There is often a generational gap when it comes to understanding high-tech gadgets.
Generations Y and Z have mastered touchscreens, state-of-the-art video game consoles and lightspeed texting. But the older you go, the more computer illiterate people become.
Most everyone born during the Reagan years knows how to surf the Internet (or, at the risk of sounding dated, even how to program a VCR), but there are curmudgeonly Baby Boomers who don’t even know how to use a microwave.
The truth is, my dad is a rather tech-savvy individual. As an engineer, he uses a powerful PC for the array of drafting software required for his day-to-day assignments.
Except he has the resolution set to 800 x 600.
Even with his prescription glasses on, he likes the large, easy-to-see desktop icons. He magnifies the text on websites, awkwardly stretching and skewing the images.
He doesn’t have time to squint at smartphones, either. It’s not to the point that my dad’s cell phone is a Jitterbug, but it’s a near-future possibility. The tiny keys on a Blackberry just weren’t designed for his stubby, stubborn fingers.
Set the default text size to 20 points, with a legible font like Helvetica! (Maybe that’s why so many seniors are using iPads – to them, it’s like a jumbo-sized iPhone.)
I fear that as my dad gets older, he may need more 65-plus technology. I picture him flipping through Sears catalogues from the ‘80s in search of LifeAlert or the Clapper, quoting the original prices over the phone and giving the customer service representatives a headache. To stay active in retirement, he may buy a Nintendo Wii and only play Wii Sports – the game that came with the Wii.
But at some point, my parents won’t be able to look after themselves, and there’s no amount of readily available senior-friendly technology to enable their future lifestyle. So allow me to sign off with a quick letter to my father:
Dear Dad,
Sorry you had to find out this way, but if you become incontinent and there’s no technology to help that, I’m putting you in a home. (One with a Nintendo Wii hooked up to a Clapper.)
Your Son,
Jacob Zinn
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