A glorious weekend part 1: The DJ stinks
Please excuse the silence. I've been under construction. But a shave and a haircut has made all the difference. Friends visiting you in the Peg work wonders too, especially when for the first time in weeks you haven't brought any work home for the weekend. So it was with a clean face and a clear couple of days I played host to Andrea, who came for a few days and joined me for the Shrimp CD release party, the Fringe Festival, and much merriment.
Shrimp played a balls out (ovaries out?) show, and my fellow writer David and Andrea and I played some balls down pool, at the Royal Albert Arms, the premiere punk venue in town. Interesting history, this place has. Apparently the Royal Albert is where every Winnipeg kid started drinking when they were, like, 14 years old. And back in 2003 a dude with certain mysterious but obviously fundamental issues turned himself into police and directed them to the body of a man he'd killed and mutilated and left in his room upstairs along with Susan Sarandon's stolen necklace.
Oh, and you want to keep talking about music venues in Winnipeg? Well the last place I saw Shrimp play was The Collective Cabaret, which has its own gruesome story. Back in October, 2002, The Collective's resident DJ, Eduardo Sanchez, went missing. In summer 2003, Winnipeg's smoking ban went into effect, and with the layer of tobacco stench stripped away, people noticed quite a different, singularly unpleasant odour. Finally in December 2003, the smell led searchers to Eduardo's mummified body in the wall. He'd asphyxiated after crawling in there months before. Local lore says he was found with a bag in his hand, and that the bag contained his drug stash -- but who knows what really drives a guy into a wall and to his death.
So, you know, could be there's more to appreciate about a city-wide smoking ban than just the difference it makes to your lungs. Could be banning smoking leads to some exciting CSI moments.
Next: A glorious weekend part 2: Food, fringe, frolic.
Shrimp played a balls out (ovaries out?) show, and my fellow writer David and Andrea and I played some balls down pool, at the Royal Albert Arms, the premiere punk venue in town. Interesting history, this place has. Apparently the Royal Albert is where every Winnipeg kid started drinking when they were, like, 14 years old. And back in 2003 a dude with certain mysterious but obviously fundamental issues turned himself into police and directed them to the body of a man he'd killed and mutilated and left in his room upstairs along with Susan Sarandon's stolen necklace.
Oh, and you want to keep talking about music venues in Winnipeg? Well the last place I saw Shrimp play was The Collective Cabaret, which has its own gruesome story. Back in October, 2002, The Collective's resident DJ, Eduardo Sanchez, went missing. In summer 2003, Winnipeg's smoking ban went into effect, and with the layer of tobacco stench stripped away, people noticed quite a different, singularly unpleasant odour. Finally in December 2003, the smell led searchers to Eduardo's mummified body in the wall. He'd asphyxiated after crawling in there months before. Local lore says he was found with a bag in his hand, and that the bag contained his drug stash -- but who knows what really drives a guy into a wall and to his death.
So, you know, could be there's more to appreciate about a city-wide smoking ban than just the difference it makes to your lungs. Could be banning smoking leads to some exciting CSI moments.
Next: A glorious weekend part 2: Food, fringe, frolic.
posted by Jeremy Boxen at 10:17 PM
5 Comments:
Best post yet, Bear. As you know, I'm a sucker for a mummy story and that's a doozy.
For those who don't know why I'm a sucker for a mummy story: My fabulous hairdresser told me a great one about a pal of his (Bill) who unknowingly bought Ramses I, which I thought was a load of hooey, until it appeared a year later in Toroto Life (see excerpt and url below). Unbelievable.
http://www.egyptianmuseum.com/article16_torlife.html
[excerpt from Toronto Life artcle]
WHAT IS PERHAPS MOST INTERESTING ABOUT BILL Jamieson and there are many things interesting about Bill Jamieson - is the way in which he has created the lifestyle of a slightly eccentric Victorian gentleman explorer, albeit transplanted to the urban wilds of the 21st century. His home a 5800 square-foot warehouse-loft in the fashion district - has five ornate fireplaces, a winding three-storey staircase, and case after case of curiosities, from shrunken heads from the Jivaro tribe of Ecuador, to human-hair battle shields from the Dyak tribe of Borneo, to scabbards used by the headhunters of Nagaland, India. His furniture is large and leather, his walls mostly painted the deep burgundy used in art galleries. On the second level, the back end of a 19th-century hearse, which Jamieson has converted into an aquarium for his collection of salt water fish, protrudes from a wall. His office is in his home, and he spends much of his day on the phone, in the past year, he has sold shrunken heads to American film director Tim Burton and the singer of the rock band Korn. Currently, he is trying to unload a humpback whale skeleton originally owned by P.T. Barnum and a Cheyenne war shirt worn during Custer's last stand.
Before becoming a dealer in "tribal art." he worked in construction-slash-real estate development. He had also been an ardent traveller and a member of the New York-based Explorers Club for some time. In 1994, he took a trip to the Ecuadorean Amazon, travelling deep into Jivaro territory, where he drank a powerful hallucinogenic called ayahuasca as part of a shamanistic healing ceremony. ("It was like a hundred hours of therapy," he says today, "packed into a single night.") When he returned to Canada, he immediately began reinventing himself. He has since travelled to Ecuador three times, each time participating in an ayahuasca ceremony. In true Victorian fashion, these experiences are forming the basis for his own memoir, which he plans to entitle Hallucinogenics, Shrunken Heads, Egyptian Mummies and the Sale of Ramses I.
In the spring of 1998, Jamieson was in Niagara Falls with a new girlfriend, and he decided to visit the old Niagara Falls Museum (which. in an uncharacteristic display of truthfulness, was then billing itself as "Canada's oldest museum.") While looking at the mummies and stuffed animals and old barrels used by Falls daredevils, he was struck with a sudden and overwhelming urge to buy everything in the museum. "It was a crazy idea." he says today, "Individuals do not wander into a museum and than offer to buy the whole thing. I didn't have the money, and my girlfriend pleaded with me not to do it. Yet I did it. And you know, I've thought about it over and over, and I think that maybe my decision to buy the museum had something to do with Ramses wanting to go home."
i too would like to be a gentleman explorer. is there a community college course i can take?
I'm sure there are places you can go, even in Winnipeg, if you would like to explore some gentlemen...
shoulda seen that one coming. touché.
Creepiness abounds in Winnipeg. It seems like the kind of place that would do well as the setting for a depressing film noir/dark comedy that has a cast of weird alcoholics all looking for the one big score but not really knowing what a big score would look like anyway.
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